On Writing: Empathy

It was, I suppose, inevitable that when Glenn Beck “wrote” a novel the internet would quickly find a way to pick it apart.  There is a significant portion of the population that’s fascinated about what would be in such a book but doesn’t want to read it.  That’s why there’s Overton Windex.

I’ve been reading it lately.  Not surprisingly I’ve found myself comparing it to the ur-long-form-blog-based literary criticism series, Slacktivist’s Left Behind Fridays/Trib Force Fridays/Mondays/Tuesdays.  Overton Windex comes up a bit short, if I’m perfectly honest.  But that’s okay.  Not everyone can spend the better part of a decade deconstructing a book a terrible paragraph and worse exegesis at a time.

Honestly, I don’t think anything will ever approach Fred’s take on Left Behind.  For one thing, I doubt there are many people in the world who combine the intelligence, humor, and patience Fred has displayed time and again in his deconstruction.  For another, there aren’t too many things in the world that will combine the simple, magic ingredient that the Left Behind series has.  Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have made a complete and total mockery of something that Fred loves: Christianity.  But in completely ruining Christianity, they have also made a mockery of something else Fred loves: people.  Because there are no people in Left Behind.  There are only ciphers of what LaHaye and Jenkins want their audience to hear in their endless, stupid sermonizing.

In channeling his outrage at L&J, Fred manages to bring out his appreciation for the thing being ruined.  It’s, in a word, endearing.[1]

This is something I understand.  It’s why I do AtF, too.  Bill Cooper has made a mockery of something I love.  It pisses me off.  But even at that I can’t get to Fred’s level.  Bill Cooper has made a mockery of history, which I find it necessary to correct.  Bill Cooper has also made a mockery of Christianity, but I don’t find it necessary to correct that. I believe a literal interpretation of the Bible is asinine.  I believe that it’s possible to be a Christian and not believe that the Bible has to be taken as a 100% accurate historical document.  But I also know Christians who live now – right now, in 2010 – who willfully disregard science in order to believe a book of bronze-age mythology.  Bill Cooper is just the natural result of willful ignorance on the part of a certain subset of believers.  I find it difficult to get worked up over that simple fact.

Still, it’s hard to read Overton Windex and Left Behind Fridays without seeing certain similarities between the books.  This shouldn’t be a surprise.  In both cases the books aren’t actually fiction in the minds of their authors.  They tell the story of the coming future that can be seen by those who possess the gnosis of the world behind the world.

To the rest of us, though, such books are a relief.  They confirm that, rather than secret knowledge of the world, their authors have no actual connection to the world.  So many things must happen that are plainly inconceivable that we can relax.  There is no such place as Tim LaHaye’s or Glenn Beck’s world.  There are no such people as occupy those places.

The sins of the writers in question are apparent.  Their plot amounts to a set of events that must happen to drive the articulation of the story.  Their characters amount to a collection of mouthpieces who say the things and do the deeds that are necessary to convince the audience that they know are standing right over their shoulder that shit is, indeed, about to get real.  Their world, then, amounts to nothing more than an amalgamation of contrived plaster sets filled with cardboard mouthpieces that spew exposition at each other.

It’s little wonder that most of the space in the plot is wasted with speeches and pointless description of the logistics of transport.  There is no more compact form of blatant exposition than the speech.  And there is no better way of giving the sense that the plot is going somewhere than to have the characters going somewhere (h/t to Deeky of Overton Windex for that one.  Oddly, I don’t think that particular insight ever came up in the hundreds of Left Behind posts or the thousands [millions?] of comments.  But it’s brilliant and insightful).

This has gotten me thinking about world building.

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I love writing.  Really, I do.  But I also love writing about writing.  On one level I suppose it’s because it’s totally meta.  But on another, more important level, it’s because the topic of writing fascinates me.  I often want to create entire compendiums of why I created a character.  It’s something that goes beyond simple backstory and in to my own imagination as a writer.

It’s also, I think, instructive.  Because one of the hallmarks of bad writing is also one of the most glaringly obvious deficiencies for the reader: bad characterization.  This is obvious from two directions: first when the author declares a character to be really good at something or to possess a certain quality and then doesn’t ever actually show those (known as the GIRAT, for Cameron “Buck” Williams’ characterization as the “Greatest Investigative Reporter of All Time” when we never, ever hear him ask a single insightful question or file a single report.  And the only information we have of his writing ability comes from a single hackneyed comparison of saying that “to say [thing] is [this way] is like saying the Great Wall of China is long.”  Really.  Feh) and second when a non-perspective character is introduced and we don’t actually learn anything about that character.

The biggest problem, at least in my experience, with any writing is introducing characters.  It’s surprisingly hard.  It’s easy to go all GIRAT on a character.  It’s even easier to not actually describe the character well at all.  Easiest of all, though, is to just shoot out a collection of random clichés.  One of the problems with describing a character is that there is nothing an author can say in describing someone that hasn’t already been said about a thousand times.  There are only so many ways to look at a person and only so many ways to describe looking at a person that will make sense to a broad audience.

So let’s take a moment for a little exercise.  This is me:




Imagine you are meeting me for the first time.  Describe me.  What did you default to?  Hair color?  Estimated height and weight?  Relative attractiveness?  Clothing?  What I’m doing?  These are the basics.

How would your description of me change if I were wearing a White Sox t-shirt?  A three-piece suit?  At the bank?  In a bar?

How would your description of me look if you were a straight guy?  A gay guy?  A woman who found me attractive?  A woman who didn’t find me attractive?

Would it surprise you to learn that you can’t actually answer those questions in any sort of complete way?

See, in this scenario you don’t know who you are.  You need to answer a whole hell of a lot of other questions before you can figure out who you are.  Imagine a series of scenarios:

1.  You’re a middle-aged man out walking around a park with your wife and teenage children.  There’s a tent set up and a group of people are listening to someone speak.  You walk over and find me standing up and telling a story.

2.  You’re a die-hard Cubs fan.  The Cubs and White Sox are playing each other in the World Series for the first time in a century.  You walk in to a bank and see me standing there in a White Sox t-shirt.  I see your Cubs shirt and give you a thumbs-down.  You decide to start trash-talking me.

3.  You’re a thirty year-old woman who’s been dumped by your boyfriend of nearly a decade and has been moping around the house for six months.  Your friends drag you out to a swanky black tie party and you’re determined to convince them that you’ll make any further attempt on their part miserable.  You walk in, see me from across the room, forget your original plans, and smile at me.  A few minutes later I walk over and introduce myself to you.

4.  You’re a thirty year-old woman who just wants to meet some friends for a drink after work.  Everyone else is running late.  I see you and start talking to you.  You notice that my words are already slurring together.  I don’t notice that you really, really want me to go away.

Imagine that each of those situations happened to a different person.  The day after each situation you sit down with the person who met me the night before and ask for a description.  Each would describe me in a different way. Different details would come out in each case.  Person one may focus more on my stage presence and speaking voice.  Person two may focus on my wardrobe.  Person three may focus on my attractiveness, clothing, and conversational skill.  Person three may focus on my sloppiness and inability to take a hint.

Given that, for the sake of this exercise, all of these things happened, all descriptions are valid.  All are also incomplete and biased.  This is also valid.

It’s important for a writer, though, to understand these things.  It’s also important for the narrator to realize what level of description characters need.  Not everyone is equal.

Imagine you have just walked in to a room in which there are 100 people.  Describe all those people.

You don’t know where to begin, do you?  More importantly, you know that if you had walked in to a room with 100 other people you wouldn’t find it necessary to describe all the people.  You might remember ten.  Or maybe five.  Possibly just one.  And of that subset of people you’ll remember them in different ways.

There was that one guy who looked kinda like Andy Richter.  There was the tall, awkward-looking guy who nearly knocked over that short woman.  There was the gorgeous blond in the little black dress who you could describe in detail, but probably shouldn’t.  There was John from high school who you haven’t seen in years and, wow has he put on weight.  Also, there was everybody else.

Details matter.  But the bigger issue is one of empathy.  I must empathize with my character because I must understand why my character thinks the way he or she does and why my character looks at the world in one way and not another.

This is somewhat second-nature to me as a writer.  I love playing with backstory.  I love trying to figure out how characters tick.

But, then, my characters aren’t just ciphers, meant only to tell my audience what to think.

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[1]I saw a friend I only see infrequently this weekend.  She mentioned she was reading a book about religion and immediately said I’d hate it, as I hate all things religious.  I found that odd.  I don’t hate all things religious.  Far from it.  I have strongly held opinions on certain aspects of religion, but I genuinely do not intend to give off the impression that I hate religion.

I’ve been hurt by religion.  I’ve seen other people get hurt by religion.  I despise those who use religion to hurt, coerce, and control.  But I will never take the rather common Gnu Atheist position that all religion is bad.  I even try to avoid taking the position that liberal religion is just as bad as fundamentalist religion because those damn liberal religious folks just enable the fundamentalists.  I simply do not believe that’s the case, as fundamentalists have a strange tendency to hate the liberal religious folk as much as, if not more than, the non-believing folk.  I’m sure the James Dobson’s of the world wish Fred Clark were gone just as fervently as they wish PZ Myers were to disappear.

Comments

[Big A]

Oh god, why did you link me to Overton Windex, why!?

There goes my next three evenings... and my sanity.

[jessa]

I had a similar problem with Ishmael: a bare bones plot purely in service of espousing an ideology. I can't remember the ideology or what I thought of it, I was too mad at the book on account of this, and it was a long time ago. But people keep mentioning this book every once in a while like it is super amazing, which sometimes makes me worry that I'm just stupid.

[BeamStalk]

Stuff like this actually helps me with my DMing of games. It makes me want to sit down with my characters and flesh them out better. I know that most of it, the players will never see but it helps me understand the way a character will react when the players do something completely unexpected. Thanks for that.