Give Them Purpose

It's somewhat tragic when people spend such loving care to build a rich character, but end up leaving them flat when they leave out the vehicle that drives them: purpose.

It probably seems ridiculous-- what would be the point of telling a story if that wasn't the FIRST thing you'd consider? For a writer, of course that would be confusing, but not all people arrive at writing first. I've talked about in my own past how I used to make pages and pages of character profiles, all supposedly for this epic story idea I had boiling up. Oo, I'm mapping where they'll go, what kind of crazy creatures they'll meet.

Only when it came down to purpose, they just didn't mesh as well as I thought they might. Precisely why I've also covered topics involved the complication of overplanning and forgetting to connect those rich yet conflicting ideas.

In many ways, we could learn from the way some mushrooms grow. At first, they spread out randomly, looking for the best sources in a comprehensive network, they send out a thin but fast moving gathering network to start. When the thin veins home in on the nutrient rich areas, they begin to concentrate on setting up shop on all of those key points and letting the smaller networks fade but not completely disappear (if a new source appears in the spread, they can detect it and spread resources to it immediately). Logically, they want to benefit from and even feed the source, so they don't just smother it but expand in as many directions as possible to, in turn, feed the source they are feeding from rather than deplete it.

So yes-- plotting is about a) spreading out to find the best ways to support the initial idea, b) locating the places to best develop it, c) keeping the web open to new possibilities and supporting details, d) continuing to build where needed, and e) feeding the ideas rather than exhausting all possibilities.

As a novice writer, one of the things that made me lose interest in a story was loss of purpose, not in my writing but for my character's sake. I ended up burning through all of the interesting points without holding back or developing the story so, once I'd removed all intrigue and mystery and conflict, they'd be left with nothing, including anything worthy of a story.

Lulls can happen in a story; they aren't unforgivable but they should reflect your intent in writing it. I'd be hard-pressed to find a story that is intentionally meant to bore anyone but it can happen, if you don't develop each part with a purpose. Does an informative section of a story have to be outright boring?

I know that 'purpose' is one of those variable words, much like 'voice' or 'style' when discussed by writers. However, when I talk about a character's purpose, it has to exist constantly. A character who comes back into the picture with no actual purpose can kill a story. It's okay if you haven't used them a while and it's okay if they don't come back if their purpose was served. They don't have to have a climactic exit, no matter how important they are in your head. You don't have to kill off characters to get rid of them. Not every exit has to be emotional-- even those can seem transparent or fall flat. A good way to ditch a stale character can even be to have them simply disappear. Maybe you can use that subplot of finding out why as a fresh lead-in to the main plot. Again, this doesn't have to be a focus, but be careful not to create intrigue if you're just going to drop it. 

One bad example for lost purpose happened in one season of The Walking Dead. My guess is that it was supposed to be an emotional or real moment for the character; even the strongest are weak and exhausted, something along those lines. Yet Rick suddenly becoming a sad sack of surrender for many, many episodes while his annoying son Carl was dragging him around with limp attempts to snap him out of it was excruciating and never quite hit the spot as anything but filler. One thing that I just can't jibe with in entertainment is any attempt to 'real-time' a situation. You're not really going to teach anyone how excruciating depression is by big-brothering it in entertainment. I've seen it done rather well across many forms of entertainment by homing in on very key points, showing how it affects others, etc. so you need never resort to rolling it out like that. The whole tedium of it reeked of losing the purpose of the show, not truly displaying a character that lost their purpose. In a world that constantly penalizes people for one misstep in the struggle for survival, Rick got a big fat fucking Mary Sue pass there.

Honestly, I never even made it to the end of the whole Negan debacle before I stopped watching. Killing off Glenn and Abraham was cheap enough. As much as I love Jeffrey Dean Morgan, I was just fucking tired of the badder than the last bad guy crap. It's the Sailor Moon/Dragon Ball formulaic rinse/repeat cycle that I avoid like the plague. Michonne was one of those characters that kept me hanging on longer than I should have, but even she was really running out of steam.

(I might have a purpose to this post, but don't count on it.)

In any case, purpose is one of those things you can't just keep in your peripherals. You really have to kept a solid eye on it. One reason I plan is because there is always the temptation to gush about the flow of great ideas while writing and I realize that the slow-burn (but not TOO slow) is worth detaching for. Unless you've crafted some masterful way to swap out main characters that are burning out with shiny new ones, then you must keep them relevant. You must leave some reason for conflict, some mystery to explore, some bait to lure them on.

Moving onto the next character color-combo piece, we have Pierait, whose entire point is Purpose.

While this very pale blue might also work for Belias's eyes, this is one I picked for Pierait's 'powder blue' hair. I wasn't going for some anime-blue but a subtle one that still differentiates from just a blue tinted platinum. This may be more of a highlight color were I to paint it, but if I had to choose a 'blue' that better represents the basic feeling I was going for, this is it. Clean slate, pure, even a sort of void on a moral spectrum. 

Now his eyes, no less a struggle to choose, needed a warm yet sunny quality. Yellows are tough to avoid being high-contrast bright without ending up more brown than yellow, but I liked this golden yet lemony yellow for it. It was intentional that I went with a reversal on what you'd find to be colors for hair and eyes. Blonde eyes/ blue hair? But then Pierait is opposite of what you'd expect from a human. This combination was actually not picked to be visually complementary as I did with my other choices. Again, this goes to the conflict of the character himself. His sort even had a history of being considered abominations so it's only fitting that his colors break all of the usual rules.

His 'people' are called the Soulless, although it is not a genetic condition. Due to an imbalance in the ways souls are distributed, some human are born without souls, which also leaves them empty containers when it comes to free will or Purpose. They seem to share the trait of apathy as children, although it's not quite that simple. They are capable of learning, but don't retain emotional baggage nor display strong emotions at all. It is akin to a functional state of autopilot.

Their state of being is dangerous and it was quickly learned that they must be granted a Purpose through a ritual in their teenage years or their deaths will release a fearsome deadly creature known as a Fury, that will leaves chaos and death in its wake. Whatever Purpose they are given must be one that can be immediately and constantly fulfilled, so it is more like a job assignment that makes their life one of contribution. Dying with a fulfilled Purpose is peaceful and without consequence. 

At one point, fear caused Soulless children to be killed on sight. If they never reached the age where they needed a Purpose, then they would never risk becoming Furies.

Where does this leave Pierait? His mother, a troubled young woman, decided to take matters into her own hands and go against convention. She discovers how to give her son a Purpose, but an impossible one: to acquire a soul. It's never been done and if his Purpose is discovered, he would be banished to where Furies flee and left to die. It's a lonely and isolated existence, but a Purpose is a Purpose.

(Next up, I'll have Lyria ready for you, an ordinary girl with an extraordinary gift.)

Speaking of purpose, what gives your characters purpose? Is your favorite current purpose the main plot itself or a fun subplot? My current WIP involves a golem, a blocked tunnel and a cryptic mystery while on the way to looking for dragons. All a subplot at the moment, but one I'm enjoying. Share yours below!

The Distance and the Intimacy: The Love Affair with Writing

We're all consumers before we are creators, no matter how much our parents/caregivers might have insisted the massive dumps in our diapers were a sight to behold. Learning faces through the blur of first sight, hearing every strange noise to prickle the ear-- assuming we're born with all senses intact, that is. (Perhaps this is why some deprivation of sense is fascinating to me, but I'll get to that.)

What do I mean by distance and intimacy? Well, not all of us really know that our 'passions' have longevity so there's a time issue involved. Sometimes, and for long periods of time, we may break up with our passions, cheat on them, all the while pining for them. Sometimes a particularly sensitive piece creates a different phenomenon of distance/intimacy. Sometimes we need to blubber and roll in the juices and sometimes we need to be the harsh logical judge of it. We get through the passion parts and then poke, edit, play, indulge, reject, accept-- it's 12 stages of grief and euphoria, but we each fill in the blanks. I've said before-- ebb and flow and some of the best writing I've seen uses the push and pull of development, to align with the very real state of many struggles. Something the characters move on their motivations, sometimes things have to happen to them. Do we take the omniscient look and hash it out in great detail or do we limit it to experience the spotty details alongside the character? Neither one is king when it comes to depth. From any perspective, we can get uncomfortably close or coldly analytical.

There are a lot of aspects to me, for one, that people try to explain. It's especially trendy these days to assume to speak for others, even when the subject is more than capable. I suppose you could narrow down my attitudes to trauma, whether it be my sexuality, my draw towards art and writing, my lifestyle. You could correlate things simply, but there's more to that history than I will ever feel comfortable writing or explaining, especially when it pertains to the 'stressors' outside of myself, the people that did and still can terrorize me if I step over the line. I will not give them that piece of fame, to ride on whatever failures or successes I have in my life with association. If you have bogeymen in your life, give them to your fictions. A memoir is the thing to write if you outlive them all.

That being said, there are 'other' things. Things I stopped trying to understand, things I use and learn to master as much as possible and I don't aim to be mysterious with those so I'll describe this the best I can without using labels that might give you false impressions.

I've struggled with neuropathic issues from a very early age. For no apparent reason or stressor, I've temporary lost my sight or hearing or sense of touch, or had them 'heightened' to unbearable and painful levels. No amount of searching ever gave me answers and in most cases, I was too afraid to tell. I had some wonderful teachers along the way that saw me melting down in my confusion and helped me, no questions, no words. Sometimes it was just a space to cry in their office, sometimes it was me interrupting to go to the bathroom. The counselor, for some reason, really liked me, even gave me her home phone number and told me to call if I needed it, made sure all my teachers knew that I could leave class any time I needed to (on days I bothered to show up, I didn't leave class at all-- kind of an all-or-nothing when it comes to showing up). It's not that these people thought I was suicidal, but looking back, I think they knew my 'other' better than books or doctors had any grasp of back then. They also saw my potential. Another thing I couldn't see without hindsight, but learned to trust some people when they said good things about me.

Because I don't see what's in front of me or, rather, rarely do. I see things more clearly looking back, sometimes beating myself up for how stupid or ineffective I was in the moment. I became adept at trying to recreate the person I wanted to be, to try to learn to be a person that can see the moment or even a little ahead, learn to anticipate the world around me. Somewhere in the invention of myself, I became a storyteller. I never saw a place for THAT (I never could get the taste for lying) in my life, but there was a pocket I'd stumbled on where worlds did wait. Despite all the characters and events happening over 'there', it could still be a lonely place, not a place of inside jokes and the things I could talk about with others who weren't familiar. So I wanted to find ways to show people. I was already building those places, learning to express through art and writing what I struggled to say.

An honest place, one I have trouble lying about too. It's not a place that can actually speak for my desires, doubts or fears, just a gathering ground from my journey in this world. And I don't have these fascinating stories of world travel, but I can simulate it through the means that I have. It's maddening, a bloom of chaos and beauty. It can be safe and warm or frigid and frightening. It affects moods that people can't see the reason for, and sometimes I don't even know why I feel or act the way I do. It can be a real bastard trying to recreate it for the sharing. Yeah, sometimes I thought about giving up because creation and using it to funnel what I don't really understand is never a safe place. It's erratic and it's not structured. Because of that, writing...

Writing holds structure or none at all. The only demand is what you intend for it. I wrote stories for school, but then I wrote stories in school when I was supposed to be doing something else. Just little stories. 'Born to Play Video Games' and 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Kitties'... (I loved the Turtles, but the idea of drawing humanoid cats was just so appealing.) I wrote poems when I fell in love with rhythm and rhyme. It was music and color in words alone. Alongside this passion, always came the impulse and whimsy of 'doodling'. I love that word too, doodling. So often it was said to me in an attempt to belittle it or guilt me for wasting time, but doodling and noodling about-- those things brought me closer to a feeling of rightness. Doodling has brought me closer to some of the most amazing people in my life-- my best friends, family, and my friend's children especially. No matter how much adulting pressures my drawing to be 'more', kids always give me this surreal sense of expertise I forget to see sometimes. They're not comparing me to 'masters' or ticking off all they've liked better; they're capable of just loving it for what it is. (Not unique to kids, by the way-- my best friends always seem to lift me up like this too. Also people who are terrible at lying, but are also likely to clam up if they don't want to hurt my feelings either.)

It's hard to say whether I can make my characters and worlds resonate the same way they do with me. I'm not someone who can see the hook, the blurb, the simplification of the big picture. My love affair with writing and creating is selfish but it wants to be generous. It can feel superficial, it can feel overly deep. Courageous and cowardly. I can't lie, but sometimes I can omit or gloss over, defense mechanisms for survival and a habit I try to break.

I write because... it's too big to contain. Because otherwise it can leak out where I don't want it to. Just like my neuropathic struggles, it's not about the cure, but working with the intuitive treatment of it. Writing is often a sensitive organism, sometimes needing compassion, sometimes needing tough love. Raising kids-- much the same. You treat every kid the same and they lose sight of what could motivate them to improve or change. I don't discipline my nephews the same, nor reward them the same and when they notice this, I explain the circumstances, let them see the logic (the punishment fits the crime and so on). Almost always, a punishment or a reward merits a discussion, but there is also a lot of time for play, contemplation, or things being what they will be. I never wanted to be a parent, but like most labels, it's not important. These little guys grew on me and the one thing I want to give them are tools to maneuver through an unfair, unsympathetic, confusing world.

I write because it's not an exaggeration to say they saved me. I call them my little heroes. I knew it would never be fair for a human being to inherit my issues, but I did need 'new life' to remind me of the one the world tried to beat out of me. I did find myself and it wasn't just through me. It was all the things they helped me see-- family/friends, writing, drawing, music. I didn't need to 'have kids' to learn to look ahead. I just needed to open myself to the 'other' things.