Character sketch

04 January 2011 09:26 AM Categories: Quotidian existence

I want to live my life as a fictional character.

The pushes and pulls and heavy stakes of reality would float away. My life would be created, a story, a product of someone else's mind. What fictional character doesn’t live a life of second-guesses, of crisis and messes and broken hearts left in a rush? The responsibility for my behavior would lie deep within my personality, be out of my control, someone else's intellectual problem. All I would have to do is be me and react to the situations my author puts me in. I would have no choice but to traipse along in my fictional universe, living as a slave to my character traits.

My life would depend upon the skill of my author. Would my story be character-driven, or would I be pulled lazily along by the plot, beholden to circumstance? Let's hope I don't get some hack writing me, someone who goes for cheap thrills and easy melodrama. I don't want to live a cliché. This isn't a romance novel and I'm not going to see it all clearly by the end. I'm not even sure if I want to follow a traditional narrative arc, though I like the predictability of it, the idea that the crisis I've been waiting for will actually come and, through struggle, there will be (positive) change.

In the real world, I live an obligated life. This is a not a bad life. It's an incredibly lucky one, actually, but I find myself confused by the obligations, pulled between what I have to do and what I want to do, or not knowing what I want because I always do what I should. How is my character reacting to years of the tight grip, of the tamping down? Would her fantasies of acquiescence, her dreams (sometimes nightmares) of unloosing, correspond with the actual experience?

She has choices to make, though it doesn’t feel like she has any choice at all. Even doing nothing is a choice that will form the rest of the story. Inaction and passivity will move the plot along in ways that are eventually out of her control. (But what if it is one of her character traits to be passive? Oh, doom and gloom and sad stagnation!) Or maybe she will act, but choose the wrong action. Is she lazy? Is she scared? What does she think will happen to her if she risks it all (and risking it all means what?). This character is guarded, self-protective, even with the ones she is closest to. This is her defining trait at the moment and as she becomes more fully aware of it, the real choices come in: make herself vulnerable or risk a deadened heart or some sort of emotional watershed. Whether the watershed is necessary or self-destructive remains to be seen.

I’ve never written a fully sketched out fictional character before, though I’ve tried, with those lists that run the gamut from hair color to first memory. I’m not sure I could create one by making checklists and filling out an outline. It has to come from within, from the words, for me. I have to write it and then see how consistent my portrayal is. Or so I imagine, since I haven’t done it before.

But in this exercise, I have so many questions. I want to go to an oracle to find the answers. I want to play with various plot lines to see how my character reacts, to test the outcome, to see where the tendrils of cause and effect grow and tangle, how others get caught up in her story. The outcome I would like for her is to feel, to be fully present in her own life, authentic to her emotions, supportive of the ones around her. She believes her heart is covered over, still equates love with risk and risk with other people, but I see the change, the crisis looming. I know the twists and turns of her heart better than she does. I know what she needs: to live emotionally again, to tweak the balance between mother, wife, writer, and human being.

I'll have to prod her, to write a story line that gets her out of the house and her mind, reassure her that she is coming from a foundation of love, that she's ok, that no one will hurt her, or if they do, she will not be destroyed by the pain. That she has things to say, finally, after suppressing them for years, that her emotions aren't destructive, that art and stability do mix, and if the stability turns from stagnation to stone, she needs to act before her limbs freeze, before her heart crumbles in her chest.

Related posts: From you, I get the story and (peripherally) Because I am hungry for art