Breaking Character: What do Lady Macbeth, Hamlet, Hamilton, Willy Loman, and Blanche DuBois all have in common? They are all great characters. The ability to write unforgettable characters is key to being a playwright. Ultimately, it is the recognizable yet surprising and unique character that leads our readers or audience forward.
3 comments:
As a writer myself, this article really interested me. One of the main things I hear in writing workshops over and over again is “write what you know.” This article agrees with this point. According to the article, it is best to write based on your own feelings and in this way, you can develop your own voice and richer characters. Part of me really agrees with this. I do think that characters are more compelling and believable when they are immediately based off of the real world. By writing this way, one is able to channel their specific life experiences and opinions into a character which therefore must be unique from all other characters ever created by anyone else. However, on the other hand, “write what you know” can restrict other elements of writing pretty harshly. For example, it pretty much means that I should only be writing characters who have lived a pretty similar life to me. But then I guess that doesn’t apply to fantasy writing? It’s definitely a confusing line to draw. In the end though, I think it comes down to this. The characters should be based in very real feelings and experiences, even if their setting and the context is based more on the imagination and the unknown. Then there are still worlds left for the writer to discover.
This article was truly fascinating to me, I am a storyteller at heart. Its why I am invested in the things I am invested in. From helping people learn to live with the stories they live in to creating and performing in the world of a story myself. I spend much of my time writing and creating in many different ways and often my issue with writing is I will try to create a world of characters and places that intermingle and have relationships but in creating different personalities and bogging myself down in different locations my work gets cramped. But the truth behind storytelling is that some of the most interesting stories are the most believable. I hate saying that as a person who both reads and writes fantasy but it is true. Its why the Narnia books or the Harry Potter books hold so much acclaim to me. Each character is based in a way that shows real world flaws and strengths that all tie directly in to actually giving the characters as a character. And the true beauty of books and stories is the ability to place the reader directly in the shoes of the characters walking through the world of the story. This is only possible if when the author writes they actively attempt to create a living breathing character and not some two dimensional story device. Overall, this article was poignant as it depicted what I believe about storytelling in a direct and real way that truly showed what I understand but lack the ability to put into words.
Though I have never attempted to write a play or musical, this makes me want to try, if only for the sake of exploring my psychological state and memories. Nevertheless, I can see these tips can be useful to anyone trying to write a creative piece. I have always felt that my fictional writing lacked character depth, which may have been because I was trying too hard to fabricate emotions rather than letting my characters experience emotion through my own experiences, just like this article says. On the other hand, I think that this strategy should be used in moderation because if you have many characters that all extend from your experiences, they could seem too similar or one-dimensional. Also, if a person decided to do this for multiple books or plays or other pieces of writing, the characters could become indistinguishable between your pieces. The way I see it, when writing you cannot rely on any singular strategy to create emotion; to do so with any strategy can leave the characters feeling unfinished or flat. Also, this strategy seems effective, but it may not work for everyone. I will most likely try it, but if it does not work, it is important to know that because each person's experiences are different, the same strategies will not work for every person.
Post a Comment