05.12.08
So busted
Out of the mouth of your characters, often come the most disturbing revelations about yourself.
Saturday during class I was struck with the sudden knowledge of what to do with my screenplay (previously mentioned here) which I’ve been reluctant to touch. I’ve left it alone for years believing it is just one of those projects I shouldn’t revisit for awhile, but as I had a break in class I whipped out my notebook with a flash of inspiration and jotted down dialogue for the character, Cassy, whom I’ve all but given up on these last 5 years as a cardboard and lifeless failure.
The scene happens when she’s avoiding emotional intimacy with the lead male character, Jared, and he asks her why she likes to write:
Cassy: I love stories! I love the challenge of building arcs and characters and situations that force them to evolve. I love the feeling of being carried away in a world, a life or an adventure.
They talk about this for a time before he calls her on some line of BS about why she doesn’t ever engage.
Jared: Why are you so afraid of being seen? Of being a part of something real rather than make believe? Why can’t you stop watching life and start being a part of it?
Cassy: I don’t want to draw attention because if people notice me, they know they are being observed. I can’t be an observer if I know they know I’m watching them. What’s wrong with make believe? No one really gets hurt in a fantasy. No one gets left or bruised or told they were not good enough. I can’t stop watching because as soon as I become part of the story I’m trapped in it, doomed to live in a reactionary state to impulses I can’t see or name and I will lose the power to tell the story objectively.
Jared: It must be a lonely and isolating place out there, watching everyone go about their lives… while you are an observer and not a participant.
I wrote in class on Saturday and spent the rest of the day home and with my thoughts. Sunday I met my scene partner at a café to rehearse and as we have in the past we end up talking for two hours before actually getting to the work. A particular tradition that I adore as it teaches me a lot about him so I know who I’m working with. Anyway, even though I don’t know him very well, I have a great deal of respect for him because he doesn’t know me either and he doesn’t pull any punches about what he thinks. In fact, its fun to find someone with the same perverse enjoyment of finding someone’s buttons and pushing them repeatedly – which he does, on me… and I can’t help but have a bit of admiration for it because I do the same thing to other people – even him when I can.
Anyway, as we talked he asked me why I don’t read aloud on the treadmill.
Me: Because then people will look at me and I won’t be able to watch them.
Later when we talked about style and dressage and I mentioned that I dress “frumpy” so I can hide he asked- “Why don’t you want to be noticed?”
Me: Because if I draw attention to myself then I can’t people watch as effectively.
Him: So you are taking away the chance for other people to people watch you?
He looked thoughtful for a second then met my eyes and said – “So you’d rather always be the watcher?”
My chair suddenly seemed terribly uncomfortable. I knew he could sense his advantage and by the way he continued to stare I knew he expected me to answer to myself but not necessarily to him. I shuffled and dodged and knew I’d been cornered by my own fears again.
As I laid in bed last night and thought about the screenplay and realized it time to pull it out and redo it, I wondered at the timing of the dialogue I’d written and just a day later been reminded of in person, by someone who barely knows me and seemed to see right through my comfortable protection. I didn’t sleep for a long time, but kept mulling over why it made me so shifty and hard to pin my thoughts down about why I feel so uncomfortable about being made.
Maybe it’s because of the return dialogue of Jared. It is lonely. It is isolating on the outside, never trusting myself to be a part of a great story again. So evidently, it wasn’t Cassy I was writing but somehow myself, which means – there’s something that needs to be examined and usually out of the mouth of my characters come the breadcrumb trail that leads down a path I generally don’t want to follow, but it seems I need to. This is apparently someplace I’m going to have to go.
Megan said,
May 12, 2008 at 11:29 pm
maybe you had put her away and written her off because, as an outlet for yourself in fiction (fictive? god I wish that was a word..so I’m dubbing it one now.) fictive form, you had let yourself become too two dimentional, it took your bliss quest and taking some hard looks at yourself, and maybe more importantly, letting some things lie and still asking too many questions but letting the answer to some of them be “we’ll just let it be what it is and figure it out as we go” lead you to finding the cassy within yourself that was no longer so flat and difficult to become emotionally attached to. Because if you were creating a fictive (whee!) version of yourself that was difficult to relate to, maybe it was because the real you was distancing yourself and becoming difficult to relate to, and only now that you are becoming more of a rounded, adventurous person again, only now that you’ve found a part of your bliss again, can you write her as someone with problems, who has distanced themselves from the other characters, but who both the characters and the audience (whoever our audience may be) can care about…because really maybe you’ve always been writing cassy as you?
Epiphany said,
May 13, 2008 at 7:54 am
I think all of our characters are aspects of ourselves, whether they’re our ambition, our vanity, even our fears…all of them reflect somehow on the person we are. Now that doesn’t mean that every character you write is you, it just means that most of the time you can examine a character and why he or she is a certain way, and learn something about yourself. Looks like that’s what you just did