"Them" as a Social Force

The last time you became angry enough to do something you ordinarily wouldn't came when, in the process of bending to access the contents of the lowest shelf in a cabinet, hopeful of finding a missing saute pan, you rose abruptly enough to bump your head on the edge of an opened cabinet door. The damage inflicted required some days to mend to the point where you could successfully shower without noticing the break in skin continuity. The saute pan, having been flung with great force, might never be quite the same.

You did not need this head-banging incident to remind you of the potential for explosive anger response, much like the impatient genie in the bottle, waiting to be set free. And yet you very well did need the reminder, which in its way links you to brother and sister Homo sapiens.

Each time someone in your immediate vision or in some report you have read acts out on anger, you are reminded of the bond you share with so many of your species, seeing them in some of their performances as something that is no stranger to you in potential. Even strange cultists and political nut cases haunt you as being a reminder of what you could become were you not in some more severe process of editorial guidance. Since your own view of yourself calls out anger as a motivating force, you readily admit not only to its presence within you but of having to put forth considerable effort toward the goal of managing it.

When you speak these days of managing anger, in essence you mean acknowledging its presence, sometimes with a mere nod of recognition, as though you were of two different social strata in a large high school, then looking for a way to laugh the anger back into the shadowy sidelines where you believe it belongs. In that sense, anger is like fire; it can be a useful tool, providing energy and focus, or it can become destructive in the extreme. You can often control your anger with humor, but it is unlikely you will be able to laugh off fire. Thus the damaging effects of anger, a person-centered energy, and fire, a sometimes-neutral-but-often-man-made energy are noted along with the need to be aware of their inflammatory potential.

When you are angry enough to act out, you are no longer the steady, more ordinary you. As you act out, you begin a precarious journey that moves you away from everyday behavior. Anger is not the only path away from everyday behavior; any concentrated pursuit or study is yet another. The more a person pursues his or her craft or discipline, the more pronounced that person's individuality becomes; he or she is actively stepping away from mainstream behavior, thought, modes of execution. The reason for this is simple enough: the more we enter our discipline, the more we acquire individuality of voice and the muscle memory required to implement that voice.

There were times when you strove to achieve uniformity, which is to say a greater connection to acceptable paradigms of behavior, intelligence, response, social characteristics, and even empathy. That didn't work either in your social dealings or in your attempts to achieve greater reach and skill with your writing, your intellectual range, your thinking processes, and your opinions, all of which inhere in your voice and your vision.

You can mercifully see connections between your appetites, goals, behavior, and visions and those of others, yet you tip over toward being more like you than most statistical N samplings variously described as "Them." You are a part of "Them" but you are also the drop of water who recognizes his relationship to the ocean.

Your best chances are with you being you. The consequences may just be all the things you long for.

Family Matters

family history--a chronicle of causal familial events that helped shape a character; the cultural environmental forces in which a character evolves; generational behavior and the attitudes in which such behavior is viewed from within the family and from external sources.

Family is such a splendid launching pad for the definition of a character, giving traditions to be applauded as well as traditions to be shunned. A character may become a victim of such tradition or a beneficiary, not to forget a martyr. If a character is informed, "All our family did their undergraduate work at Yale," and the character had hoped instead to attend The Rhode Island School of Design, might not there be a howl of conflict raised? And what about the implication that the family did undergraduate work at Yale, suggesting that graduate school venue may be an option, but graduate school itself was more a directive?

Families are social bands, dispensing tradition, learning, social and financial resources, all provided with varying degrees of love or complete lack of love. Characters may be assumed to have responded in some way--as actors in stage and film renditions respond continuously to one another--to their family origins, but also beyond their family influence in terms of wanting to break from family behavior and set out on a fresh set of responses.

Two widely differing examples of family effects on present-day characters are found in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth. Each has as a pivotal issue the impending death of a patriarch and its effects on the survivors. Told from the point of view of the outsider, Charles Ryder, Brideshead is essentially the story of the Flyte family, who own the Brideshead estate, their Catholicism, its effects on them and Charles Ryder, who has a close friendship with his Oxford classmate, Sebastian, and a romantic relationship with Sebastian's sister, Julia. Returning to Earth focuses on the approaching death of Donald, a middle-aged man of mixed Finnish and Chippewa heritage, terminally ill with Lou Gherig's disease. The narrative begins with Donald, who is dictating his story to his wife, Cynthia. Reminiscing on his connection with his Indian heritage, Donald recalls the influence of his father's cousin, Flower, on him. "Flower shook my brain like one of her many rattles hanging from the rafters of her tar paper shack." Each of these authors is remarkable in a specific way, deft in the ability to describe the reverberations of family into the dance the individual members has with life.

A Chilling Effect

effect--the result or consequence of a previous action or condition; a segment of a sequential scheme of events; the product of causality.

Effect is the response of a character to an ethical or sensual stimulus; the reaction of one or more individuals to a previous stimulus or action. Capt. Ahab felt the effect of the great whale; Huck Finn felt the effect of having been a contributor to the escape from slavery of Jim; Jane felt the consequences of her growing attraction to Rochester, acted upon them, and was rewarded by the appearance of additional effects.

Little happens in a story without some regard to design, less yet happens without an effect on someone, something, somewhere. Relationships, be they romantic, political, or professional, grow in complexity and interdependence or accordingly withdraw from closeness, then consequently wither. In a broad, sweeping sense, story is a record of effect, the effect of a place on a character, the effect one person or character may have on another (see Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassady for the former, see Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for the latter). Thus effect is a record of impressions and responses that writers are at pains to dramatize and describe.

Characters may be seen as individuals who try to contain and constrain the effects visited upon them by other individuals, by life experiences, and by the physical and social content of places. In his 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Toibin demonstrates the complex range of effect a small town in Ireland and the borough of Brooklyn have on the behavior of a young Irish girl and those she comes in contact with, showing by deft indirection how the effects of place are filtered through a character, then have effect on other characters.

The musical, My Fair Lady, and to a slightly lesser extent its parent, the stage play Pygmalion, dramatically demonstrate the effects of social class and of physical locale on the character of Eliza Doolittle in an emotional spectrum worth investigating for the writer who wishes to show how places and individuals evoke emotional responses in characters and, if we are fortunate, in us.