Introduction to behavioural rules:
- Use behaviour rules to begin creating a character
- Rules can be crude as they are not applied absolutely
- Two rules are more effective than one at creating depth
- Use an audition scene to assess how a character produced by potential rules might fit in to the role
- These behavioural rules are the inverse of how we experience characters in real life; we try to infer the rules from the behaviour we see (aka attribution).
- Focusing on behavioural rules also encourages better observation and subsequent portrayal;
- This leads more naturally to “show don’t tell”; focus on what is observable and not what is / should be felt.
- Behavioural rules lead to better engagement of prediction-making (both writer’s and reader’s, which is more interesting for both as well).
- Behavioural rules reduce use of writer’s knowledge that the reader cannot know.
Use of behavioural rules:
- Often in the format “Always …..”
- Any of a variety of “how” questions about how character exists in the world:
- Speak, move, dress etc
- Also what a character (always) speaks about
- Seems usually quite abstract, e.g. “always mentions someone not present”
- Can range from smaller (“always tidies”) to larger “always sacrifices something”
- Can range into feelings (presumably need to be careful with this as it’s less visible?), e.g. “always feels something is someone else’s fault”
- Overall anything about the way a character habitually is.
- Rules can be good or bad, better or worse.
- Beter rules should be grounded in observation of reality.
- Exaggeration is fine but should build from reality.
- Nice rule of thumb: a good rule makes it easier to write a scene, a bad rule makes it harder.
- Audition scenes should be robotic or at least have the candidate rules applied robotically (inverse of rules making the scene easier to write)
- Frequency of rules e.g. every time they speak, x times per y, never.
- This process then leads to a less rigid application of the observed behaviours, i.e. rules are a framework that leads to the finished product.
- Weird coincidence – used quote from Wood’s How Fiction Works that I happened to have read about an hour ago.
- Nice progression: real life -> realism -> caricature -> comic
- Usually you want slight exaggeration (my analogy: like salting food!)
- Exaggeration can be of degree or of consistency
- Interesting point that minor characters should be a little more exaggerated than major characters.
- Certain rules work better with particular authorial voices; sounds like you can make it easier for yourself with a more intrusive authorial voice that can comment on more things.
Conversational style:
- Paralanguage, everything outside of words themselves.
- Language, words
- Turn taking, I guess self-explanatory
- Listening, ditto
- Generally only draw attention to what is unusual
- Can group sets of behavioural rules with frequencies into above four categories to get quite a detailed structure for scene-writing.
- Remember that it can be productive to pick combinations of rules almost arbitrarily and then see what happens with an audtion scene.
- E.g. “high pitch” + “uses two technical terms every utterance”, or “uses ‘you’” + “never more than five words per utterance”
Life scripts:
- Speech is action
- People are trying to be themselves; “keeping up appearances”
- This should reveal something subtle about them lest it be boring
- Injunctions: don’t rules, Drivers: do / be rules
- These basic rules (injunctions, drivers) can almost be used to play a game of producing actions based on the rule, which can drive the fiction forward effectively.
Rules that matter:
- Characters have their own observation which is important to their characterisation.
- Idea that it’s possible to try and distill simple rules that evoke strong characterisation (reverse of above, i.e. starting from rules and seeing what happens.)
- Involvement vs independence, i.e. appropriate level of closeness
- KQ1: “What matters emotionally to my protagonist?”
- KQ2: “What matters thematically to my novel?” (I think I’ve been focusing too much on this second one).
- Perhaps one aspect of what is perceived as good literature is actually the ability of the author to accurately distill these rules for various circumstances.
- Example of a theme of Grapes of Wrath being “impotence of humans”, so we see rules about attempts to control things.
- Characters’ emotional concerns might not overlap with the piece’s thematic concerns – can we take this further and make a more productive rule that the two should not overlap?
Last advice:
- We root more for characters with clear wants and goals (at least clear to them); this only applies to major characters, though.
- Backstory is overrated (yes!!) – has danger of writer knowing more about characters than reader does.
- But maybe peppering small elements of backstory can be beneficial.
- Also character profiles can be overrated; possibly useful for narrow kind of realism, but then again real people have many irrelevant details compared to fictional characters; should at least be secondary to key details (or behavourial rules).
- Quote from Orson Scott Card: “Characterization is not a virtue, it is a technique.”
- Not every character needs painting in detail; level of detail always varies on spectrum.