She's Deeply Confused

excerpted from

Creativity Rules!
 

by John Vorhaus

You can create characters out of anything. You don't even need to start with a character at all, not even so much as a name. You can derive character through the filter of found language. Yes it's true.

I have on my desk a theater playbill, and I extract verbatim from its Who's Who.

"...burst onto the scene..." "...for which she won..." "...most recognized for..." "...co-starred with..." "...other regional credits..." "...last seen in..." "...played on Broadway..." "...currently appearing in..."

These phrases are artifacts of a particular language, the language of the theater playbill. Taken together, they create a voice, and you can use this voice to construct a character. Simply ask yourself who, in the world of your imagination, fits within the boundaries of the language artifacts you're examining. Then apply your (newfound?) inventiveness to the task of filling in the details of that person's background and state of being.

SANDY SALTWATER is perhaps best known as Sandy Seabed in television's She's Deeply Confused. After studying theater at Brown University, Sandy moved to New York, where she appeared in Trevor, Trevor (Pub Theater) and played the dual roles of Eve and Anna in Palindrome at the Pepper Rep. Her film credits include The Legend of Sleepy Hollow III and IV, and Gossamer Wings for Showtime.

Try that.

-->

Fabrication can be fun. With nothing at stake, we enjoy godlike serenity as we endow our characters with history and ambition, triumphs, vanities and hidden agendas. This kind of fabrication is also useful, in that it presents you with characters where before you had only empty space -- characters which, by the way, you'd be highly unlikely to derive by other means.

Now I'm skimming a copy of Victoria Magazine and grabbing language from it:

"...a gift for her daughter..." "...you and Mother have long exchanged beauty secrets..." "...'Dear Grandmother' is a book you'll want to share..." "...Mama's kitchen was heavenly..." "...the mother-daughter team creates fresh-scented lavender lotions..."

Can you guess who reads this magazine? Can you create such a reader? Can you craft a letter to the editor from this reader? Oh yes. Yes and yes. Simply attach the voice of this magazine to the voice of an imagined reader.

Dear Editor,
Ever since Mother passed, I've been trying to fill a great hole in my life. Today I saw your magazine for the first time, and from the cover story forward -- "A Mother's Dying Wish" -- it spoke to me. Believe me when I tell you that I stood in the bookstore weeping, just weeping...

-->

Artifacts of language are everywhere: in sales catalogs, newspapers, web sites, handbills, junk mail.

• When you're strapped for creativity, you can always borrow from what already exists.

Try it. Grab some text from a magazine, cookbook, or high school yearbook, and distill its language. Then cast a character from the voice you find.

-->

There's a relationship between the reader and the printed word which amounts to mutually reinforcing reality. Guns and Ammo Magazine, for example, sends the message that "guns and ammo are way cool" to people who already believe in the way coolness of guns and ammo. This direct reflection of the reader's reality is directly how a magazine stays in print.

And that's useful to know if you write for magazines. You'll have much greater success selling to magazines if you pitch articles or story ideas which directly reflect the readership's preconceptions. Sorry if this sounds cynical, but which article is Guns and Ammo more likely to buy: pro gun, or pro gun control? You can study artifacts of language to discover a magazine's or newspaper's point of view.

You can also learn more about yourself by examining the language choices you make. Here are some things I have said at one time or another.

A lie is not a lie if the truth is not expected. If I don't believe it, it isn't true. There's a fine line between insanity and minority opinion. What you see depends on where you stand. If you can't be right, be loud. I think we can all agree on the nature of consensus reality.

Taken together, these artifacts of my language reveal me as someone who likes to question reality. Once you've made (or acknowledged) such discoveries about yourself, you can then export them into characters as a means of bringing those characters to life.

Harley Boone never signed on to the whole calendar thing in the first place. At the age of eight he invented his own year, including holidays. When he tried to skip school to honor the Feast of St. Spreservus, counseling was recommended.

And what might some other holidays in Harley Boone's year be?

-->

Thus you can use your personal vocabulary to create character. If you imagine that you don't have a personal vocabulary, just explore your microculture -- that set of experiences and memories that you share with a spouse or lover, friends, family or co-workers. These experiences and memories often come with language attached. For example, I have a friend whose father hands out hundred-dollar bills at Christmas. Because Ben Franklin's portrait graces this bill, it has come to be known that every year dad Franklins the kids. Any character who Franklins his kids is a character you can learn and know and use.

Record some of your personal vocabulary now, then create a character who fits that voice.

-->

Characters you create from borrowed language have a borrowed feel. But characters who spring from your own language or history will be more authentic, because their voices come from within. They will also have the advantage of being uniquely your own, and thus much less likely to be clichéd or derivative.

I seem frequently to invent characters with such personality traits as obsessive collector; avid amateur poker player; shortcut taker; angle shooter; inventor of new words. These traits mirror my own, and I find them easy to assign to characters. When we project our real selves onto our characters, those characters come more quickly and effectively to life.

Does this mean that all characters are or should be a direct reflection of the writer? No, of course not. Otherwise, I'd have to write middle-aged bald guys all the time, and never get to write spunky young women. But consider this: There is always an intersection between what's real about you and what's real about the characters you create. Find that intersection, explore it and write about it, and you can be confident that your characters will think, act and speak in authentic ways.

What characters do you write about most frequently and most effectively? If you can't answer that question, answer this one instead: What are your personality traits? What would happen if you pasted them directly onto the characters you're working with now?

-->

Yes, this requires a certain minimum level of honesty on the part of the writer. You simply can't assign aspects of yourself to your characters unless you're willing to acknowledge and accept that those aspects live within you. This is a problem. I love, as I've mentioned, to write about obsessive collectors, but I can't do a good job of it unless I admit that I'm one too.

What would you rather not admit to yourself about yourself? Now go and build a character out of that.

-->

Okay, by now we're pretty sure that we can create character out of anything that's left lying around. We can do the same thing with story.

As an obsessive collector, I happen to collect, among other things, internet artifacts, those ephemeral renderings of reality which float around in the ether and occasionally tumble into my email box. You've seen them: urban myths; jokes; scams; actual newspaper headlines; bad country-and-western song titles; and imponderable questions like, "How high is sea level?" I quote here from a collection of... well... mind-bogglingly stupid behaviors.

• Trying to keep warm in freezing weather, a 50 year old man huddled over his paraffin heater. Accidentally overturning it, he set himself on fire. Screaming in pain as his clothes were engulfed in flame, he ran out of his hut and jumped into a nearby reservoir, where he sank like a stone and drowned.

• A psychology student rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped, and beat her repeatedly with an axe, leaving her mentally retarded.

When I first read these, I thought, "Man, you can't make that stuff up." Then I thought, "Sure you can." Then I thought, "Let's give it a whack."

• A man tried to kill himself by running his late-model sedan into a concrete wall. He forgot that his car had an airbag, which inflated, leaving him injured but alive. En route to the hospital, the man seized control of the ambulance and attempted to crash it into a wall. He missed his target and flipped the vehicle, killing two paramedics. He walked away unscathed. And was hit and killed by a police cruiser speeding to the scene.

That's a whole story, beginning-middle-and-end, all derived from an exercise in mimicry. Try it now. You know how stupid people can be.

-->

Just as you can create characters by poaching from your own language, you can invent stories and situations by aping your own style. Simply project your own voice onto a character, and then devise a situation which naturally conflicts with that voice.

Jon had a wisecrack for everything. Birth, death, religion... Jon had something clever to say. And Jon was fine until the day he met a woman who wasn't dazzled by his quick wit. She wanted to know his well-defended heart, and Jon felt it wasn't wise to expose the cracks in that...

What do friends say about you? What do you say about yourself? Take one of those elements, project it onto a character and propel that character into a story. Don't worry whether the story "goes anywhere" or not. In the next section we'll explore the simple problem-solving tools which can take a story from its beginning, over the hurdle of middle, and on to a satisfying end. In the meantime, just notice again how easy writing becomes when you have a precise, well-defined task to attack.

-->

Notice also how far outside the realm of "magic creativity" we now stand. Simply use what you have on hand, and your creative well can never run dry.