 Drama: May 02, 2012 Issue [#5004] |
  Drama
This week: The Wilderness inside Your Characters Edited by: Joy  
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"I go into the wilderness and rediscover the world within."
China Galland
"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit"
Edward Abbey
"What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another."
Mahatma Gandhi
"One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls."
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
"Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an' he foun' he didn't have no soul that was his'n. Says he foun' he jus' got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain't no good, 'cause his little piece of a soul wasn't no good 'less it was with the rest, an' was whole."
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Hello, I am Joy , this week's drama editor. This issue is about the wilderness inside a character or the puzzling complexity he has to face within him.
Note: In the editorial, I refer to third person singular as he, to also mean the female gender, because I don't like to use they or he/she. |
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Welcome to the Drama newsletter
Have you ever tried portraying a certain kind of a character you've never tried before? If so, that was your challenge. Accordingly, the hardships your character needs to overcome are his challenges. Sometimes, this is easy. At times, however, the character finds himself in a place where he is totally lost and bewildered. In other words, he finds himself in the wilderness.
We define wilderness as the place where nature exists in its utmost form to challenge man, and not a place man has specially designed according to his needs. Yet, man needs nature to grow because nature, and therefore wilderness, has profound effects upon his psyche.
Run-of-the-mill horror writers present this wilderness up front with dead bodies, zombies, monsters, and the like. Yet, no matter what the genre, a seasoned writer can put the wilderness inside his characters. This kind of wilderness is the feeling that unsettles a character. What may show up as a giant poisonous dart frog from another realm in a sci-fi story may have been the killer jealousy hiding inside an antagonist in general or literary fiction.
This type of wilderness has the virtue of subtlety, an ability to veil itself in a different guise. The writer's challenge is to mastermind this veiling, so the character flails and thrashes around just like a person lost in the wilderness without adequate provisions or weapons.
To do this:
 Create a strong, identifiable character to start with, so your readers can be hooked immediately. Make sure to hint at subsurface currents in his feelings from the beginning of the story.
Refer to the character's backstory. What happened to him in his earlier life will explain what the character cannot explain to himself.
Employ the other main and secondary characters because nothing messes up a person's mood and thought processes like another person.
Learn about human behavior. If need be, skim through psychology books and study different behaviors and their causes. For example when a character feels abandoned, he may repress it with dourness, inaction, or friendliness to the annoying extreme. If unjustly accused, he may show it as rage, tentativeness, or malice.
Don't let failure of your character or even his physical or psychological death frighten you. Remember you are dealing with fiction where there is life after death.
Be careful with the pacing. Give your character a breather every now and then. If your character is constantly running away from his inner demons, your readers will be exhausted.
Take special care with intensity, especially erotic intensity as it overpowers other emotional and dramatic choices. If you are going to include erotic intensity, make sure it doesn't close off the real and important feelings and conflicting actions between characters.
Keep in mind that everything eventually boils down to the battle between good and evil. This need not be the theme of your story, but allude to it in some way.
Wilderness inside a character means that he has to deal with his own emotional complexity. Complex characters involve the reader and create emotions in him. Emotional complexity need not be reserved for literary fiction. Give it to your characters in whichever genre you choose to write.
Until next time... 
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"Dave tried to ignore the unflinching gaze as he studied his hand, but finally, he had to ask the stupid question that had been haunting him for six years."
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"It was one of those moments that, if I could live it over, it would be very different."
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I won't say it was easy to walk around like I didn't have a big secret. Sometimes it was scary and most of the time it was very lonely.
I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to share something so personal with a group of strangers, so I walked out and never went back. That was over two years ago.
Frightened, Penny tried to pull away from her sister, but Brenda dug her fingers into her hair.
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Yet for the past year, Logan had lived what some would call a half life.
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Of course I had a memory that helped me sit against that fence with all those feelings mixed in. The day the letter came.
Sometimes it felt like my mom and dad hate me, and tolerate me at best. Everything I do is wrong, and everything I say doesn't leave a scratch on their perfect lives
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Your silence is the loudest sound. It drowns out the murmur, the harsh clang of painted metal forcefully closing, the squeaky linoleum and rubber, the gentler undertones of our world revolving and passing us by without a glance, with barely a growled word.
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