Mass Hysteria as an Analysis of Character or How to Create Characters with Rich Personalities

The second month of the year is already here and a new Insecure Writer's Support Group meeting knocks on our door. For today, I've decided to talk about how to develop a deep, complex character; or at least, how I do it.

I must start by saying that every author should have a minor in psychology. It'd make things so much easier! But since that's not my case, I do what I can with what I have; and I do have a great sense of style and perfect comedic timing... But that has nothing to do with the title, so I'll just move on.

I've always been very interested in how other people's minds operate and how others perceive reality. Do you remember your mother asking you how you would feel if Tommy would've been the one laughing at you? Well, the question stuck in my mind and there's not one day that I don't ask myself something along those lines. What is that woman thinking? Does she have to go to work or she gets to stay at home? I also look into people's houses when my husband is driving. I think of it as an extension of that same question, and it mesmerizes me to see others go about their usual lives without my presence intervening. Just the fact that they know I'm watching changes their reactions, and don't even get me started on Reality TV, so I settle for this. I guess you could say I love being the proverbial fly on the wall. 

All these exercises make it very natural for me to paint stories where there's a sense of more than one thing going on. Much like in our lives, we are centered in the protagonist's story (ourselves) but it is affected by so many tangent stories (secondary plots, or the fall of your neighbor's huge tree on top of your house) that push the main character to take course of actions he/she had never considered before. That's how real life works and that's how good fiction has to feel like. 

Now, we're all human beings and we are at the mercy of our own experiences from which we derive knowledge that will help us make 'educated guesses'. There's no way on earth that I know exactly what's going on on that woman's head when the Starbucks guy messed up her first caffeine intake of the day. I can only guess based on what other reactions I've seen to the same event (he's a very clumsy guy), and what would be my own reaction (Oh, don't you dare, mister!).

This is how our own philosophy of life trickles down into our fictional worlds and we end up revealing a lot more about us than we ever wanted. In those believes we stand alone, more or less, and that's part of why the same story can be told in a million different ways. 

In my case, I write horror. That's just how my brain works. It's either because I'm exercising a cheap form of therapy, or because my experiences growing up were very much touched by the shadow of the paranormal. I am also a huge believer in the darkness that resides at the core of every human being and that permeates every aspect of my stories. 

Let me explain. It's not that I don't believe humans are good in nature, I do believe in that, but I think we're not indiscriminate lovers. We select carefully those for whom we'd do everything and the rest can fall out of the planet, for all we care. When push comes to shovel, we will always protect our loved ones, our kin. The rest can drop dead.

Imagine we are ants on a park and there's a kid out there having fun and squishing us under his foot. I, for one, would collect my kids and the rest of my family and run back to our anthill. If in our way back the foot's about to come on top of one of my kids, I would not hesitate a nano-second to push someone else under it if that would spare my girl's life. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. And I think 99.99% would do the same.

Mass panic is that moment where every rationalized and civil thought goes out the door and in comes the survival mode. There has been a few well documented cases where mass panic has ensued in large groups of people and it always ends up tragically. So, it's not that I am all 'doom and gloom', facts and even psychologists tend to agree with this theory.

Horror stories are, by definition, the perfect environment to create such a reaction from people. In my stories I create the elements and gather them, so the perfect storm can rise and put my characters into extraordinary situations where most of them will react out of fear and not logic. Given all that I've been telling you about, you know what kinds of endings my stories usually have, don't you?

So, there you go. That's how what I read, what I observe, and what I am sum up and help me to have complex characters that react in one way, think in another, and feel yet in another one.

I entice you to read about human psychology -if your a scientologist, I'm deeply sorry for you- and how we react to motherly love, to violence, to threat, to death... There's not one thing you write about that cannot gain from you understanding human behavior better. 

Observe keenly how your neighbors react to your own mood swings, to your presence, to your words or absence of them. Don't peek directly into their windows, are you crazy? You'll be served a restraining order! Instead go buy a big telescope and mount it on your bedroom's window. Then tell me all about it so I can write a story about the creepy next-door neighbor. =)

Remember to check the rest of the blogs from the group tho get more fantastic advise!

Developing a Story

My first short story is going along pretty well, I haven't finished the first draft but I'm advancing at a pretty steady pace and close to that goal. What I want to share with you today is the creative process I've developed as I find my way in this career; I'd also loved it if you shared yours with me, as it might inspire me to tune mine even further.

When I began with the novel, as I posted in a previous entry, I didn't know quite well how to tackle the process of creating an interesting plot and appealing characters; I thought I could start writing and everything would fall in place as I told the story. Truth be told, it is nearly impossible to tell a compelling story when all you got is bits of pieces of it; so, after my first total failure I started writing down my ideas; and I mean pen and paper, no computer. My mind works better when I put in paper everything, weather I'm developing my newest novel hero or making a grocery list; there's something about doing it the old way that makes it more graphic and clearer in my mind.

I realized that the characters I had found the most interesting as a reader were those going through an ordeal, those who are overcoming adversity in some way; for example, if there were no animosity between the families, Romeo and Juliet wouldn't be a memorable story; had it not been for the fact that he is a vampire and she is a human, Twilight would be just another teen book. In order to make a story interesting, you have to make it complicated... at least in romance.

First I came with the outline of the novel, the main characters, their state of mind at the beginning of the story, their motivations and the complications they'd have to conquer. I'm telling a family story too, so, I also had to create a family tree, a background to it, and the interactions between them. Since I'm planning a series of books, my characters will have to mature as time goes on and I risked making them illogical as I needed them to do something; my way of avoiding this was to create a "Script", one for each important character, where I describe their personality; that way I have somewhere to look when I need to find someone with the right attitude or motivation to react in a particular way.

Finally, I imagine new plots and characters, but places and the details of them come harder to me; so I went to the internet and looked through tons of pictures of houses and landscapes until I found those where I could picture the events of the novel.

The whole process took like three weeks and was tedious at times but, once I went back to the writing, it proved to be worth it and I'm sure to repeat it in the future; as I did with the short story. I'm also sure that as I know better what I need in order to create a more rounded story, my research will be more limited to what I'll really use and shorter in time.

Next time I hope I'll be telling you all about my research into the most rewarding conclusion for anyone in this career, publishing. I'm already looking for magazines interested in new writers, since I'm about to finish that cherished first work. I'll tell you all about it next time.