Anatomy of Perceval

Characters in Love

July 4, 2009 · 1 Comment

First came courage, then came guilt, and now love!  Characters in love.  Not in lust.  When two characters are in lust, that’s easier to write in one sense because the expression of that lust is usually sex.  The challenge with writing sex scenes is to write them with as little actual sex as possible.  Describing sexual behavior can be unintentionally hilarious or terribly boring.  One way to avoid both is to pick a point of view and stick to it.  Never write a sex scene from omniscient third, describing every move and moan from the distance of that point of view.  The scene will end up like the instructions to a mechanical process.  I avoid writing sex scenes unless they either move the story forward or reveal character.  Everything else tends to be gratuitous.

Anyway, back to love.  I began thinking about this emotion for two reasons this week.  First, the coverage of Michael Jackson’s death and his two marriages.  Then, I began to think about the psychology of love, and that over and over, people who knew Jackson well talked about his loving and giving nature, his kindness.  For someone of Jackson’s fame and wealth, how does he trust that the people who are saying they love him, truly love him?  I believe his family members love him, his children also.  But outside of that circle, I wondered how he knew when a person was genuine with him and not just after a piece of him.

That issue is a common one among public figures.  I ran smack into it with Evan Quinn in Perceval because of his fame.  Love would not come easy to him as a result.  And the more I worked on the first draft, the more I realized that his fame was the least of the obstacles in the way of love for him.  This is not something that’s easy to research, either.  I rarely felt comfortable enough with a conductor to open up the topic of his private life, his love life.  Over time, I learned from the people who worked with the conductors and from observation.  There’s a huge myth that conductors are big skirt chasers, unfaithful and proud of it.  This couldn’t be farther from the reality.  Conductors are married, single, shy and introverted, extraverted, straight, gay, happy, tormented, devoted and true, serial cheaters, divorced, lonely…in short, conductors are no different from the general population.  Their job is the only thing that sets them apart, and its demands.

That job can be an obstacle to a conductor’s love life.  It’s a very demanding occupation that involves frequent travel and a single-minded focus.  A friend has commented that anyone who wants a romantic relationship with a conductor needs to understand what he or she is getting into, i.e. he or she will never be the first priority, and the conductor’s life may very well be the one that is the most important in the relationship.  I’ve thought that if a conductor doesn’t marry young, he or she may never marry.  But there are always exceptions, and it depends on the conductor, what he or she wants out of life, profession, and family.

Characters in love, Evan Quinn in love.  What I need to remember: to focus on the emotion in a scene, the conflicts it triggers within the characters and between them, and how they overcome them.  In Perceval, Evan begins to grapple with what he wants out of life, his friendships, his music, and love.  And it helps that he meets someone about whom he can’t stop thinking….

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“Seven Pounds” or About Character Motivation

June 27, 2009 · 3 Comments

Last week, courage was on my mind, specifically whether or not Evan Quinn was courageous.  Then I saw the movie Seven Pounds, starring Will Smith.  Smith’s character, Ben Thomas, put a new spin for me on the question of courage and what could motivate someone to do something courageous.  Specifically, guilt.

Guilt is an emotional experience not explored much by writers and screenwriters.  Fyodor Dostoyesky famously explored it in Crime and Punishment.  The movie The Machinist stands out for me because the main character played by Christian Bale physically manifested the psychological and emotional effects of guilt.  Guilt is unpleasant.  Guilt is painful.  But Ben Thomas in Seven Pounds showed me what an interesting motivating factor it could be for a character. 

Ben Thomas’ experience in the movie grabbed me around the throat and shook me.  Will Smith was nearly unrecognizable as Ben, but his performance was brilliant.  He captured the character’s pain on his face, the character’s courage in his choice for himself.   It reminded me of two characters in the Perceval series, characters I created and maybe I need to pay more attention to the guilt that I have given them.  Maybe it’s not Evan’s courage or lack thereof I need to focus on, but his guilt.  As it stands now, Evan represses his guilt, but maybe I can play with that more than I have.  The other character doesn’t repress his feelings, and Evan reacts to that by working harder to repress his own.

Which brings me to the whole issue of a character’s emotional being and what to do with it.  Emotions motivate behavior.  I tend toward showing behavior to reflect the character’s emotion rather than stating how the character feels.  That doesn’t always work, however.  For Evan, I also use his thoughts and how he responds to the world around him to reflect his emotions.  Stepping back, it’s also possible to use description of location to reflect a character’s emotion, how he sees it, or the use of color in the description to create a tone or atmosphere that reflects the emotion.  Dialogue and choice of words can also reflect the character’s emotion.  Much care and thought needs to go into this in order to be accurate and true to what the character is feeling.  Emotions require respect in the writing.   The wrong word will create the wrong impression, the writing will fail.

I had not seen Seven Pounds in the theater because its advertising campaign annoyed me.  When the DVD came out, I continued to pass it by until last week.  Now I am so glad that I watched it.  A reminder that as a writer I need to pay attention and be ever on the prowl for ideas for character development…..

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On Courage

June 20, 2009 · 4 Comments

Last night as I was falling asleep (or tossing and turning, depending on the point of view), a portion of the climax scene for the Perceval novels came into my mind, playing out like a movie.  No, I’m not going to describe it here (smile), but what came into my head upon waking this morning is this: is Evan Quinn a courageous character?  Or is he actually a wuss?  And then, how does a writer create a courageous character without sounding preachy or goody-goody about it?

What is courage?

When I looked up “courage” in my handy dictionary, I found an interesting word history.  It comes from Middle English “corage” which came from Old French: “cuer,” the word for “heart.”  To have courage is to have heart.  Well, the definition is “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere and withstand danger, fear or difficulty.”  But it also takes nerve to be courageous and a strong heart.  Courage does not mean the absence of fear.  Courage is the ability to act despite fear.  Using fear as a motivator rather than a paralyzer.  Courage is something most people believe they don’t have and don’t think about it, especially in the midst of an action that is, in fact, courageous. 

It takes courage to express oneself honestly and create original, fresh writing, share that writing with others through publication (or a blog), because the writer is sharing her soul, her innermost imaginings and heart for others to read and experience.  This is true for artists in general.  And every occupation has something that is fear-inducing and requires facing that fear and doing the job anyway.  Performers suffer stage fright but perform.  Conductors (and other musicians) also suffer stage fright but they conduct.  Having that fear, that edge, can also be a good thing.

I haven’t decided yet whether Evan is courageous or actually a wuss.  My imagination gave me only last night some of the material I need to figure that out.  He is very much a human being with flaws and strengths, and a heart.  I trust that by the time I arrive at the climax of book 5, Perceval’s Choice, my imagination will have provided me with more material so I’ll know the answer and will be able to write the ending to that book and the series….

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Language Grows

June 15, 2009 · Leave a Comment

An interesting note in this week’s “Time” magazine on pg. 15:
“1 million: Number of words in the English language according to the Global Language Monitor website. The millionth word? Web 2.0.”

Dictionary publishers celebrate! The question now is: just how many of the words are actually used on a daily basis?

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