whoa hey a meme!

[lettered]

Pick a character I've written and I'll list the top ideas/concepts/etc I keep in mind while writing them that I believe are essential to accurately depicting them.*

*I don't think it follows that if other people don't have those concepts in mind they're inaccurately depicting them. For what it's worth.

Comments

[jjhunter]

Anyway, what I mean is that I try to view Pepper as someone coming from a completely different moral stance than a generic "I try to do the right thing."
24) I feel like Pepper really, really likes to win.
25) And that makes her do and try things she might not otherwise try.
26) And that when it comes to Tony, she really, really wants to win.

Coming back to say 'yes, yes, yes' and huh. (I am the adult who as a small child apparently said, ~age 6 in the context of checkers, 'If you're not winning you're losing', and then spent her teenage years trying so very, very hard to be genuinely good in all ways, and now as an adult is figuring out what is sustainable and enriching and satisfying when being good isn't the highest, well, good but retaining a sense of compassion and openness are aspects of myself I deeply value.) So I wonder, and try on for size,

10. I interpret her as someone who would simply not be interested in a lower stress job with less responsibilities or less impact on the world. Basically, being one of the most important figures in one of the most important corporations in the entire world is the only job that could make her happy.
11. Other things leave her fairly cold.
12. She fears that this makes her weird and different.
13. Which she is able to hide under a veneer of perfect amiability. She often doesn't talk about the things that make her truly passionate, and is able to converse with feeling, humor, and understanding on any number of subjects. She's very sensitive to other people's lives, concerns, and feelings, and is always considerate of them in every action she takes.
14. And all of this is perfectly sincere. She is a compassionate person and cares about things other people care about.
15. But they don't stir her deep down the way her job, career success, and power do.

because I don't think these quite map perfectly onto me, and yet there are aspects that really, really do, and it makes me wonder if the other elements might be more true than my personal mythology claims atm. (This is the problem with being a person who feels deeply and has historically suppressed or selectively channeled huge chunks of that emotion - the emotion takes on life-like aspects of its own, and now I am suddenly thinking of myself as a combination of Pepper Potts and Bruce Banner and that is a very, very bizarre way to start my day. Heh.)

Anyway, thank you so much for all this rich characterization food-for-thought.

[lettered]

now as an adult is figuring out what is sustainable and enriching and satisfying when being good isn't the highest, well, good but retaining a sense of compassion and openness are aspects of myself I deeply value.

Yeah. I find this frustrating. Because I still want to BE THE BEST, but more and more I find I son't actually want to. How do I manage to want and unwant the same thing? Or want different things. Idk.

am suddenly thinking of myself as a combination of Pepper Potts and Bruce Banner

Well, what I love about fictional characters is that they are just manifestations of one person's mind. Well, in the case of Pepper and Bruce, obviously different people invented them and worked on them--but in the end they all just illuminate different aspects of ourselves. Real people do this too, but it's harder to see because real people are more complex (and I think that in some ways we are less comfortable ripping apart real people for this kind of analysis).

Anyways, I find that even when I write characters with whom I do not identify, such as Tony and Pepper . . . I end up identifying a lot in spite of myself.

[jjhunter]

Anyways, I find that even when I write characters with whom I do not identify, such as Tony and Pepper . . . I end up identifying a lot in spite of myself.

This reminds me a great deal of an excellent piece of advice I got re: acting: to become someone else, you first need to deeply understand yourself. The more you understand yourself, the more precisely you can use your own personality and experiences as building blocks to emphasize or de-emphasize to bridge the gap between being yourself and inhabiting that other person.

To write is to call up little bits of yourself to act as the characters you write - how could you not identify in spite of yourself, even just a bit?