Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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I posted this in a comment on another blog and thought I'd repost it here because I wanted to keep it where I could access it again readily and figured I'd share it with others, mainly my fl. And I think I've posted some of this previously, but what the hell. Here goes.

The topic of cuteness and making characters suffer has been getting some play this week on writing blogs. This is my comment to Karen's post.

Of course, cute is in the eye of the beholder. When I was 11, "Illya" was cute and therefore, the character on Man From UNCLE I focused on. When I was hit my 30s, Robert Vaughn's handsomeness started to give David McCallum's cuteness a run for its money, and I started appreciating Napoleon Solo in a way I never had previously.

It has long been known in fan fic circles that the angst factor, the hurt/comfort factor, drives a lot of fanac, aka fan activity re: viewing and writing.

We want to comfort the ones we love and before we can comfort them, they need to be hurt or otherwise in need of comforting. As viewers, someone else has to do that for us and we can comfort only vicariously through another character on scene, preferably the buddy (boo hiss to girlfriend / boyfriend characters because that's the role we want). As writers, we get to do it ourselves, which explains a lot of the Mary Sue phenomenon: She's Us and aside from being perfect, she gets the lust/angst character. She's our wish fulfillment.

Lee Child has been "accused" and I certainly agree, of having his Jack Reacher character, a man who is so anti-social and in many ways, unappealing (to me, having read one of the books in that series) attracting sexually appealing female characters who seem to find him just the greatest thing since sliced bread. Wish fulfillment in the pro book market.

That science is catching up (and that research re: babies and cuteness is not new, the need to evolve the urge to nurture young and helpless of the species will help ensure survival) is no surprise.

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I have to wonder, though, about changing and varying tastes. We humans aren't as simple creatures as we used to be back when we were first evolving. And a lot of research into what attracts males and females to each other re: what qualities would make a good mate (at least long enough to create and nurture strong offspring) has been going on, from how easily looks can turn the head of the opposite sex (think peacock) to strength to fight off predators, from features that we've come to associate rightly or wrongly to intelligence to the more modern economical factors that mean someone will be able to provide for the care of a child, either by being able to bring home a wooly mammoth to live off for a year or a good stock portfolio and pension plan.

But back to writing. I think that I cast my main characters to up the angst factor for myself, which makes it easier to write, not just for the descriptions which I suck at, but for the emotional attachment the faces help foster. Even for the villains. I know it makes the stories more like TV shows and I'm visually oriented. I don't visualize well, so I need that element provided for me. I gravitate toward visual media. I am a great lover of books, but my first reading love was comics in comic book and comic strip form.

But not any old face will do. Even the antagonist has to be an actor I like, whose face appeals to me on some level. Which is why, in my WIR, one of the antagonists looks like yummy Jimmy Smits. For the on-hold Mars book that Deb and I first started writing, my main character is the guy in the icon. He appealed to me on a gut level the first time I saw him, in the movie "Simon," back in 1980 or so. Of course, I didn't really learn who he was until The Equalizer, but that's another story. He's been the "star" of much of my writing for a long time. The protag in the WIR looks like Michael Shanks. And so it goes.

And when it comes to adult characters, these aren't just faces I would want to comfort and nurture. They're folks I'd want to have sex with (I'm trying to not be too blunt here). Anyone who doesn't see the lust factor in what a lot if not most people put into their writing, especially fan fic, is either oblivious or in denial. IMO, of course.

Maud Newton had an interesting excerpt from a recent article by John Lanchester in the New York Review of Books about J.M. Coetzee's feelings re: using authorial characters in his works. Coetzee's latest novel features a writer.

"It is more, perhaps, a question of ethics, touching on the morality of making people up, and then devising trials and torments for them, designed to expose and test their deficiencies. Is there anything of ethical content to be said about the fortunes of these imaginary people? Does making things up have an effect on the maker, and on the reader?"

and this:

"A cartoon version of this would be to say that Coetzee has moved from a concern about human beings to a concern about animal beings to a concern about fictional beings. A reader who has followed Coetzee’s books since Disgrace, and followed the thread of ethical inquiry that runs through them, might pose Slow Man’s central question differently: Why should we care about fictional characters when the world is so full of real suffering?"

I've certainly written my fair share of angst for my characters, especially in my fan fiction, both mental and physical suffering. And I certainly feel as if my characters, the ones who are the protagonists and main characters, and especially those who appear in more than one story, to be real in a sense, even if they dwell only in my head and on paper or in pixels. And I hope they feel real to the people who read about them. But perhaps Coetzee is being too hard on himself. Writers do have power. They can entertain. They can make people feel something. They can make them think. And they can make them perhaps consider something they never have before. Maybe even feel something about the real people who are suffering what the fictional ones suffer.

A writer's skill influences how well they can do this. As a reader, I don't want to feel my emotions have been manipulated (the same is true for when I view movies). I want to believe those characters are real. And while I prefer happy endings for the catharsis after the suffering, I have no problems with reading something sad or tragic. I'm a crier. And that can be cathartic, too. But the characters aren't real in that they don't exist beyond the page except in memory. They don't physically feel the pain we inflict on them or are witness to. They don't really suffer.

But there are some readers who do suffer when they read things, which is why I can see the usefulness of warning labels yet don't want my enjoyment of such books to be spoiled by knowing heavy angst is coming, or worse, that the book ends sadly. For people who need to know so they can avoid such books, perhaps they need to read only recommendations or books reviewed to their liking. I don't know.

And when I write, I don't suffer with the characters the way I do when I read. Possibly because in my backbrain, I know the outcome. And perhaps because there's comfort in knowing the characters exist only due to my having created them and the suffering isn't real on a physical level. But I am wondering now about the emotional connection between character and reader. The ability to move someone can be a double-edged sword. Something to keep in mind.