Geodesics and Side Salad

Geodesics and Side Salad

Perspective has fascinated me since I struggled through reading a book on special relativity that I grabbed off my dad’s bookshelf. It took me an embarrassingly long time to finish.  For years I would say “it’s all relative” with a clever smirk, knowing that it was, truly, all relative. I heard a quote recently that pulls that truth into a sharp, almost painful social juxtaposition.

“The worst thing about life is that everybody has their reasons.”

This was a shot through my heart. I went to the most senselessly cruel decisions I see today, and got a stomachache considering what reasoning could lie under them. However, as a writer, I have to embrace this phrase for its truth and power. That’s one of the cornerstones of humanity, and real characters- their reasons.

But reasons aren’t so simple as a multi-national corporate mission statement, though they might be as dishonest. Perspective, like gravity, forms our reality. So how do we map the geodesic curves formed by a character’s baggage into a narrative? One that carries the reader to the “truth” of a character, whether it’s true or not?

The Sandbox: Hank and Side-Salad

Let’s start with the five senses. I heard a writing exercise from Brandon Sanderson, who surely didn’t invent it, that I think perfectly illustrates this point: Describe a scene through a character’s eyes, then describe that same scene through another character’s eyes. I could use the practice, so here we go:

Hank

Hank removed his hat and dappled his sweat-covered forehead with a sleeve before replacing it. He’d made good time today, and Thistle Springs was welcoming him with a jaunty wave. The wind carried the smell of cooking meats, and the sound of carousing. Hell, Hank might have time for a bit of that himself. He winked at the lovely ladies on the bar balcony. As a matter of fact, he’d make time.

Side-Salad

The hard earth made every hoof fall ring through Side-Salad’s legs. The sharp, metallic creak of the welcome sign swaying in the breeze grated her nerves almost as much as the human on her back. Sickly women draped in fake smiles coaxed men into buildings under a setting sun. When the doors open, grain alcohol stung her nostrils.

I was pretty subtle there, but did you notice the second perspective was a horse? That might seem like a silly example, but there are hundreds of ways to write that same paragraph without letting you know she’s a horse at all. No matter how obvious a perspective seems as a writer, you have to bring it home to the reader or it’s worthless.

What a character pays attention to can tell you a lot about who that character is. The note could be as simple as the fact that a horse has hooves, or more motivated, like a distaste for humans or a love of red meat. The more you consider perspective, the more efficient and effective you can portray character and their deeper motivation.

The Math of the Antagonist

Getting back to the antagonist, the meany, the BBEG, and their motivations. Everything may be relative at the grandest and smallest scales of the universe. That doesn’t mean anything goes. Similarly, perspective explains behavior, but it doesn’t excuse it.

I’ve struggled with this for a while, conflating explanations and excuses as I work to understand the world we live in. Let’s take a look at the antagonists inside us as an example.

Struggling with depression all my life, I spent so much of it looking for an explanation. Despite being a creative, I’m a logical person with a brain that wishes the world was made of as much math as we were taught in school. I was never good at feeling my feelings, but I could sure as hell investigate them.

Let’s imagine you find the answer, the source of your mental antagonist. A bully, a dismissive parent, or isolation. Is the depression gone? Have you solved the math equation?

No.

That’s the trick, and it’s a fantastic optical illusion. Understanding something doesn’t necessarily give you the tools to solve it. I think about perspectives outside of my own in the same way. While my writer mind wants to explore every detail of the big bad meany, that wouldn’t serve the story.

Instead, I write as much as I need to in order to ensure I can live in and embody the character’s actions, without trying to get the reader to understand. Now that may sound confusing, especially since I talked about the reader comprehending above, but what I really mean is the sort of understanding that comes from lived experience.

The smart readers who are paying attention may deduce but readers enveloped in the story will feel. That’s true magic.

The Trade-Off

I suppose the natural question is: do I ever lose myself in these evil characters once I embody them? I’ve priced out a dungeon, and I’ve planned some doomsday scenarios under the guise of a writer. Obviously I would never act on them.

I can trace my depression without erasing it, inhabit a villain without becoming one, and sympathize with cruelty through the eyes of necessity without sacrificing my values.

A character’s baggage isn’t gravity. It’s mass. Understanding is the gravity.

Understanding doesn’t change mass. It simply bends light.