Over the past few months, I’ve been helping plan an old friend’s bachelor party, the experience of which has made me starkly aware of just how conservative I’ve become in middle age. Not politically, you understand—personally. When I was a kid, I was like Leo Getz in Lethal Weapon (I was seriously that annoying) who nonetheless fancied himself Martin Riggs; somewhere along the way, though, I grew up to be Roger Murtaugh.
And that got me thinking about how, at different stages of life, we’re sometimes lucky enough to closely identify with a particular fictional character in an exceptional way; I would say the experience is even as random and as rarified as true friendship: How many times, really, have we “met” a character who speaks so directly to us, whose emotional circumstances so closely reflect our own, that through them we vicariously attain some measure of insight… and maybe even catharsis?
We’re not necessarily talking favorite characters here; those come in spades. God knows, I love Indiana Jones and Jean-Luc Picard and Philip Marlowe and Chili Palmer, but I don’t necessarily—much as I want to—relate to those characters so much as admire their characteristics. In that way, they’re more aspirational than they are analogous.
I’d like to know which characters from fiction speak to you—and for you. I’ll get us started, selecting examples from three distinct phases of my life: childhood, adolescence, and midlife. (For those interested, I’ve included each narrative’s Save the Cat! genre.)
SCOTT HOWARD FROM TEEN WOLF (1985)
Genre: Superhero (“Fantasy Superhero”)
I felt so supremely unspecial in grade school. I wasn’t cool, or sharply dressed, or proficient at sports, or even particularly academically ambitious. How I ached to be extraordinary like the fictional heroes I admired, be it Superman or Encyclopedia Brown or Tom Sawyer. Ultimately, though, I envied their superhuman talents more than I related to any of them personally.
I certainly empathized with Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly from Back to the Future, who was a bit of a misfit himself. But he wasn’t a loser: He had a girlfriend; he could play guitar; he was an ace on his skateboard. Marty was more relatable than say, Ferris Bueller, but his social circumstances weren’t a close enough match for my own.
It was really Fox’s Scott Howard, from Teen Wolf, with whom I’d say I identified more than any character from the many, many stories I consumed back in those days (via every conceivable medium). He was so painfully aware of what a nobody he was, how definitively he’d lost the popularity lottery. Initially regarding his latent lycanthropy as yet one more instance of congenital misfortune, his social life soon improves considerably thanks to his sharpened reflexes on the basketball court. Naturally—supernaturally?—his condition eventually becomes a case of be careful what you wish for…
Teen Wolf’s plot is so simple and earnest—a vestige of a time when stories were still closed-ended allegories with a point rather than open-ended exercises in expansive world-building. And the movie’s special effects, to the limited extent its modest budget allowed for any, are wholly unimpressive in our era of photorealistic CGI. But Teen Wolf gets right what so much of today’s cinematic and televisional entertainment proudly gets wrong—disciplined storytelling, an emphasis on emotional performances over empty spectacle—and if you were a grade-school outcast in the eighties, it was just the fantasy you needed to feel a little bit better about yourself.
CLAUDIA FROM INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1976)
Genre: Superhero (“Fantasy Superhero”)
Unpopular though I may’ve been in grade school, I was nonetheless quite comfortable there (perhaps—who knows?—thanks in part to lessons learned from Teen Wolf). So when I got plucked out of New York City public junior high and sent to Jesuit prep school, the culture shock was so overwhelming it not only adversely affected my social life, but my emotional and educational development, as well: Overnight, I found myself in a place without friends and without girls, whose curriculum was a course-for-course recapitulation of everything I’d already learned in seventh and eighth grades. (You can read the full account here.) While virtually everyone else I knew was socializing, and dating, and studying new subjects—ya know, experiencing adolescence—I felt as though I’d been developmentally frozen at fourteen years old.
It was at a bookstore in the summer between sophomore and junior years that I stumbled upon author Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, a novel I’d never heard of (the Tom Cruise movie was still a few years off at that point), but whose title intrigued me. In its pages, I found a kindred spirit in Claudia, the five-year-old waif whom Louis and Lestat turn into their vampire “daughter.” Though Claudia continues to develop intellectually throughout the decades, she is nonetheless perennially infantilized by her “fathers,” on whom she depends for her very survival. Claudia eventually grows frustrated—even homicidally mad—over having been eternally consigned to a state of arrested development, denied the otherwise inalienable rite of growing up. Through this fantastical character, Rice spoke to my own experiences in a way far more affecting than most straightforward teen melodramas of the time.
I’m certain that Teen Wolf and Interview, formative influences both, help to explain why I find supernatural horror fiction such a fertile genre for exploring the human condition. A former screenwriting mentor of mine, who’d been a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, once told me the value of stories rooted in magical realism—be it a surrealist comedy like Groundhog Day or an occultic chiller à la Rosemary’s Baby—is that they offer profound insight into human nature we wouldn’t otherwise have without their chimerical central conceits.
FRANK MACKEY FROM FAITHFUL PLACE (2010)
Genre: Whydunit (“Cop Whydunit”)
Introduced as a supporting character in The Likeness, the second installment of author Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series of novels, Det. Frank Mackey is promoted to first-person protagonist here. Hailing from an inner-city Dublin ghetto, thick with the overpowering redolence of both malted barley (from the Guinness Brewery) and working-class malcontent, Frank finds himself reluctantly drawn back to the people and places he left behind decades earlier, without so much as a backwards glance, when the corpse of his long-missing first love turns up in a derelict house on his old block of Faithful Place. If In the Woods, the first book in this series, is about memory, and The Likeness identity, this plaintive policier is all about family.
If you’ve ever been young, and in love, and high on the courage it takes to leave home in search of a path of your own, only to reach middle age and wonder—even doubt—if there’s a way back home, Faithful Place will unsettle you like a suddenly ringing phone in the middle of the night. It’s relentlessly truthful, emotionally, and somehow authentically hopeful, unsentimentally. And it isn’t the story’s central mystery that keeps the pages turning; it’s Frank Mackey, with his singular point of view. His closing soliloquy, about his complicated relationship with Dublin itself, perfectly and poetically expresses everything I feel about my own hometown of New York; the book’s final page makes me weep every time I read it.
Your turn. What stories and characters reflect some secret facet of your own souls?
I just want to say that this post is a great argument for diversity and inclusivity
It is highly unfair to ask EVERYONE to identify w/ white male cis-gendered straight able-bodied characters
One of the characters you mentioned is a little girl, so we CAN identify w/ someone outside of our demographic, but all too often creators demand that marginalized audience members must, while providing few marginalized characters ANYONE can identify w/. Or they have “the one black guy”, who’s supposed to give every black person, regardless of circumstance, someone to identify w/
Furthermore, if you identify w/ a character you don’t want to see them mistreated. Of course they’ll have plot problems, tough issues, struggles. They’ll get angry, depressed,hurt physically. That’s the nature of story. But you wouldn’t want them killed off gratuitously, shunted aside for “more important” characters, reduced to incompetence just to make other characters look good, etc… But this is usually the fate of marginalized characters
This is changing more and more, but there’s still room for improvement
As for me… when I was young it was the Incredible Hulk (1977-1982). A highly intelligent but isolated man w/ anger control issues. We even had the same first name (a change from the comics)
More recently I’d say, Doc from Z Nation. The old-man hippy burnout way out of his depth, but he still trudges on
This brings up some writing questions: To what degree do you identify w/ characters you write? To what degree does this help or harm your writing? If you identify w/ a character will you make the character more real, or over-candied (https://mythcreants.com/blog/why-the-term-mary-sue-should-be-retired/)? If you don’t identify w/ a character, will you have trouble making that character realistic, or maybe just forget about them halfway through?
Keep in mind, while you want your reader to like and support your characters, identity such as discussed here is too impossible to predict. Sometimes it’s not even your goal, such as if you’re writing a James Bond or Superman character and like (“I don’t necessarily—much as I want to—relate to those characters so much as admire their characteristics. In that way, they’re more aspirational than they are analogous.”)
Typically great response, Dave — thank you! Thanks for giving this post so much of your time and insight.
Yes, it occurred to me as I was compiling this list that the first character was a white male, essayed by a white male actor (and created by white male writers); the second female (and a child, at that), created by a female writer; the third another white male, yes… though this one created by a white female writer. So, though my list is overwhelmingly Caucasian — save Roger Murtaugh, that is! — it kind of represented an interesting mix of viewpoints. Of course there are others I could’ve cited, as well, I just felt the three featured here were interesting in that they spoke to distinct stages of my life.
We’ve definitely made huge strides with respect to representation in popular entertainment. I went to the movies for the first time in forever recently and saw Danny Boyle’s Yesterday (which was terrific), starring Himesh Patel. He was outstanding in the lead, and they made no mention or issue of his ethnicity; it didn’t figure in any way into the story. And I couldn’t help but think that had this movie been made twenty years earlier, it would’ve starred Hugh Grant. And that would’ve been fine, too — a younger Grant would’ve been great in that role — but how nice that these opportunities are opening up to actors that up until recently would’ve been consigned to some supporting role in a token gesture of diversity. People in movies and on TV are, more and more, starting to look like what you see on the streets, a trend I suspect will only continue. I completely took for granted as a kid that all my heroes — Scott Howard, Michael Knight, Superman — looked exactly like me; it never occurred to me in my youth that our culture (for the most part) only gave us Caucasian role models. More diverse casting not only gives audiences of different ethnicities a chance to be represented, but it serves to remind straight white males like myself that we can relate to characters — and, by extension, to people — of different backgrounds, genders, races, sexual proclivities, and experiences.
I’ve never seen Z Nation, but I adored the old Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk show. It had a melancholic quality that was quite at odds with other superhero shows at the time, be it Adam West’s Batman, Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman, Jackson Bostwick’s Shazam!, Nicholas Hammond’s The Amazing Spider-Man, etc. And it was a rare instance of a superhero franchise reaching a conclusive resolution, in the final of three late-eighties reunion movies, The Death of the Incredible Hulk. (Those TV movies were also somewhat ahead of their time, incorporating other Marvel heroes such as Thor and Daredevil in an early live-action attempt at a shared superhero “universe.”) And of course, Lou Ferrigno has continued to provide vocal contributions to the MCU’s iteration of the Hulk.
Boy, I could say a lot about your closing rhetorical: To what extent does one identify with the characters they write/create? My novel Escape from Rikers Island features three prominent characters (among scores of others): the protagonist (a young NYPD detective), the antagonist (his mentor and corrupt supervising officer), and the antihero (the shot caller of a Brooklyn-based African-American street gang). From a purely biographical perspective, I have the most in common with the hero: He’s a white male, raised in the Bronx by his mother (the father was largely absentee), educated at CUNY, who married his college sweetheart (all things that could be said about me). So, he was an “easy” character to write, in that sense.
But the story’s antihero, a young black gangsta raised in the Marcy housing projects, wound up expressing a lot of my own anger about the corporate gentrification of the boroughs, and the institutionalized racism of the police, to say nothing of the fact that this particular character really values his friends — the “front-line homies” with whom he came up. So, he wound up being the most fun character to write, because writing him allowed me to express some “antiheroic,” or at least anti-establishment, grievances I carry. I very much related to him and his plight.
And then there’s the antagonist, an experienced street cop who teaches his idealistic protégé (the story’s hero) some pragmatic life lessons. And even though this particular character is reprehensible in many ways, I actually agree with a lot of the things he says (just not many of the actions he takes). I don’t think I could’ve written him truthfully without identifying with his worldview somewhat. The story’s theme — and, by extension, its ultimate meaning — is explored through the “debate” Escape from Rikers Island presents: Throughout, all three men express universal (if occasionally irreconcilable) truths about the story’s subjects (racism, loyalty, individualism v. conformity); take any one of them out of the equation, and the story has no conflict — and thusly no message. Each of them represents, in their own way, viewpoints I myself hold (and sometimes wrestle with), and through them all, the story synthesizes those perspectives into cohesive worldview — and that’s the moral of Escape from Rikers Island. (You will, of course, have to read the book to find out what that is! Haha!)
I suspect that if (the royal) you are writing a character with whom you don’t in some way identify, all you’re really writing is a one-dimensional cliché, or a stereotypical facsimile of some character you once encountered in another story. Use every character in your narrative to represent something truthful about yourself, and you’ll endow them all with a verisimilitude of their very own. (And — bonus — the story then benefits from added thematic depth and complexity. Consider, for instance, all the competing truths in Lucas’ six Star Wars movies; you can sense he relates not only to his namesake Luke, but also Han, Leia, Ben, Anakin, Threepio, Yoda, Palpatine, etc.)
Thanks for a great discussion, Dave! Happy Labor Day weekend!
Although there is a little of me in every character I write I more closely identify w/ Hailey from my new comic strip, ADHD (Always Distracted Hailey Delgado) (http://adhd.thecomicseries.com/), than any I’ve ever written
Hailey is a mid-20’s Hispanic gay woman, and I am a mid-50’s White straight man. But we do have one important thing in common
I was diagnosed w/ Hyperactivity (which would later be known as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) about five decades ago. Hailey has ADHD. In fact, there are numerous variations in Attention Deficit Disorder, and Hailey has the same symptoms as me
I base the jokes off of incidents and experiences in my own life. In my previous works I had always avoided making a character a writer; it feels cloying and self-indulgent. But Hailey is a writer because my ADHD affects my writing, and I want to use that material. When I created the name I realized “Delgado” was close to my self-applied nickname, “Dell”. But I decided to keep it, as a token of how much we do have in common
The comic is not autobiographical. The reason I made Hailey so different in demographics is so people wouldn’t think that the main character’s me
But in many ways… yes, she is me
Thanks for this welcome comment, Dell! Among other things, I learned so much about you! As much as I enjoy dissecting and debating produced and published works, there’s so much fun to be had in discussing our own fictions. That’s the thing I miss most about my old writers group — talking craft, and process, and inspiration. That group dissolved a year or two before I started this blog, but I often think I’d have so much more to say at those roundtables now — so many more insights into storytelling as a result of this ongoing project. I sometimes fantasize about how amazing it would be to have my own little “Vicious Circle” of fiction writers and cultural critics who met in the dim recesses of some Irish pub in Lower Manhattan once a week to swap witticisms and get drunk. (That admittedly romantic idea is even more appealing in our interminable state of self-isolation…)
Among other facets of narrativity I don’t think I explicitly understood or fully appreciated a decade ago were the creative counterparts of biographical truth and emotional truth. Young writers seem to either heavily rely on biographical truth or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, eschew it outright. We had a comedy writer in our group whose protagonists were invariably thinly failed facsimiles of herself: cosmopolitan single gals in their early 30s, originally from the Midwest before relocating to L.A., perennially unlucky in love, who were navigating the social complexities of sex and the city. Sure, the high-concept scenarios differed from script to script, but the heroine remained essentially the same; this screenwriter was basically writing herself. She reflexively wrote from a place of biographical truth because, I suspect, she took a quantum of creative confidence from that. (I’m not knocking her, by the way; many of her scripts were laugh-out-loud funny.)
The action scribes in our group (myself included) tended to shun biographical truth, writing instead about cops and spies and Dudes with a Problem — larger-than-life heroes whose lives were far more interesting than our own! Speaking only for myself, I was trying to learn — to teach myself — the craft of storytelling, but I really didn’t have all the much to say about the world. Instead, I was simply regurgitating the same unchallenged anti-authority themes and tropes I’d been fed my whole life — what sci-fi author David Brin labels “the Idiot Plot” — without anything new to bring to the conversation. I certainly wasn’t digging into the details of my own life (biographical truth), nor was I producing any emotional truth in my work.
As I’ve become a more confident writer, though, I have strived for emotional truth in my fiction, most of which is admittedly speculative in nature — supernatural horror and magical realism. Despite this, more and more autobiographical details have found their way into my writing. (Hell, Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire as an emotional reaction to the death of her young daughter.) I don’t, for the most part, do this consciously; I simply write to the emotional truth of a situation, and when I need a plot development that serves said truth, I find my imagination recalling and appropriating some real-life experience I can write about with situational authenticity.
For example, the “Thing Bottle” novella I wrote last year, Spex, is comprised nigh-exclusively of my own actual grade-school experiences and adventures (though without the aid of X-ray glasses, of course). And the main character of the story — the adult male narrator looking back at this particular episode from his preadolescence — does indeed grow up to be a writer, something I myself had previously avoided, too, Dell, for the same reasons you stated.
I’m working on a follow-up novella in the same anthology that cuts even closer to the bone — an “Angel Bottle” tale about a boy in search of a father, which is a theme that keeps asserting itself in my fiction (I wonder why). It’s certainly there in my WIP horror novel, which features four protagonists (one titular hero and three narrative subordinates) whose distinctly different personalities clash with each other constantly, and yet are all, in their way, reflections of me — different (often incongruous) facets of my personality and worldview — and my life’s experiences. (I’d love to talk at greater length and specificity about these stories, but that will have to wait until after they’re published.)
I suppose what I’m saying is that biographical truth, to the extent a writer chooses to invoke it, is only valuable insofar as it supports a story’s emotional truth. And I suspect the reason many young writers — myself included — avoided exploiting biographical truth in our early creative efforts is because we didn’t want to confront the (often painful) underlying emotional truths. But when we are willing to finally do that — to “go there” — something miraculous occurs: We start to recognize even our most outlandish and fantastical characters as creations unique to us, rather than being knockoffs of characters from books and movies we admire. When he knows he’s no longer “tracing” the work of his influences, but writing his own material, that’s when an artist achieves a sense of confidence in his craft that’s both undeniable and creatively empowering. And when someone asks whether Character X is based on him or is purely a fictional creation, he merely shrugs and answers, “Yes.”
For me as a kid, Harriet The Spy and John Cleese. It was mostly musicians as an adolescent, like Siouxsie Sioux or David Sylvian, but as an adult, instead of relating to characters, I find myself wanting to be more like them. If I could have the fierceness of Furiosa and the sex appeal of a K-Pop band, I’d be pretty satisfied:-)
I suspect, Suzanne, that if you could devise a character with “the fierceness of Furiosa and the sex appeal of a K-Pop band,” you’d have the next zeitgeist-seizing megahit on your hands!
I think you raise a valid counterpoint: The value of fiction isn’t strictly based on how representational it is — how closely it mirrors our circumstances — but also how aspirational a vision it advances. I’ve long argued — you recall “Changing the Narrative”? — that we need substantially less fiction that indulges nihilism, violence, and messiah-worshipping, and more that promotes pragmatic optimism, cerebral problem-solving, and we’re-in-this-together cooperation.
To that end, Star Trek always did that so brilliantly. And when I was still in my single digits, growing up on the syndicated reruns of TOS (and adoring the initial feature films starting Shatner, Nimoy, et al.), my immature worldview very viscerally responded to the cowboy diplomacy of Captain Kirk, made more appealing still by Shatner’s walking-on-air charisma.
I was eleven when The Next Generation premiered, and the stern, disciplined demeanor of Captain Picard was not my cup of tea! The guy reminded me of my grade-school principal! And yet as the show went on, and I entered my teenage years, his more measured, philosophical worldview really started to resonate with me; he was an intellectual action hero, so different from most others in the genre, and he unquestionably provided an aspirational exemplar. Some fictional heroes are mirrors — and we need those, too — while others can be models, offering an ideal to aspire to. In our current era of meaningless storytelling, a little old-fashioned optimism would arguably be a subversive act of creativity no one sees coming!
Ah, Star Trek—the first show to ever give me hope. Picard will always be my favourite captain, cemented by The Inner Light.
It was indeed a hopeful show, and Picard is truly one of the great fictional characters of all-time — across TV, cinema, and literature (and he’s been prominently featured in all three media); he easily makes my personal top-ten list. I love him so much, in fact, I have made the decision not to watch the new Picard series that premieres next year, for several reasons. The first is that I said goodbye to Picard nearly twenty years ago, and I don’t really wish to revisit him (other than in subsequent viewings of the TNG show and movies). Also: I don’t trust the current custodians of the franchise — the ones that produced the J. J. Abrams trilogy and Discovery and now this — to truly understand Picard or what makes him special (since they’ve already proven they don’t understand Trek at large or what makes it special). Simply getting the original actors back without the original behind-the-scenes talent (the writers, et al.) doesn’t often yield the desired results (see, for instance, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi).
“The Inner Light” was an absolutely shattering episode of TNG, Suzanne, and a prime example of what my mentor meant when he said that a fantastical conceit is only useful insofar it allows us a deeper understanding of human nature that we couldn’t have attained without it. When storytelling shifted from closed-ended allegories to open-ended world-building (and I’m 100% certain, by the way, Picard will very much be in the postnarrative mode), too much emphasis got placed on the mythology itself — the magic systems, the rules, the continuity of it all. As any child knows, the magic is irrelevant; it’s just a buy-in that allows the storyteller to show us an existential truth about human nature. And Patrick Stewart’s composed dignity always drove home the writers’ philosophical points with a dramatic intensity that made those morals impossible to forget; “The Inner Light” is the quintessential testament to that.
A fun post, Sean. What a great topic, way to know more about you, and question for contemplation. I haven’t seen Teen Wolf or Faithful Place but will make a point to watch them. A little insight into you. 🙂
I have no idea how to answer your question. Television was barely a thing when I was a kid. Ha ha. I can relate more to books from my youth and teens than to film/television. Charlotte’s Web and A Day No Pigs Would Die have stuck with me for decades and perhaps were the first influences that eventually turned me toward grief counseling. I was moody as a teen (so very tragic) and therefore the Brontes and Hardy fit me to a tee.
As an adult it’s harder to decide, partly because the range of choices is so vast. One of my all-time favorite films is Cinema Paradiso (the subtitled original from 1988). That one spoke to me and captured a bit of my soul, so I suspect I reside in that film somewhere. Thanks for the awesome impetus to remember those influences. Great post. 🙂
Hey, thanks, Diana! So nice to hear from you! Hope all is well by you. Even though I am disappointed to learn you’ll no longer be hosting the Monthly Speculative Fiction Prompt, I’m so pleased you inspired Carol Forester of Writing and Works to carry the torch! I have made it a point to follow her blog!
As for learning a little bit more about me through this post: I believe my full-length essays have value insofar as they address some sort of universal truth, and the only way to get at those truths is to go personal — to talk about the things inside your secret heart. To that end, I could’ve just rattled off a bunch of characters from fiction I love here, but it seemed to me the post was only worth writing if I talked about why these particular characters resonated with me so profoundly — and that meant going into personal stuff I’m slightly uncomfortable with airing. But if the thought of someone reading what you’ve written doesn’t make you a little uncomfortable, it probably ain’t worth a damn!
The animated feature Charlotte’s Web (from 1973) used to air every Thanksgiving Friday on local TV when I was a kid, and my sister and I would watch it and weep our faces off every year! Later, in third grade, I read all three of E.B. White’s children’s books — Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan — all of which have stayed with me in a profound way.
My wife, also a moody teen (hey, it was the grunge era!), loved Hardy and the Brontës, too, and introduced me to both. One of the first gifts she gave me, in fact, was a copy of The Mayor of Casterbridge (which I still have), and two summers ago, we named a litter of kittens we were fostering Charlotte, Anne, and Emily.
You cite Cinema Paradiso as a film that “stuck” to you, and even though it is an Academy Award–winner, it’s probably not a movie that most audiences are familiar with. When I think about some of the movies I never forgot, more often than not they fall into a similar category: little-seen and barely remembered. In the 1990s, when I was a cinema-studies student, my favorite films weren’t the Batmans and the Die Hards, but rather things like Smoke (which I wrote about here and referenced here) and Cop Land (a star-studded policier no one remembers, but features an arguably career-best performance from Sylvester Stallone). I cherish those movies, because the blockbusters that seize the zeitgeist, like Star Wars, belong to everybody, but movies like Smoke and Cop Land feel like belong just to me.
Thanks for taking some time to pop by, Diana; your participation is always welcome and appreciated. Hope you’re enjoying the waning days of summer, dear friend…
Still behind and catching up here (at 4:15 a.m., no less). For me, it’s hard to delineate between characters I admired, characters I wished I could be and characters I related to because of who they and I were at the time. And… well, it’s 4:00 a.m., so it may be beyond my currently ability to discern.
That said, I related to Charlie from Stephen King’s Firestarter, the reasons for which I discussed in a previous blog post of mine entitled becoming.
About as far from that as one can get in many ways, I also related strongly with Anne from Anne of Green Gables. I never felt like I belonged. In my mind, I was ugly. The community in which I lived was backward and religious, fully of gossips. My intelligence, while of benefit to me, was a source of ridicule. I envied having a single best friend, like Diana. I perpetually lived in two worlds: one of harsh realities and one of fantasy. I was strong and independent. I could go on and on.
As a teen, I strongly identified with the character Garion from David Eddings’ The Belgariad and The Mallorean book series. I felt I lived in a world of secrets being kept, and often that the fate of the world rested on my shoulders. It was the beginning of realizing how many people confused liking me for liking what I could do for them.
For similar reasons, I found myself identifying with Karen Miller’s character Ash from the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker (“Mage”) series of books: losing too much of myself, losing people I cared about without warning, and having many people (again, often within religion) spurn or seek to punish me for not falling in line with their way of thinking.
Oddly, despite all of what sounds like a life of angst and sadness, this doesn’t describe my life. I think books and movies at key times have always helped me process the darker sides of life in a healthy way, such that I can leave it there and continue to choose to be happy and open.
Erik,
Thank you for sharing these examples with such candor — and at such an ungodly hour, no less! I appreciate your efforts to catch up on the posts you’ve missed while you were on vacation, but please don’t feel the need to comment on every one! It’s enough that you read them, and a bonus that you always internalize them so thoughtfully.
What I love about each character you’ve cited is that they hail from different literary genres, written in different eras, created by authors of different sexes and biographical backgrounds. It seems all the characters with whom you identify — and I am only personally familiar with Firestarter and Anne of Green Gables (I don’t read a lot of epic fantasy because I find it takes me too long!) — wrestle with being (or at least feeling like) outsiders. I think that is certainly true of Scott Howard and Claudia from my own list. We all know what that feels like. To that end, I am really enjoying the new TV series Mixed-ish, a spin-off prequel to Black-ish that chronicles 12-year-old Rainbow Johnson’s (Tracee Ellis Ross) experiences growing up in a mixed-race family in the 1980s. It’s written from a place of real emotional honesty, portraying a particular life experience (and corresponding POV) that I haven’t previously seen represented in commercial entertainment.
Fiction is indeed a very healthy way to make sense of the world, and our own complicated (and ever-shifting) place in it. My recently completed novella, Spex, is a dark fantasy about two 12-year-old boys (also in the ’80s) who come into possession of a pair of magically functional X-ray glasses, but it’s really about what it means to be at that critical developmental juncture between childhood and adolescence, when wonder gives way to disillusionment. I don’t think of Spex as a happy or sad story, just a human one, with all the complexities and ambiguities that entails.
And beyond contextualizing experiences we can relate to, fiction is just as valuable — perhaps more so — when it puts us in the head of a character with whom we don’t immediately identify (like Mixed-ish does for me); in recognizing the undeniable humanity of someone unlike us, we stretch the limits of our own empathy. Stories do that. Fictional worlds very much have the capacity to change the actual world. That’s true magic!
Thanks for weighing-in with some great personal case studies, Erik. Hope you’re gearing up for a happy holiday season ahead…
Sean
Congrats on completing Spex! When do these go beyond “imaginary” (to me) and into … real fiction I can read? (How’s that for an oxymoron?)
I went to the Boston Book Festival last weekend and happened to catch Maulik Pancholy on a panel. Having previously been on the TV show 30 Rock, and continuing to act on stage, he’s now turned to writing. I picked up a copy of his recently completed debut—a middle-grades novel called The Best At It. This book is for pre-teens, not for someone “my age,” and features a character and culture that would seem on the surface unlike myself. Yet I read it in a sitting and felt connected to the character nonetheless (as I did to Bilbo Baggins and a host of other characters “unlike me”). I think part of the success of a story is the storyteller and writer; but part of it is also the openness of the reader or listener or viewer to connect. Not much will save a bad book or movie; but I think empathetic, introspective people can relate to a lot more by way of genre and difference from self than can a surface reader or … how to say … solely consumeristic reader / viewer.
Soon, I hope. I’m actually doing a (fairly) light rewrite of Spex this week — beta-readers have overwhelmingly responded with the most favorable feedback I’ve ever received — at which point I have a few industry contacts I’d like to forward it to, in the hope of perhaps finding a home for it (as well as the previous m.s.) in 2020. But given my lofty degree of faith in the project, I certainly have plans to move forward aggressively…
Literature is an active pastime, whereas filmed entertainment — not that it’s without its virtues — is passive. A novel requires the reader to meet the writer halfway, bringing his attention, open-mindedness, imagination, and his own life experiences to the proceedings. It’s a participatory art. We watch movies together, in a theater or a living room, because each of us has basically has the same experience — if not always the same reaction — when we see Rambo or Interview with the Vampire or The Lord of the Rings.
But when we read those books — Rambo or Interview with the Vampire or Lord of the Rings — not only are our narrative experiences wholly unique unto themselves, but they are unsharable; they exist only in the lockbox of our cerebra. You’re an Anne Rice fan, Erik, but what you experienced when you read those books is based on what you brought to the readings; your singular imagination met Rice halfway in an entirely different metaphysical headspace than mine did. That’s the gift books can give us: Whereas movies present to us the same fictional world, books bring each of us into one unique world that’s part of an infinite multiverse. My literary experiences in Middle-earth, or at Hogwarts, or in Tana French’s Dublin aren’t your experiences. They’re similar, sure — much the same way we can both visit the same city and see the same tourist attractions — but they are not the same.
And because books force us to see through the eyes of a character in a world our imagination must partially construct (active), rather than watching that character act and react on a fully set-dressed stage (passive), they become invaluable exercises in empathy-building. Great storytellers do more than merely entertain us; they make us more empathetic.
I’ve always been able to identify with Rose from Lost. Everybody is always running around like a chicken with its head cut off, getting into this and that, and she just wants to stay out of it. She’s happy to be a part of the community, but doesn’t want to deal with any of the extra, needless drama. That is me to a T.
There’s also Scarlett O’Hara. I’m not really like her in most ways, but she has zero patience for fools, and every time she flipped her lid because she had to deal with picayune BS when she’s trying to do the most basic tasks so the family can survive, I was like “Yes! She gets it!” She’s actually on my Mount Rushmore of favorite literary characters of all time with Roland Deschain and Severus Snape. They’re always on there, but the fourth spot changes depending on my mood. Contenders are Sara Crewe, Jim Hawkins, Atticus Finch, Mowgli, and maybe Mr. Jarndyce, Tarzan, and Rand Al’Thor from the second tier… not that you asked about favorite characters which you mentioned “come in spades.” Plus, you were talking movies, and I lapsed into book characters. My apologies.
I could also really related to Gordie LaChance once upon a time.
Oh, wow, Pierce — what a great, eclectic mix of characters! Thanks for sharing this! (And no need to apologize for “lapsing into book characters.” Two of the three characters I cited in this piece — Claudia and Frank Mackey — are literary creations, even if they were later adapted for the screen. I very much fell in love with Claudia and Frank on the page.)
It’s a testament to the power of literature (and by that I mean all modes of fiction, including screen storytelling) that we can see ourselves in so many varied personalities. Throughout my life, there have been many characters I’ve looked up to aspirationally, even if I didn’t exactly relate to them, like Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop and Beverly Hills Cop II when I was a spirited junior-high-school student.
Around that same time, I loved Charlie Sheen’s “Wild Thing” pitcher from David S. Ward’s Major League. But just as I was turning 40, my screenwriting career imploded, and all of a sudden I was a middle-aged man trying like hell to get one last shot to “make it.” Needless to say, Tom Berenger’s wobbly kneed catcher Jake Taylor became identifiable to me in a way he hadn’t been previously… and in a way Ricky Vaughn had never been. So, even though Major League has been a favorite movie of mine since I snuck into a theater to see it in the spring of ’89 — a time period you and I were recently discussing, as it happens — it was only at midlife that I related to Jake, related to what it was like to have experienced personal/professional derailment owed to a mix of bad luck and bad choices, and found myself wondering if redemption was even possible… or if it was too late for that.
With respect to aspirational characters, I published an appreciation for Ted Lasso, who is the kind of hero I wish had been around — on TV and in real life — when I was a kid.
This past spring, I wrote a love letter to the much-maligned Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie called “Into Each Generation a Slayer Is Born,” and I talked about how I directly identified with Luke Perry’s Pike when I saw that movie at 16. Even to this day, it’s one of the most accurate representations of who I was at the time I saw the movie: a good kid; a social outcast; a misunderstood loner. I find that movie to be much more emotionally relatable than the celebrated TV series it spawned, which is a misogynistic revenge fantasy deceptively masquerading as a feminist-empowerment narrative.
Stand by Me was and remains the finest story about being a 12-year-old boy ever produced. My four-member grade-school gang had an analog for every one of those characters: We had the sensitive writer (Gordie), the smart kid everyone had prematurely written off owed to his family’s bad reputation (Chris), the goofy sidekick (Vern), and the kid who nursed an obsessive fascination with the military (Teddy) as well as an unconfronted hatred for his father. (That last boy is the only one of our group I am no longer in touch with, and haven’t been for many decades.) Even though I grew up in the Bronx of the 1980s, not rural Oregon of the ’50s, I’ve never seen a movie (or read a book, because I love The Body, too) that more accurately captures the spirit of my own boyhood.
Hey, thanks for sharing some of the characters that have spoken to you throughout your lifetime. I’d always hoped this post would inspire robust conversation, but for whatever reason it kind of stalled out. Thanks for keeping the dream alive, pal!