Setting up the rules
“Looking back at what and how I write, I seem to begin a new play with two people of completely opposite nature and temperament, put them in an intolerable situation, and let the sparks fly. The extra ingredient, and very important, is that they must both emphatically believe that their way of life is the right one. Then it’s the playwright’s job to support both of those beliefs. . .
“To me, the first 10 minutes of a comedy are critical. They writer must 1.) set up the rules and the situation, 2.) catch the audience almost immediately. One the rules are announced, farce, satire, straight comedy, or whatever game you’re playing, the audience will believe you as long as you stick to those rules and that game.” –Neil Simon (stolen from this month’s issue of The Writer).
I like this because it nicely dissects two things I have noticed in my own fiction writing:
1. You should be sympathetic with your characters even if you wouldn’t normally agree with or like them. You have to find a way into their behavior that allows you to understand it. Doing this automatically adds complexity and intelligence to the writing, plus it is a way around your personal judgment of certain behaviors. I think that’s how writers end up with great, complex villains or we end up with books like Lolita. How could Nabakov write about a child molester in an interesting way without first going to the uncomfortable place of sympathizing with his point of view? It seems to me that this is a way into creating fascinating, different-from-the-writer characters.
2. When you create a fictional world, you are subconsciously setting up a series of rules to work within. You are creating not only the where, when, and how of a physical world, you are creating a series of rules for each character–How does she think? How would she act in this situation?–that all work together to create the overall story. When you work within these rules, you can do anything you want. When you break the rules, the reader will know it right away. That’s why it’s so jarring when a realistic story suddenly shifts into magic realism or when a character does something that’s, well, out of character.
Has anyone else thought about this stuff?
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There are a lot of simplistic villains in books and movies because people don’t take the time to make them real people with real motivations, possibly for fear of being identified with the character’s ‘evil.’ I can’t help but think that today a book written from a child molester’s POV would end in the author’s home being searched for kiddy porn.
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