 Drama: March 14, 2018 Issue [#8803] |
  Drama
This week: On Vulnerability Edited by: NaNoKit  
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Human beings are vulnerable. So, too, are good characters.
This week's Drama Newsletter is all about the need for realism in our antagonists and protagonists. And about the flu.
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Since the end of last week, I have been a miserable, coughing, sneezing, aching, shivering, sweating, feverish ball, firmly curled up in bed. Yeps, I thought I’d escaped flu season this year. I was wrong.
The reason that I’m sharing this with you is that it’s perfectly possible this newsletter won’t make much sense. My brain’s not exactly cooperating right now. Still, it did make me think of how life’s sudden twists and turns can leave us feeling vulnerable. And how vulnerability is an important aspect of the characters we create.
Back in the 90s, I was introduced to free-form text-based role-playing games. You come up with your character, in the same way as you do with characters for a short story, or a novel. Except, this character interacts with other people’s characters. The adventures the characters go on are a result of a blend of several people’s imaginations. It was a lot of fun, and an excellent creative writing exercise. There were few rules or limits, but an important one was that your character must have at least some vulnerabilities.
Every now and then you’d get someone who’d think it was cool to play some disruptive monster that couldn’t possibly be stopped. It wasn’t cool. It disrupted storylines because of being unrealistic. I mean, it might have been okay if they wanted to play a monster that just wanted to peek out from under the table and be given a cookie from time to time, but no, it was always about chaos and destruction, which is why we had to have rules. If you’re going to cause that, there’s got to be an in-game way to end it.
It’s the same with novels and short stories. An antagonist who is difficult to defeat? Sure. An antagonist who is impossible to defeat? That wouldn’t be a very rewarding read nor, possibly, be all that rewarding to write.
Protagonists, too, need to have a vulnerable side. An untouchable hero or heroine is as unrealistic as an untouchable enemy. As readers, we want to be able to relate to the hero or heroine of the story. That cannot be done if the character is incapable of experiencing the things that we experience – joy, sadness, friendship, loss, love, pain, grief, and so on. We know what it’s like to feel these things. When the character feels them, we sympathise with them and begin to care about what becomes of them.
That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be nice, sometimes, if we were a little less vulnerable. After several days of this flu I am well and truly tired of it. It’s not helping me write. It’s not helping my studies (and I have several deadlines coming up). It’s my birthday in a few days’ time and as things stand I have lost my sense of smell and taste. If I cannot enjoy some treats that day then what’s the world coming to?
Unfortunately, it’s not something I have a choice in. All I can do is look after myself, keep warm, and wait it out. In the meanwhile, I wish you health and a greater success at writing something coherent than I have had with this newsletter (sorry  ).
NaNoKit
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