How do characters illuminate their world?
We experience stories through the eyes of their people. What they seek in their world, we seek. What they find, we find. As such, to choose a character is to choose the manner of entering the story world.
Truth-Seekers
I recently watched the Studio Ghibli film The Boy and the Heron. It’s fascinating. The titular boy is a truth seeker, earnest wants to get to the bottom of mysteries. Because he has this nature, we enter into those mysteries with him. He illuminates the story world’s mysteries and brings us along.
If he were passive, he wouldn’t delve into that same mysterious world, and we, the viewer, wouldn’t either. A character keen to discover the truth of things carries a spotlight into their world.
In another Studio Ghibli film, Princess Mononoke, a young prince is desperate to bridge conflicted groups. This active role is beset with challenges, and gives him unique insight into the different sides in a mythical battle. Through his actions, he activates other characters, bringing out their true intentions. It's a great choice for a central character. The Princess, on the other hand, is dead set on defeating her enemy, but the prince illuminates her compassion.
What are other ways characters illuminate their world? A detective is someone who digs into their world in a narrow, focused way. They are excavating clues to get the truth on a particular crime, and in so doing they unearth truths that are savoury, unsavoury, tactical and deeply personal.
Explorers
An explorer wants to know what is across the ocean, above the sky, beneath the earth. They seek the ruins of lost civilizations, and find forgotten wonders. Their objective is not to unearth one truth, but many.
A scientist is also an explorer. They might be exploring through the medium of a microscope, and in so doing discover vistas that open up the story.
Let’s say our story explores the nature of time, raising questions like: is time linear, circular, spiralling, or all of the above? Is reality a web, with time and space as its warp and weft? A scientist would bring one lens to bear. A mystic would bring another, a hybrid another still.
A time traveler character is moving throughout time differently from the rest of us, and experiencing it in according to the rules of their fictional world. That’s quite a vantage.
This may be very personal for them as well. Someone they love may be caught in a part of time that’s hard to reach, as though across a vast mountain range. In trying to save them, our timescape-rescuer is illuminating the temporal expanse of the story.
If our story is about traveling through the chakras of a human body, and vertically through layers of self and cosmos, then we might choose a mystic character. Or, to make them more relatable, someone apprenticing with a mystic.
Why Are They Doing All This?
This brings us to what pushes characters to act: their motivations. This might be a simple wondering about what is out there, but it often helps to give them a focused desire. They may be sailing through time to find their lost child, or trying to connect to their previous life so that they can join with that old self and become whole. They're crossing the ocean in order to consult a wise elder, then bring back council for their ailing people. These motivations focus the tale.
Whew! Could You Summarise All That?
Sure, that would help me too.
So there's the story world, with its particular landscapes, beings, rules, and truths waiting to be discovered. The question is, what is the journey of a character through and into those possibilities? Imagine them as a light investigating into darkness. What do they discover? How will different characters within the same story illuminate the world and each other?
Prompts
Consider the land where you live, and the disposition of the people there. Where I am, they are externally friendly and inwardly reserved. Like peaches, they are soft on the outside and hard to make deep friends with. What are they like where you live?
Now, consider a character who would stir everyone up, who would bring out what’s inside them. For example, it would be interesting to have a character around these parts who always says the wrong thing. They take a smile for an offer of friendship. When someone says, ‘We should get together sometime,’ this character takes them at their word. They hear that it’s good to express yourself, to not repress anything, so they go into a yoga class and let out massive sighs, burps and farts.
This character is a contrarian. If she's in a right wing group, she says extreme left wing things. If he's in a left wing group, he says extreme right wing things.
Consider your particular situation where you live. What kind of character would reveal what's beneath the surface?
They might stir things up socially, like the guy above, or in any other field. What kind of character would reveal what's interesting to you, in the place that you live?
Business Prompt
A character is a role in a story. To emulate this in a business meet-up, it can be helpful to have different physical hats to don, each one for a particular perspective. If you're a one person show, then you could have some hats that you put on for different ways of thinking. This could be the strategic planner, the innovator, the historian looking back at how things have gone in the business so far, and guessing the future. The comparer, who looks at other similar businesses and makes patterns. These are all roles through which you can illuminate your work.
What are some others, perhaps specific to your work?
Until the next,
happy creating,
Theo
Perspectives: How Diverse Characters Illuminate their Worlds