Character Writing, and Where I Stand

I've talked a little about writing on here before, but not that much. Which is kinda weird, because, like... writing is pretty much all I do. If I'm not singing or watching TV or stressing the hell out about everything I have to do to secure a future for myself, I'm writing. And I'm thinking about it even more than that.

So I'm going to talk a little about it now, because I've realized that my character writing has gotten very much improved lately and it's really exciting for me.

See, the odd thing about my relationship with stories was this disparity between the stories I consume and the ones I create. What you'll notice about the shows and books I like is that they're all extremely character driven. Buffy is all about the Scoobies, Community is all about the study group, Artemis Fowl is all about Artemis growing up, Heroes of Olympus is all about the Seven, Merlin is all about the relationship between Merlin and Arthur. Yes, there are adventures to highlight the relationships and characters, but that's just it - the plot highlights the characters, not the other way around.

The stories I write - although, this is becoming less and less true - were not the same. The first novel I wrote, way back in sixth and seventh grade, the as-yet-unnamed fantasy story based on a game that my friends and I used to play as children, was very much plot-based, to the point where, looking back on the story now, the characters' motivations made next to no sense at all. They would simply do things because the plot demanded it.

In the next novel I wrote, which began in seventh grade and ended in eleventh grade, I began to realize just at the end that my protagonist was hardly ever actively participating in her own destiny. This is a problem that I am still trying to fix in rewriting the manuscript.

Even some of my short stories had similar themes - one of the ones I was most proud of in middle school, a story based on the song Sunny Came Home, by Shawn Colvin, had the main character act as an audience member to the real story, rather than participating in it. The story was about Sunny herself. The character through whose eyes we see the story doesn't even know Sunny.

This is pretty odd, for someone who grew up with such unforgettable teams of characters such as those who feature in the Percy Jackson novels, or the Artemis Fowl novels, which are all about choices that the characters have to make. There's a weird disparity there.

And, honestly, I think this was because for all of my stories, I focused so much on plotting it that the characters always played second fiddle. When I took a brief writing workshop in grade five, I learned a lot about plots, and how to plot stories like a mountain (a technique which I still use on occasion), and making sure that the plot flows in a logical order.

So focused was I on writing the plot that the characters involved in said plot got less and less screen time. It was as if every page I spent developing the characters was a page where the story was at a standstill. I had not yet discovered that the most I could learn about writing did not come from a workshop, but from stories that I read.

This has begun to change extremely slowly, and you can begin to see a very slow burn of a metamorphosis in the novel The Blessing of Aphrodite, from grade seven to grade eleven. But this has begun to change much more quickly and much more dramatically just recently, and I feel it's something to celebrate. Small victories, and all that.

For instance, the first chapter of the newly rewritten version of The Blessing of Aphrodite is spent not, primarily, on the arranged marriages which features so prominently in the plot, but on the relationships between Cassandra and her brothers - the good-natured but not entirely harmonious friendship between her and her step-brother Merithos, and the belligerent and, at times, downright cruel fighting for power between her and her older brother Aerius (name subject to change). In my first draft, the establishment of these relationships were both lazy and simplified (the friendship between Cassandra and Merithos was idealized and perfect, Aerius was little more than an arrogant jackass), but these characters - who are both fairly important to the plot - are only introduced in the third chapter, because they are not important to the plot right away.

The moment this changed was the moment I decided to give Aerius a redemption arc. This was not in my original plan at all, and was a spur of the moment decision based on repairing the Problem of the Week (or, the obstacle that appeared in the chapter at hand). It was a good idea, though, because it forced me to stop simplifying Aerius into Generic Arrogant Jackass, Greek Edition and begin to think about him as a person, who has been acting this way for reasons of his own, and can begin to redeem himself for different reasons, but ones equally personal.

In order for Aerius to redeem himself, I had to begin thinking about all the things necessary for him to redeem. His arrogance was important, and his general meanness. His meanness, however, stemmed from misogyny that was common to the period. But the question I had to ask myself was, "Why is Aerius a misogynist?" and the answer "Because he is a male in Ancient Greece," no longer seemed to cut it. It was too simple. Yes, that is the easy answer, and it might even be accurate, but it doesn't provide any insight in how one would begin to redeem him. Yes, his environment makes it easy for him to express this, but there is something about him personally which allows it to fit.

So I began developing Aerius's character, and his backstory, and all the things that I know about him but will never be of any consequence in the book. And then, because I did it for him, I had to do it for the other characters. Merithos has history now. Cassandra, even, has far more history than I ever gave her before. Even her step-mother has history I had never bothered to consider before. Hell, I gave so little thought to Cassandra's step-mother that I only bothered to mention that she was pregnant about halfway through the first draft. Now she has a backstory.

And now my book is becoming far more focused on the interactions of these characters, and I love this. I love how I have grown with this.

The other thing I feel is important to mention is the progress I have made in a different, less immediate project of mine. There is a story idea which has been in my head since sixth grade, but which I have never begun to actively write because A) it is impossible for me to focus on two writing projects at once, and B) I could never figure out a plot to go with the concept in my head.

The reason I mention this idea, though, is because the characters, and one character in particular, has changed dramatically simply because I began writing about them.

This story I write sometimes when I have writer's block on everything else. I never seem to have writing block on this idea because I never write it, so there's always something in my head that isn't on paper yet. Now, in the early concept of this idea, it was essentially a Harry Potter trio. The main protagonist, a headstrong male, his friend, the comic relief but loyal-to-the-end guy friend, and the know-it-all female friend. However, this has changed as I began writing the characters in various situations (with little to no context), and problems began to emerge. One of the main problems I was having, for example, was the gender of certain characters.

The concept relies heavily on identical twins. It's very important. The problem I was having, though, was two-fold: 1) I had always, for some inexplicable reason, imagined the comic sidekick as male, but his twin as female, and 2) the the gender of the villains were fairly unbalanced, with three females and one male.

I began with the second problem. I wrote a couple stories in which one character was female in one, and male in the other, and it, of course, worked far better in the original plan. What I had been worried about, though, turned out to be a non-issue - despite the one male being more power-hungry than the others, I found that the power dynamic wasn't affected by gender, but by knowledge, which the females had plenty of. There was one problem dealt with.

As for the first problem, the issue of the comic sidekick, I played with a couple of ideas. I toyed with the idea of fraternal twins being involved, but it didn't fit with the rules of the universe I had created with such concreteness. I was still having trouble with the comic sidekick and his twin for a long time, until I came up with a solution which was surprisingly simple.

The comic sidekick was transgender. He had been assigned female at birth, with his twin sister, and had transitioned to male later in life.

As soon as I thought of it, I knew it worked. It fit him. It was THE solution.

So I began to write about him, with this new knowledge in mind. And the character began to change, morphing and breaking out from his Ron-Weasley-shaped shell. He is no longer the comic-sidekick. No one, in fact, is the comic-sidekick, though they all have their moments of wit. He is much more layered now, and has developed a disposition of optimism and hopefulness and sweetness which I had never anticipated, but which I adore. And the interaction between him and the other characters has so much more nuance to it now that I know him.

I'm just very proud of the place I've come to with my character writing. It was a long time coming. And I felt it necessary to share, to celebrate my victory.

The other thing I want to say is this: the character sheets aren't necessary. I know they help some people - I have a friend who lives by those character sheets, which determine the appearance of your characters and their background and their education and any other personal information about them.

But I don't live by them. They don't help me. The only thing that really helps me to know my characters is writing about them.

That's how I discovered that Aerius deserved redemption. That's how I discovered that my version of Hades is just as insecure as he is twisted. That's how I discovered all the little habits of my characters, such as Cassandra's lip biting and Callum's inability to speak to new people without saying the word "um" in every sentence and Aerius's tendency to touch the weapon hanging at his side. I learned it from writing them.

It's fine to know the background of your character academically, and have it all written down on a sheet somewhere. But, for me at least, I don't really know any of it until I have it in action, in a story somewhere, reacting like people.

And it was only from practise like that that my character writing has come as far as it has.

So... yay! Learning to write characters like people instead of plot devices! Go me!

Academic Meta: Antigone

As opposed to my not-as-academic meta which I write on a more regular basis.

It has recently occurred to me that I work up to twelve hours on an essay for English or Literature class, and the only one who ever gets to read it is my teacher. And that's just messed up. Surely my hard work and sweat and tears deserves more than that.

So I've decided to start posting the essays I'm particularly proud of on my blog. "But they're so long!" you say. Well, the joke's on you, because my essays average at about 2000-3000 words, and my Hamilton post was 1000 words longer than that. I've written Spike meta at 6000 words, I think. Point is, I'm writing stuff like this all the time. Just not as formally, or about things as academic.

But I put just as much work and just as much heart into my academic essays, so I want to share them with the world. This is the first one I'm going to post. It's about Sophocles' Antigone, the third play in his trilogy of tragedies about the house of Oedipus (whom you may know from the titular complex popularized by Freud. I have issues with this, but I'm not going to get into it right now).

Enjoy.

The War After the War: A Battle of Principles in Antigone

Throughout history, there have been many battles and many wars fought for reasons that were perhaps not so important as the principles they stood to represent. This concept of fighting more on principle than on the actions themselves, goes back for centuries, and perhaps one of the first recorded instances of this, fictional or otherwise, is in Sophocles’ Antigone. In Antigone, the titular character buries her brother ceremonially, in the traditional belief that this will allow him access to the afterlife. This is in direct defiance to a law which the newly crowned king of Thebes, Creon, put in place, claiming that her brother had been a traitor and did not deserve such a burial. Seeing his law disobeyed, he demands justice, and sentences Antigone to death for her crime, despite many people voicing their disagreement to him. At first glance, this would appear to be a relatively simple conflict between a king and his subject about civil disobedience. But looking closer, it is evident that there is more to this story than a woman’s defiance. In fact, their argument hinges on disagreement of a much larger issue, which is the importance of the law of their gods, and whether or not Creon himself, as king, must also obey these laws. Divine law was important for these characters, and though it is possible that neither Creon nor Antigone were exclusively concerned with this matter, it is evident from the structure of the story and the general beliefs of society that Antigone is the one fighting on the correct side of this issue, and Creon is not.

            Firstly, it is necessary to understand what divine law is in order to understand what it is that Creon and Antigone are truly arguing about. Divine law is the concept that aside from earthly, man-made laws, there are also a set of laws put in place by a god or many gods which dictate not only how to live a lawful existence, but also a moral one. In slightly more recent theology, one might think of the Ten Commandments as an example of divine law, as they were allegedly codified by a divine being, the Judeo-Christian God. Within the setting of Antigone, it was not this God, but the ancient Greek gods who were being worshipped, and whose words were divine. What makes this concept potentially difficult for a modern audience is that, in recent history, divine law and earthly law have become almost synonymous. For instance, in keeping with the Judeo-Christian God’s Ten Commandments, it is against earthly law as well as divine law to kill, or to steal. However, for a citizen of ancient Greece, earthly law and divine law were not so identical, making it possible to live a lawful life without necessarily always living a moral life. This was due to the fact that much of ancient Greek divine law was inherently ritualistic, which was not enforced by earthly laws (Le Bel). The most obvious example of this is the very thing which Creon and Antigone are fighting over, which is the question of how important it is to bury the dead. From a theological point of view, it was necessary to ensure passage to the afterlife, but from a purely mortal point of view, it was not. Another example is the more extreme case of human sacrifice. This features in a different series of plays written around the same time as Antigone, Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. In the first installment of The Oresteia, Agamemnon is punished for sacrificing his daughter to the gods, a punishment presumably orchestrated by the gods themselves for his despicable act (Talukdar). This is in contrast with the fact that there were actually no earthly laws preventing Agamemnon from doing such a thing – what he did was, at the time, lawful. However, it was also indisputably immoral, even in ancient Greece. Therefore, it is with the knowledge of these regulatory discrepancies that one must regard the conflict which Sophocles brings to light in Antigone, the principle which both Creon and Antigone are willing to die – or kill – over: the question, “Is it enough to live lawfully if one does not live morally?” or, put another way, “Does the unspoken, yet understood, law of the gods hold precedent over a law clearly codified by an earthly authority?”

            That being said, it is important to realize that neither Antigone nor Creon were driven entirely by the strength of their conviction on this issue when they acted. To understand the complexity of their motivations, one must first take into account the nature of the relationship between these two characters. Antigone and Creon are not strangers; in fact, it was Creon who enacted the exile of Antigone’s father, Oedipus. It was also Creon who, later, made to kidnap Antigone and her sister when Oedipus would not return to Thebes. With this in mind, there develops a new layer entirely to the conflict when Antigone hears of Creon’s law forbidding people from burying her brother. To Antigone, this is a move which, as well as dishonouring one of her own, also directly targets her and her sister, who, traditionally, would have been the ones most likely to bury one of their family with the proper ceremonial rites. Antigone says, “Such I hear is the martial law our good Creon lays down for you and me – yes, me, I tell you – and he’s coming here to alert the uninformed in no uncertain terms, and he won’t treat the matter lightly,” (Sophocles 37-41). Antigone feels that this law was not created to control Thebes, but to control her, which she does not take kindly to. It appears to her as though Creon has victimized her family, starting with her father, then she and her sister, and now her brother, all of whom she loves very much, and because of this history, it seems natural that she would wish to rebel against such a person. Antigone herself says, “If I had been the mother of children or if my husband died […] I’d never have taken this ordeal upon myself. […] But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to life again,” (Sophocles 995-1004).This all but confirms that Antigone is far more concerned with her family than with the principle. Similarly, Creon is also not innocent of ulterior motives. He claims that his law is based on the principle of not providing privileges to people proven to be traitors (Sophocles 222-231). This would have been unusual for the time, however, as the consequences of not being buried were so strong that generally, even ones enemies were buried with the appropriate ceremony (Retief and Cilliers). It seems probable, then, that Creon’s law had less to do with the etiquette of war and more to do with Creon’s opinion of Oedipus’s children. From Creon’s perspective, the house of Oedipus has been cursed due to Oedipus’s infamous crime, and Thebes has been paying for it with the war waged by Oedipus’s sons. Targeting Oedipus’s remaining offspring, his daughters, with such a controversial law would appear to be an effective way to remove them as potential problems immediately. This is not to say that Creon planned to murder the children of Oedipus – merely that he is an opportunist who wishes to free himself of a problem, as Oedipus and his children have, in the past, done nothing but jeopardize Creon’s various plans, which, until this point, were usually intended to be in the best interest of Thebes.

            Despite Antigone not being entirely pure in her motives, it is clear to see that it is she who must be seen as ultimately right, even if it is solely by chance of a miscalculated decision on Creon’s part rather than because she stands for justice in general. Regardless of what drove them, Creon directly disobeyed divine law, and divine law, more so than earthly law, was what kept order at the time. It is true that, not only as a subject of a king, but even more so as a woman, Antigone transgressed her rights – this is made reference to by her sister Ismene, who says, “Remember, we are women, we’re not born to contend with men. Then too, we’re underlings […] so we must submit in this, and things still worse,” (Sophocles 74-77). Nonetheless, it is Creon who overstepped further, as he did not only break a law, but a sacred law. Laws such as these were created in an attempt to unite society under a set of values, and Creon shows immense, reprehensible pride by placing his own ideas at greater importance than, essentially, common morality. There is one irrefutable fact about this situation which ultimately turns Antigone from a common criminal to a heroine – the people agree with her. This is shown when the Chorus of Thebans says, as Antigone is escorted from the palace to her death, “But now, even I would rebel against the king, I would break all bounds when I see this – I fill with tears, I cannot hold them back,” (Sophocles 895-897). The people of Thebes are sympathetic to Antigone’s plight because she held true to their common values, whereas Creon, even when told of the concerns of his subjects by his son, who outright tells him, “[…] the city mourns for this young girl,” (Sophocles 776) refuses to yield. Instead, he says, “And is Thebes about to tell me how to rule?” (Sophocles 821), showing that he does not wish to be a voice of the people. This is what makes the difference between Creon being wrong and Antigone being right – Creon defied the values of society at large, and Antigone upheld them. This makes for an interesting reversal of roles - despite their respective stations, it becomes Creon who did not know his place, while Antigone represents the people. Antigone is not a heroine because she is objectively right, but because her actions, far more than Creon's, align with the values of the people Creon rules, and is unafraid to confront him for that principle.

            Creon, for his part, seems to be either unaware of his fatal miscalculation of strategy, or too stubborn to repair it, and this is the wrong for which he is ultimately punished. In fact, when it is pointed out to Creon that the people of Thebes not only disagree with his verdict, but also that they believe the law itself to be unjust, he becomes indignant. Rather than fixing his mistake, he begins to make statements such as, “The city is the king’s – that’s the law!” (Sophocles 825), and when his son accuses him of offending justice, Creon responds, “[Is it] Wrong? To protect my royal rights?” (Sophocles 832-833). From these examples, it is plain that Creon is choosing not to believe that anything could come above the law that he created. This attitude remains even when he is told the gods themselves disagree – he replies with, “You’ll never bury that body in the grave, not even if Zeus’s eagles rip the corpse and wing their rotten pickings off to the throne of god!” (Sophocles 1151-1153). Here, he is no longer simply ignorant to the extent of the laws he has broken – he does not care. He is putting his own will above that of the gods, and this is his fatal mistake. It appears as though Creon expects to be protected by his kingship, knowing that as an authority, he is within his rights to make his own laws. But in the stories of this time period, kinghood rarely protects people if they have broken an important law of the gods. For example, in the story of Sisyphus, king of Corinth, he defied death, breaking a fundamental law of the gods – people are not meant to return from the dead. For this crime, he was severely punished, and faced an eternity of suffering (Salverda). As an alternative example, there was also the story of Tantalus, king of Sipylus, who broke the gods’ laws by bringing their food down to mortals, and like Sisyphus, was also punished eternally (Boedeker). These are fantastical stories, but at the time, it was stories like these which were integral to the beliefs of society. These are myths in which a king finds himself wholly at the mercy of the gods for not respecting the laws they put in place, and it is with the knowledge that these stories existed and were aplenty that one must realize the foolishness of Creon’s mistake. Kings before him had never been protected by virtue of their earthly authority – it appears to be pure hubris which gives Creon the impression that he could be the exception. It is for this refusal to humble himself, for his absolute certainty in his own infallibility, that Creon is punished – notably, a crueler punishment than even Oedipus received, as Oedipus ended his original ordeal with his children still intact and without blame, while Creon ends the play with both his wife and son dead, and loathing him in death. It is because Creon is punished so severely that one is certain that Creon was wrong in this argument, and Antigone was right.

            This is a complex story with many layers necessary to understanding exactly the implications of what is happening. Firstly, one must understand what exactly divine law was in ancient Greece, and that it was not as automatic as it is, arguably, in the present day. One must also realize that, though both Creon and Antigone claim to be warring about a principle, they are both also warring on the subject of something else: namely, their unforgiving opinions toward each other. This, however, does not eliminate the moral principles they represent – because Antigone represents the values of the people, she is in the right, while Creon refuses to even consider the concerns of his own subjects, an anti-democratic notion which the ancient Greeks would have abhorred, putting him firmly and relentlessly in the wrong. Therefore, despite the possibility that Antigone was doing the right thing for entirely the wrong reasons, it is still true that divine law outweighs the rights of kings, and Antigone becomes a courageous heroine of literature, while Creon, in the truest form of eternal punishment, is despised still, thousands of years later, by those who read the play. 

Endnotes

Boedeker, Deborah. "Drinking from the Sources: Tantalus, Epic and Myth."Didaskalia. Randolph College, 30 Oct. 2000. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.

Le Bel, Maurice. "Natural Law in the Greek Period." Web. 8 Mar. 2016.

Retief, F. P., and L. Cilliers. "Burial Customs, the Afterlife, and the Pollution of Death in Ancient Greece." Acta Theologica. African Journals Online. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.

Salverda, John R. "Sisyphus, the "Joseph" of Greek Myth." Academia. Academia. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.

Sophocles. “Antigone”. The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1984. Print.

Talukdar, Monideepa. "The Patriarchal Nature of Justice in The Oresteia."Southeastern Louisiana University. Southeastern Louisiana University. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.

"It's beautiful! What is it?"

Do you ever come across a work of art and you're just really blown away by the artistry of it and whatever and it really made you feel something but you have no idea what the context of it is?

Like, when I first read The Hollow Men by T.S Eliot. That is an undeniably beautiful poem, a tragic poem, one that feels heartwrenching when you're reading it. I knew this the first time I ever read it.

But upon a first reading, I didn't have the slightest clue what it was actually about.

(It's about the lost generation that came about after WWI - they were the reason for the so-called "Roaring Twenties". Sure, it seemed like everyone was having fun, except that there was no drive to do anything else.)

But it doesn't really matter, because the way the words are chosen, the artistry of the piece itself, it makes you feel what you're supposed to feel without even knowing why. And that's really impressive.

Or, maybe, when you're looking at a piece of abstract art. And it makes you feel something. You don't know why it does, but you're staring at this mess of colours someone put to a canvas and you feel something about it. It's inexplicable, but that's art.

I love that feeling. I think it's one the most magical things. Because you know that it's coming entirely from the art itself and not from sympathy about the subject.

The example that got this tangent started isn't entirely applicable in the same way, but it still kind of brings that same reaction, of, "I'm touched! Why?"

So, my DELF test is coming up. That's kind of stressful, since it's essentially the culmination of thirteen years of French Immersion, and if it doesn't go well then I might jump out a window. So to prepare me, I've been looking up all kinds of French media. Watching French movies, finding French podcasts, watching Buffy in French because why not, and listening to French music.

One of the French musicians I've been getting into is Maitre Gims. It's more pop-ish than I usually go for, but it's the kind of pop I like because it isn't all romantic and stuff (despite French being the language of romance). He flip flops between being a singer and a rapper, and I tend to stick to the ones where he's more of a singer. I was first introduced to him because one of my French teachers once used his song Zombie as a grammar exercise in class. That song is super catchy, and lyrically interesting.

So as I was looking up more of his stuff, I came across his song "J'me tire".

That's the one that made me go, "It's beautiful! What is it?"

Well, maybe beautiful isn't the right word. It's pop/hip hop, which I have a hard time defining as "beautiful," because to me that's a really loaded word to be used for something more majestic. This song wasn't majestic.

The word I'm looking for is "powerful."

Looking at the title, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. What I got, though, was a rather personal, emotional song about the artist himself, Maitre Gims (or M-Gi, as he calls himself in the song) feeling helpless.

I don't have the full context of his feelings here, and that's where the feeling of, "What is it?" comes in. But the words themselves mean a lot. Roughly translated, the chorus goes like this:

"Im pulling myself out,
Don't ask why I left without a word
Sometimes I feel my heart hardening
It's sad to say, but nothing makes me sad anymore
Let me go somewhere far from here
To keep the smile, I'll say that there's worse
If it's like that, bah, fuck the life of an artist
I know it's cliche to say I've been targeted
But I'll say it for the rhyme"

That's a super rough translation, but that's basically what it says. He also talks about going somewhere where he wouldn't need to take the mic anymore, where no one cared about his life anymore. Possibly most telling, he thanks people who support him despite his being black.

As far as I can gather, though as I've said, I have zero information on the context behind this song besides what's actually in the song, he's been the subject of racism based on his art and the kind of music he makes, to the point where he feels like his only option is give up. At least, that's the message I'm understanding from it. What really makes me feel it is the bridge, which roughly translates to:

"I'll leave without a word
Without telling myself what I will become
Stop, don't think about it anymore M-Gi
Stop, don't think about it anymore, go on."

You really have to hear it, though. Guy's got a powerful voice, and a powerful delivery. I haven't been able to get this song out of my head for days, and that's not just because it's catchy. It's just one of those things that makes you feel something, even if you can't quite understand it (and I couldn't at first - I looked up the lyrics, and that's the moment that this song burrowed itself into my head and never left).

Interesting things that happen when you explore the pop culture of places you've never paid attention to before. I'm not even sure if my interpretation is entirely correct, though it wouldn't surprise me - I understand that France has a pretty big problem with racism.

Anyway, I hope I introduce you to one of those "It's beautiful! What is it?" feelings, because this did it for me, and I think it might be a nice feeling to spread around.