Shifting Personae
I don’t know how anything ever gets created. The moment a single creative decision gets made, everything shifts around it. If you’re writing a story and a character has a little two-paragraph flashback, the information contained therein affects every other scene with that character, changing the context and meaning of their actions. Even if the scene still fits, still makes sense, those two scenes in parallel now have their own sets of implications, rippling out, changing the overall shape and structure of the tale. It’s like this with every change: Each time the pieces shift in relation to one another, form a new picture, and the result may make more or less sense. It’s like solving a system of equations: For each character, only certain decisions will line up with their implicit perspective, with their stated values as conveyed by other scenes. When there’s a contradiction, there’s an infinite number of resolutions, each with an infinite number of ramifications, each of these requiring additional solutions and justifications and so forth.
Many creators don’t seem to be intimidated by this problem, to be frozen in indecision, in the same way I am. While I think my perspective is an accurate one, this isn’t quite the same as it being a useful one. Yes, every character changes with each line and choice, and sometimes introducing a certain decision might completely contradict a past decision, might seem arbitrary and weird. Very well, then; they contradict themselves. The human mind is arbitrary and weird, and most of our rationale for decision-making is absurd post-hoc motivated logic. What even is character plausibility in the context of a world where flesh-and-blood humans behave so erratically?
Of course, the truth is that plausibility of character was never about realism. Characters aren’t people. Characters are, rather, an idealized, isolated, and distilled abstraction of how people see other people – and how they see themselves. As the map is not the territory, the character, the personality, is not the person. Though we may use the term “uncharacteristic” to describe a behavior, there’s no such thing as a real person behaving “uncharacteristically”, as their character can only be defined by observation of their actions, anything “uncharacteristic” is merely a hole in one’s understanding of who that person is – or, perhaps, of what people are. Character is a description, not a prescription, and messy humans are frequently unaccustomed to coloring within those lines. We don’t like to think that way about ourselves, though: We like to think of ourselves as rational, reasonable, measurable, personable. The first character we ever write is our own selves: The role of a lifetime.
The question, then, is not “is this behavior realistic?” but “does this behavior say what I want it to about the character and the world they occupy?” The question is, “what trait of human behavior do I want this scene to exemplify, and what is the worldview that logically descends from that trait, and is its representation undermined by traits the character has previously evinced?” Naturally, there’s seldom a convenient and pithy answer to these questions, but they are worth asking, in one form or another.
Here I have talked myself all the way back around again into anxiously worrying whether each scene lines up properly, whether it all sums up to a coherent whole, to wondering how anyone ever creates anything when there are so many concerns, when there are so many factors. There’s no good answer except to say that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The truth is that there’s no underlying truth that one must be true to: Only the story, the silhouette of a deep and incomprehensible idea, the sensation of profound realization, that we must be accurate to. All else is decoration.
Problem Machine 