Conventionalisms, commercialisms, standardisms, stereotypes, symbols, icons, coathooks to hang ideas and storylines on ... who/what are the unexamined characters, and how else might they serve the story?
To start with an odd bit, even if you don't remember or never saw Danny Kaye's classic Hans Christian Anderson film, you may be familiar with the Inchworm (lyrics start at 0:57) and Ugly Duckling songs in it from other contexts. (Disclaimer: I respect and appreciate Danny Kaye beyond measure — this bit is only about the songs themselves.)
The inchworm's slow, methodical pace is all we're told of it, so we easily buy the cheap shot that this little character is wastefully oblivious to what truly matters (and implying that inchworm characters/people don't matter, either). We're likely oblivious to the covert message to judge by appearances. Yet, from inchworm perspective, it may be appreciating marigolds more profoundly than anyone/anything else ever can.
In comparison, the Ugly Duckling is granted great potential just aching to happen, and we embrace the overt message to not judge by appearances, that even the least of us matters.
Exterior observation manipulates/persuades us to not identify with the inchworm, so we're comfortable to consider it and what it seems to represent as being in the wrong, so to speak. Emotional engagement persuades us to identify with the duckling, on the other hand; so, if the Duckling is in the right, then so are we, the readers/listeners/viewers.
The film needed elevation of the values of individuality, unconventionality, creativity, and future potential (in an era when these qualities were not really held in high esteem for ordinary people to have). And, of course, an elevation stands out more by discredit of its apparent opposite. The conflict in the covert messages is left to the reader/viewer to resolve.
Both these characters are the coathook type: useful to represent an idea or provide a turning point needed by the plot. Although memorable, they're immediately dispensable, having served their overt and covert plot purposes. (The extent to which covert purposes exist is often unconscious and automatic on the writer's part, which is what allows later criticism to identify characteristics —including prejudices, of course— of a given era in the art the era produced.)
Equally memorable but tenacious and indispensible are Shakespeare's Falstaff and Cervantes' Sancho Panza, upstaging the stars at every opportunity and outliving original design. Yet even when characters originated for function don't promptly morph into star material, their usefulness can be considerable. Somewhere, between the extremes of star territory and the dress-extra chorus line, lies the domain of second-banana antagonists, mentors, sidekicks, "love interests"... and just below them, barely above the faceless crowd, the haunt of the unsung, indispensable third banana: the bit-part utility-player, character actor, support staff. Where would Little Red Riding Hood be without Grandma? Who would sign Superman's paycheck if not Perry White? (It'd be another editor-in-chief, of course, but by definition equally irascible and demanding, never just blending into the wallpaper.)
Characters like these may rise and fall up and down the ranks, sometimes on the writer's intuitive auto-pilot, sometimes as the writer intentionally chooses. Consider Diana Gabaldon's Outlander predicament:
When Gabaldon was invited to write a short story for the 1998 British anthology Past Poisons: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology of Historical Crime, she was interested in the challenge of writing a shorter work but hesitant to use any of the main characters from the Outlander series for fear of creating "a stumbling block in the growth of the next novel. "... The Lord Grey character came to mind...
"Lord John Grey is an important character in the Outlander series, but he isn’t onstage all the time. And when he isn’t … well, plainly he’s off leading his life and having adventures elsewhere, and I could write about any of those adventures without causing complications for future novels. Beyond that obvious advantage, Lord John is a fascinating character. He’s what I call a 'mushroom' — one of those unplanned people who pops up out of nowhere and walks off with any scene he’s in — and he talks to me easily (and wittily)."[Lord John is] a gay man, in a time when to be homosexual was a capital offense, and [he] has more than most to lose by discovery. He belongs to a noble family, he’s an officer in His Majesty’s Army, and loves both his family and his regiment; to have his private life discovered would damage — if not destroy — both. Consequently, he lives constantly with conflict, which makes him both deeply entertaining and easy to write about."
...the character has been called "one of the most complex and interesting" of the hundreds ...in Gabaldon's Outlander novels... the Lord John spin-off series currently consists of five novellas and three novels...
[Partial source:
The Lady Killers blog series by published authors, mostly women, on writing mystery/crime/etc fiction. Recent months focus on realism problems in depicting violence present and past; ghosts, goosebumps, gunfights, is writing hard, prejudices and stereotypes. Really
neat ol'fashion typewriter illo down at the Nov.19 "Art of Revision" article!
:) ]
Is Lord John Grey a character or what? What he is, besides, is an added string to the author's bow, a working vacation when writing Clair and Jamie grows tedious, a supplemental income stream, a draw for a wider readership than the more conventional characters and genres of Gabaldon's writing might bring, a leavening for "heavy pastry"(h/t G. Heyer) that breathes oxygen into Gabaldon's universe.
Another good example (more accurately, two) comes from Barbara Hambly's New Orleans-based Benjamin January mysteries, their bedrock the French-Creole plaçage system by which a white man legally contracts with a woman of color to be his permanent, exclusive mistress, in exchange for compensations such as his respectable financial support of her household (where he visits at his pleasure) and of children of the relationship, her and their manumission, their home free and clear, etc. January (a skilled musician and surgeon, drastically underemployed because he is black) and his half-sister, Dominique, are the grown children of a placée. And Dominique is the placée of Henri, a wealthy and amiable sugar planter ... who contracts marriage to the even wealthier, beautiful, ice-hearted Chloe, in the sixth book in the series.
Mere cardboard melodrama as backdrop? Well, let's see: January's hoped-for sweetheart —who earns her living translating Greek and Latin texts for white educators and scholars— needs to wear spectacles ... and so does the fair✱ Chloe — enormously thick-lensed ones. For that matter, so does Henri! This is the 1830s, mind you. So, hmmm, we begin to sense that Henri and Chloe are no stock characters from general casting. By page 283, certainty. By book twelve, they are in frantic search for a missing friend and anxious to pay January —who's on his last pennies with a family needing his support— to share a dangerous journey to Washington D.C. in the guise of their slave, because of his investigative/diagnostic skills as developed over the preceding eleven-book chronology.
In the first book of this series, the character of Henri was a bit player, and Chloe not yet a twinkle in Hambly's eye. Yet as the one and then the other arrive upon each scene, speak their lines, and never bump into the furniture unless the story calls for it, their potential grows. Book by book, their roles expand to fulfill that potential, sans cardboard and stereotype.
As characters rise from levels of pawns, placeholders, plot-pointers, spear-carriers and whatnot, they may gain humanity. At the same time, no characters at any level are immune to traits of the symbolic, innately-accepted conventionalism (e.g., rare is the truly ugly hero and even rarer the heroine), standardism (the side-kick is kickable and always forgives ... except when the plot needs otherwise), commercialism (cowboys and Clauses sell products), and stereotypic, unless the writer
chooses to redact those traits, because a writer's imagination is as influenced by culture as is conventional/standard/commercial/stereotypical character portrayal.
We are in a season of extremely commercial character images, some genuinely rooted in ancient heritages, others more recently invented or co-opted, if firmly anchored in American tradition by now. Parodies abound ("Grandpa Got Run Over by A Reindeer") because they're rebellious fun to play around with, and that hints at how constrained these rigidities can make us feel. So tonight's challenges experiment with three-dimensional possibilities in these or other stock/ conventional/ utility characters:
Challenge Option #1: From among your own casts of characters, including your versions of the saga of Callow Youth & Stout Companion if you wish, find a third-banana actor or two (or more) who sometimes steal the limelight, and turn her/him/them loose to meander or romp outside the original context and constraints, through the wider landscapes of your imagination. Write as many or as few paragraphs, scenes, or incidents as you prefer.
Challenge Option #2: From highly commercialized holidays or over-used story themes, liberate from that conventional context one standardized character or more, in any combination, and give them/him/her a new environment with room for the character[s] to expand to fuller dimensions. Extreme examples: a cherry tree (Washington's Birthday) and an Easter bunny team up to initiate an eco-diverse philosophy in Johnny Appleseed's backstory; or steal a Caterpillar® and a mothballed space shuttle fueled with Alice's shrink me drink to terraform Wonderland; or take up sword and buckler to rally the public library's books, magazines, dvds, newspapers and computers in fighting off a government shut-down.
Challenge Option #3: From any iconic or over-quoted book, film, television program, or etc, rewrite a scene making one or more stereotypic, symbolic, two-dimensional minor character[s] become three-dimensional, and the original star characters become the bit-part utility players.
Write On! will be a regular weekly diary until it isn't. For the winter, the Thursday timeslot has changed to 7 pm Eastkost (4 pm Pacific) and various kosaks are diarying in rotation with our fearless leader SensibleShoes.
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Marginal note: my computer has been freezing up very frequently lately (even 'tho I live 3,400 ft below the snow line) especially when I'm in DK, and especially around 5pm or 5:30 to 6 or 7. Rebooting usually does no good for a couple of hours. So, if I'm not here or I vanish, that'll be why. I'll return as the fates allow.