Writer's Fallout Shelter

Personally, a lot of my characters (particularly from my series, thus the ones I spend the most time with) feel like they are a facet of me - a part of me - but then it's a concept that is isolated and blown way out of proportion. I had an acting teacher who said that the biggest power in becoming other characters isn't to know more but to know less and/or forget what you know for a time. To be able to suspend a part of your perceptions. For an extreme example, I know that murder is wrong. For that reason and many others, I would never kill another person, particularly pre-meditated. But what if, for a few minutes, I could set aside those moral and religious beliefs? What if I could step past them and put myself into the mindframe of one who has no such convictions that killing was bad? What if for a time I could forget my personal prejudices and see things through such and such character's eyes? Does it sound scary to some? Yes, particularly with the extreme example that I chose, but maybe you understand the point. It can be very intimidating to some, especially if they have a very strict perception of "right" and "wrong".

For me, I actually use my stories and other writing to explore motivations. For instance, I firmly believe in my religion and in a loving God, so what background, thoughts and feelings can lead to a person literally hating God? What kind of logic leads a character to do certain things. I have two characters taught all their lives that magic is evil. This is their perception of reality as taught to them by particularly Fathers that they love and revere. So what happens to them when one of them finds out that his own sister is a magic user and the other discovers that the girl that he's in love with in a magic user? Now who is right and who is wrong? And if they try to care for the girls (who need these two guys), do the guys feel like they are betraying their past, their history, their father? Or did their fathers betray them? What happens when two realities collide? Truthfully, I think such happens quite often in real life, but perhaps not to the same scale. I like exploring these extremes on such a level that other people would probably consider unhumane if such experiments were made with living people instead of hypothetical with characters. To be honest, I have been accused of being cruel to some characters.

But as I said, they still all feel like a facet of me. I think that most any character that you spend a significant amount of time with has to be "like" you - that you have to share some common ground. Otherwise, how can you realistically get into their "mind". Now the boundaries between what ground you share, the situation that causes it, the reactions, the logic, etc are all very fluid as far as I can see. Each character is a part of me, but I am not them - I am more than them, yet less than them (since as I said, I usually take it to an extreme). I see them in me. No character and/or narrator of story or poem in my writing is actually "me" - even if the the story is INDEED a memory. It is merely my own perception of who I think I was. By the time I write the story, I am no longer the person that I was so it's half guess work and part can't help but be "contaminated" by the person I had become.

Some emotions are considered "universal" and those are typically what not only connects us to our characters, but also connects our readers to our characters. Fears, frustrations, sorrow, anger, joy, pleasure, etc.

Yes, I have had people think that I was the narrator - particularly for some of my poetry - but it's never wholly me. In the interest of recreation, it's never perfectly acurate even if it is a "memory" so it is more "based on" type of issue. At first, I was sort of annoyed by it I think, but now I just find it amusing and don't usually correct them.

Anyways, that's a few of my own, rambling thoughts.

-Renegade