Well, tropical cyclone Debbie has now thoroughly degenerated into a low and is wending its way inland to rain itself into oblivion.
My community was spared, in the end. Cyclones being the wild meanderers that they are, at various times Debbie threatened north of us, to hit us square on, then trended south with occasionally unnerving swings north before bringing its full grief to bear on the Whitsundays and Airlie Beach. As it was, the system was large enough that tens of thousands had to be evacuated from low-lying areas of Mackay, and until close to the end Townsville was still expected to have winds equivalent to a category 1 or 2 cyclone.
Ultimately, Townsville was spared even significant gales, and can account ourselves blessed on that score. Best wishes to those who bore the brunt, who are today beginning the long clean up.
With tropical cyclone Debbie breathing down my neck of the woods, I’m likely to be absent from the blog and other social media for a brief time. Preparing for the possibility of the cyclone making landfall nearby, in downtime reading Enforcing Order by Didier Fassin as essay prep and distraction (I don’t enjoy cyclones one little bit and tend to become rather anxious when they’re hovering nearby). North Queenslanders, let’s hope it all goes well!
Well, after yesterday’s pervading gloomy sense of failure, I put in some serious labour on my university work yesterday afternoon to clear the decks for today. My cunning plan being to spend today writing until my knuckles ached.
So I did.
I scrapped all the work I’d done on the short story so far–figuring some of my difficulty with it was my subconscious telling me I was doing it wrong–and started from scratch.
The new version retained the main character’s voice, but switched from first to third person. Two existing scenes lost an event and I merged them into a single slightly longer scene with a more logical progression.
And, in two long sessions, I managed a total of 2700 words. By my standards, that’s not a small number! I’m very pleased with that progress. Now I have a much clearer idea of how to progress the story from where I am.
Needless to say, it was also marvelous to actually devote a full day to nothing but writing. Feels like Christmas!
Five day into having committed to make progress on the SF short story, I’d be inclined to report that the outcome has mainly been frustration.
Technically, I’m now four scenes in, but that represents little real progress. It doesn’t count a first scene written before determining where the story should actually start, then discarded. Monday and Tuesday produced the bulk of this week’s new words, 1500 or so. Yesterday was mostly rewrite of those scenes followed by 230 new words (i.e. barely any at all) and today was rewrite of rewrite ending when I ran out of time with no new words.
To be quite honest, I’ve gone quite flat in general. I’ve not been reading apart from material needed for my study, and study itself is proceeding like a crawl over broken glass. I’ve applied self-discipline to honour my various to-do lists, but it’s all quite joyless.
On top of which, it’s frustrating. If I sacrifice writing time for study, and study doesn’t go well, then what’s the point?
And I really do miss lost writing time. I need the practice. In one of his video tutorials on writing, Brandon Sanderson talks about reaching the point where you’re good enough to realize how bad you are (to paraphrase), and I’d say that’s where I’m at. It’s certainly its own kind of frustration. I feel a strong compulsion to improve, to level up past that point, but it’s not going to happen when my practice consists ten words a day wrenched out between other obligations.
Alan Baxter’s anthology Crow Shine has recently been nominated for an Aurealis award for best collection, and when you read it it’s easy to see why. It’s a bloody good read, start to finish.
There are nineteen stories from the dark end of the speculative fiction genre, mostly horror, but with a smattering of weird and urban and dark fantasy. Character, time period, geographical setting, and supernatural element are richly varied, so no mid-anthology ennui here. Indeed, the collection starts well and only gets better as it proceeds.
For my money, the closest thing to a weak story is Punishment of the Sun, which, while engaging, I felt lacked clarity in its underlying events. But it’s still a pretty high low, and its surrounded by gems.
Tiny Lives is such a pristine and moving example of shorter short fiction that I read it several times to see what I could learn from it about writing. The Chart of the Vagrant Mariner is a brilliant eldritch pirate story, originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and a highlight. Darkest Shade of Grey is like a lost episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker, but with extra added humanity. A Strong Urge to Fly is pure Tales of the Unexpected, with some beautiful, atmospheric prose in the descriptions of the town of Beston-on-Sea. The Old Magic is a moving story of longevity and power. Among these highs, the final story, The Darkness in Clara, in which a woman struggles to make sense of her partner’s death, still manages to stand out as exceptional. Again, moving and humane, with a point to be made about how we harm each other and ourselves.
Peter M. Ball, over on Man Versus Bear, is hosting The Sunday Circle for followers of his blog—in which people answer three questions about their current creative efforts.
What are you working on this week?
What is inspiring you at the moment?
What part of your project are you trying to avoid?
It seems fun, reflexive, and an interesting means to pin a bit of accountability to what you’re up to, so I’m giving it a try.
What are you working on this week?
In general, I’m currently trying to write a series of different short stories. The goal is to go fairly quickly (by my slow standards) and without necessarily thinking too much about future submission, with a view to improving skills and experimenting with viewpoints, styles, genres, and such. Essentially as discussed on a recent Writing Excuses podcast.
Next week, specifically, I’m hoping to progress a short science fiction story with the working title of Good Wolf Bad Wolf. It’s space colony SF looking at the exact moment someone decides to resist a cosy kind of oppression.
What is inspiring you at the moment?
I’m at the start of my final semester of a BA(sociology/criminology), and that inevitably involves a lot of academic reading on what makes people and societies tick. That’s where a lot of my inspiration is presently coming from. When reading about subjectively strange social phenomena, it’s hard not to stop and think, “Hey… what if you wrapped that behaviour around a world? A person? A well-resourced villain?”
What part of your project are you trying to avoid?
The writing. I am avoiding the writing. The, you know, crucial bit. Well, I’m not avoiding it, really, or even genuinely reluctant to engage with it. But the aforementioned study is requiring a lot of my attention as the first round of assessment approaches, and that creates a powerful pressure to enclose my writing time to the service of my study time.
Yet… I know it’s also excuse making. I know perfectly well I can devote an hour per day to writing without impacting study, and that’s enough for progress. Given that my confidence is a bit low at the moment, and I’m finding writing unfamiliar things a bit difficult and awkward, I suspect my subconscious is trying to nudge me towards easier pastures. And I’m not having it!
You can’t swing an antique typewriter on the Internet without hitting a writer giving advice to their younger self.
But it’s not a purely pointless cliche. Writing is a skill-set as much as it is a Mysterious Talent Breathed Into Our Ears By Angels. Stick with it and you learn. What you learn is idiosyncratic but might be of use to younger writers who are stumbling in ways similar to your own hilarious youthful pratfalls.
Heck, reflecting on what you think you might have learned can actually be the moment you learn it.
Writers digest considered it an activity worth putting into a writing exercise.
So, without further ado, seven things I’d tell younger self if I met him and he let me get a word in edgeways…
Don’t wait.Second post on this blog pretty much explains this one. If you love writing, prioritize it. I chose a more “practical” route, and it vanished like a soap bubble.
Write a little every day. Don’t tell yourself you’ll put off writing until you have “enough time” to devote to it. You’ll never have much more time to write than you do right now. And you need the ongoing routine and practice to improve. So write even, a little, as often as you can.
Finish things. Again, it’s how you learn. I used to abandon a story whenever it went awry. Took me ages to learn I was mucking up my starts because I hardly ever saw them in the context of a completed story where it was more obvious that I was generally starting stories too early.
Perfect is for saps. I say “awry,” but I used to abandon stories because I knew I couldn’t make them perfect. I used to not submit stories because I knew they weren’t perfect. “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” You’re as good as you are, and you’ll get better if you don’t give up for want of perfection.
Don’t worry about rules.Patricia Wrede says this best on her Six Impossible Things blog.
Realize that doubt is just weather. God I’ve struggled with self doubt. Given up on writing. Given up on individual stories. I’ve gone back to stories that wracked me with so much doubt that I pitched them into the bin, and found stuff in them that was so good it surprised me. Self doubt isn’t truth: it’s weather. It will pass. Wait it out.
Mind your health. I didn’t. But writers aren’t disembodied brains, and you will eventually sabotage everything you do if you neglect your physical well-being.
In an earlier post, I used Goffman’s idea that we present ourselves differently to different audiences to suggest that characters (and people) will have a bunch of different roles and each of those roles make them act in specific ways in specific circumstances. Identity theory takes that a little bit further.
Cooley and the Looking-Glass Self
Before identity theory there was Charles Cooley and his looking-glass self.
Cooley felt that who a person was emerged from a reflective process of imagining how society saw them and feeling good or bad about it (Serpe & Stryker, 2011, p. 227).
How this impacts behaviour can be seen in Shakespeare’s magnificent Shylock, who says to those who have treated him with the contempt due an usurer, “Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a cause; But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.” Alternatively, someone who takes pride in thinking they are known for their good works, may often be kind.
Cooley believed that how much a person or group’s perception of us contributed to who we were and how we acted depended on how significant they were to us. If we have no ties to society, if we think society doesn’t want a bar of us, we’re less likely to change our ways to please them. If we believe our wife thinks we’re fat, maybe we’ll cut down on pizza (maybe).
Identity Theory
In identity theory, Sheldon Stryker put forward a way to understand how our relationship to society makes us act differently from the next person (Serpe & Stryker, 2011, p.233).
Why do I malinger in the break room while you do all the work? Why does she fight for worker rights while he fires ten percent of his workforce just before Christmas?
One answer is we’re none of us just a single reflection in Cooley’s looking-glass. Our “self” has as many identities as we have discrete social groups with whom we have a relationship, and each of those social groups sees us in a particular way and has particular expectations which we’ll either comply with or resist (Serpe & Stryker, 2011, p. 233). Depending on who we’re with, our identity might be Parent, Child, Worker, Sibling, Tough Guy, People Pleaser, or countless others. We contain multitudes.
Which identity pops up under what circumstances depends on the identity’s salience—its importance and relevance—in that situation (Serpe & Stryker, 2011, p. 233). It’s a no brainer that at work your Worker identity will have salience. But if you’re unexpectedly bullied at work maybe it will trigger your Tough Guy identity to salience (or your inner Child).
Stryker suggest three related factors shaping identity salience and behaviour(Serpe & Stryker, 2011, p. 234):
Commitment
Identity
Role choice
Commitment describes how powerfully your relationship with a social group compels you to act in a particular identity or role, identity is the pattern of behaviours and expectations making up who you are with a particular group of people, and role choice is a set of relevant behaviours (Serpe & Stryker, 2011, pp. 233-234)
Studies have shown that strong social ties to a group will increase the salience of identities associated with that group and likewise the time and energy spent performing associated roles (Serpe & Stryker, 2011, p.234). That is, we most often behave in ways consistent with the expectations of the people who are most important to us.
TL;DR
Just to quickly summarise:
Individuals are a mass of identities shaped by their social relationship.
Our identities come with a whole set of expectations about who we are and what we’ll do.
Which identity has salience in a particular moment is rooted in how numerous and strong our ties are to the social group associated with that identity.
Writing and Identity Theory
Characterization of Heroes
Your character motivations, then, will come down to the clearly definable groups of social relationships in their lives and the relative strength of their ties to those groups.
As a hero, chances are most of their social groups will have expectations of fairly healthy and positive behaviour from them, and that will inform the range of identities making up the hero’s self, and which of those identities might have the greatest salience in a scene or even across a large part of the plot.
If their identity as Husband, Son, Churchgoer, Citizen, all come with expectations of civic responsibility, then powerful identity salience might motivate the character to fight their city’s corruption throughout a long book. At the same time, maybe their childhood friendship with the chief figures in the corruption makes for scenes in which the identity of Friend gains salience, and motivates them to give someone a second chance who doesn’t deserve one.
From this example it’s clear that conflicting commitments and identities are great drivers of story conflict, internal and external.
Identity theory also provides an approach to plotting out a character arc. Changing your character between the beginning and end of your book can be seen as reducing the salience of one or more of their original identities and increasing the salience of one or more of their other identities. Friend to Cop, say, in the example above.
And that can be achieved by allowing events to weaken or strengthen their ties to the relevant social group. Betrayal by their corrupt friend weakens ties to friendships from the old neighbourhood. The travails of fighting corruption together strengthens ties to honest cop colleagues. Identities shift and propel the character arc with them.
An Example: The West Wing and President Jed Bartlet
My favourite example of all this is probably the character of President Jed Bartlet from television’s The West Wing.
His identities are clearly defined:
President, in relation to the people of the United States.
Husband and father, in relation to his family.
Friend, in relation to a great many people who are dear to him.
Good Roman Catholic, in relation to the Church, God, and other Christians.
Sufferer of Illness, in relation to, variously, the medical profession, his family and friends, the people, and other politicians.
As great as the salience of the President identity is, we’re shown how utterly it crumbles before the salience of family when his daughter is kidnapped. In the course of the series, we see the slow rise of the salience of his illness, and the pain that comes as it conflicts with many of his other identities.
And we’re given the superb masterwork episode Two Cathedrals, in which his identities combine and clash to create perfection. Death of a close friend brings friendship to the highest salience, and the majesty of his identity as President, his moral authority as Good Roman Catholic, and his knowledge as a Scholar all manifest. In a cathedral, God’s own house, in English and in the old language of priestly authority, the President of the United States berates God as a “feckless thug” and it is unforgettable.
It’s proof that the interplay of commitment, identity, and role choice can breath electric life into a character’s motivations.
Reference
Serpe, R., & Stryker, S. (2011). The symbolic interactionist perspective and identity theory. In S. Schwartz, K. Luyckz, & V. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of identity theory and research (pp. 225-248). New York: Springer.
After a long and tiring day of shoving information into my head and pulling essay out (i.e. today), only an evening curled up with US reality cooking show Top Chef will do. I’m up to season 13, so I’m clearly too committed to deflect by claiming it’s a guilty secret.
Still, I figure I can frame it as sociological. Seriously, those chefs are usually in full impression management mode. “I’m great. My food is great. Game face. Got this. Kick arse…” usually followed by them plating burned slime that makes the judges gag.
And, if I’m making delusional excuses, all that conflict’s gotta be material for characterization.
But if I’m truthful, I’m just a lapsed semi-demi-hemi-foodie who thinks Top Chef comes up with the most cunning challenges of the cooking competitions. Also, I want to spend the night without a single thought in my head…
In a weird sense, sociology sees everyone as having a slight whiff of fictionality. Which is great, because as sociologists diligently research to understand human character they teach us about who our genuinely fictional characters can be.
Erving Goffman, a foundational sociologist, wrote that behaviours in daily life have a performative character. We are social actors, perpetually onstage, presenting carefully constructed identities to multiple audiences as we perform in the many roles of our daily life (Marwick & Boyd, 2010, p. 123).
As a rule, our performances are designed to persuade—we seek to create a particular impression so we can influence the situation (Goffman, 1959). Bedside manner, for example, is how someone in a medical role persuades a patient to be calm and accept treatment. Or a group of parents may compete in various ways to persuade each other that they are good (or even the best) parents.
This makes us all sound fearsomely inauthentic, yet it’s also just common sense. In your role as a parent scolding a misbehaving child you’re going to act (hopefully) very differently than you do in your role as a friend, four drinks into a night on the town. This is a key idea of situationist theory: that your behaviour arises from context and not some implicit mental characteristic (Marwick & Boyd, 2010, p. 115).
Goffman (1959) adds to this the interesting idea that a role and its associated performance can be triggered by a situation which merely resembles the one where that role is usually most relevant. That is, if you’re a parent and you encounter an adult who is less powerful than you and seems to need protection, your parental role may pop up like a nurturing jack-in-the-box.
And what is the use of this in writing?
Well, my writing software offers a template for character development that includes the question, “What is the character’s role in the story?”
Following Goffman, it seems more useful to ask, “What are the characters roles in the story?” No one has just one role. Your character might be the antagonist, but won’t be just a villain. When not busy putting your protagonist’s feet to the fire, they’ll be someone’s friend, or parent, or business partner, or student, or all of them and more, and each role will bring out different kinds of behaviour.
A character who is determined and ruthless, for example, might be a total villain when preventing the hero from stopping their evil plan, but an admirably fierce defender if someone threatens their children. Alternatively, maybe their will to kill the hero falls apart when the hero’s helplessness invokes their parental role.
In planning a scene, it might be useful to ask:
What role will the situation provoke from each character?
What behaviours does that role bring out in them?
What are they trying to persuade their audience (the other characters) to believe or do?
What impression does that require them to create in the minds of their audience?
How do the trappings with which they’ve surrounded themselves—clothing, professional accessories, furnishings, even manners of speech—contribute to or detract from that impression?
Answering those questions may help your characters to perform in more complicated, three-dimensional ways.
(Goffman’s work on how people present themselves is a lot more substantial than I’ve covered here, so this is a subject to which I’ll likely return.)
References:
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.
Marwick, A., & Boyd, D. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114-133.
Alan Baxter’s anthology Crow Shine has recently been nominated for an 
Worlds Made of Words 