Tuesday, March 15, 2016

The Blank Slate and Character Development

When I was in college, attending classes about literature and reading Pride and Prejudice because someone told me to (ah the life of an English major!), one of my professors introduced me to Locke's idea of tabula rasa.

On a side note, this professor was passionate about his job - and arrogant. He was a fairly attractive man in his early 40's - one of those men who are called distinguished and who all melt in my mind into one Ken-doll-esque image.

So picture a brown-haired, slightly older, professionally dressed Ken doll, talking to a room of 150 students about how he was leaving the University of Arizona for a school on the east coast because the U of A didn't appreciate or value his intellect enough.

He was more or less an ass.

But he did teach me about tabula rasa, a concept that I still find fascinating. Locke's idea was that we are born a blank slate; all of our ideas, prejudices, inclinations, etc... are formed from our experiences. In other words, we are not born predisposed toward anything; we are only a sum of our experiences.

It's a great big checkmark in favor of nurture on the nature vs. nurture debate.

Lately I've been reflecting on tabula rasa and how much our experiences shape our perception of everything.

Someone recently described the brain to me this way: "Our brains our constantly playing a game of Memory."

You know the game:
So when something happens, my brain grabs that giant cardboard card with the image on it and runs through my brain's filing cabinets, excitedly commenting that "I know I've seen this before - ah ha! Here it is."

The card my brain finds is from a past experience; possibly a past experience from a week ago, but probably a past experience from a year ago; a decade ago; two decades ago.

This would be fine if my brain were only coming up with matching images that were 100% relevant to the moment. But often they aren't.

Here is an example: If you were in a car accident -- a really severe one, where your car was totaled and you had to go to the ER in an ambulance -- as soon as you tried to get behind the wheel of a car again, you would probably freak out. Your brain would go into panic mode and match the image of this perfectly new steering wheel with the old one that got smashed and alarms would go off in your brain and body and you would probably suddenly feel unsafe.

Because your brain was just matching the current image with an old image. Even though the experience was different.

I'm sure God made us this way for a reason, however I wish I could just get a clean slate again, because so often I'm wrong and my perception isn't reality. I have to retrain my brain to check my perception not just internally, but externally.

It's like my brain has been infiltrated by a double agent who whispers lies and half-truths: "Avoid that person, they don't like you; don't do this, you aren't any good at that, remember?; don't say anything, you know what happens when you talk."

These are perhaps (perhaps) extreme examples, but it's true. In trying to protect me and work for me, my brain has (in some ways) become my enemy. I have to root out the double agent, pull the creepy flesh mask off my brain Mission-Impossible-style and reveal the mole for who she is - a deceiver.

That is the best I can do. Reveal the lies my brain keeps telling me. The only time we ever have a clean slate is the moment we are born. After that, the indelible impressions begin.

The cool, less depressing, view of tabula rosa is when it comes to crafting characters. When I write characters, I tend to write them like they are newborn baby puppets who will do and say whatever I want them to because they're mine (mwahahahaha). But that makes for very flat characters.

Instead, I want to think of characters as being born with a blank slate and ask myself: What impressions were made on them as babies? As children? As young adults (when every little thing is of the utmost importance - I don't jest, it truly is)? Then suddenly, they act and react not because I need them to, but because their slates are talking.

To these characters, the way they react is instinctual and real; it is true to them, however untrue (or crazy or weird or demented) it is to other characters.

And suddenly my flat characters are as round as balloons.

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What trick do you use to make realistic, round characters?




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