Two Mondays ago, my dad and I took a roadtrip through a hectic part of the country called North Jersey so I could check out a potential graduate program at William Paterson University. After experiencing several close collisions within the town of Paterson (which I would compare to downtown DC), I'm not completely sure which direction to take: grad school or the work environment. Hopefully that decision will be made before the end of the year.
What inspired me most about this trip was the two hours I spent in a small classroom, looped into a half-circle with eight graduate students and a professor from the Creative and Professional Writing Program, listening to the students present their mock-lesson plans for an Intro to Creative Writing Fiction class. Now, nonfiction is more my forte (any fiction I write is so heavily based in past experiences that it severely challenges the genre) but the methods by which these students broke down the elements of creating believable characters could even work as to a checklist when writing about actual people.
The one exercise that stuck out most to me was a challenge to avoid writing black-and-white characters, the characters who are either completely good or completely evil. For every good quality, the student/writer would have to create a negative trait, and vice versa. It's definitely a great way to add some realism to fictional characters, because as much as we'd like to believe, there is no black-and-white in the human condition. All the best people have flaws. And as much as we'd like to believe otherwise, evil people have at least a tiny ray of positive nature.
I won't focus on the latter because this is a heated, and for some, close to home issue given the recent terrorist attacks. But this realization really made me stop and think about it. Sure, we'd all like to believe that we're doing the right thing and yes, we have faults, but doesn't everyone? And then there are the people we just can't stand. Not inherently bad people, but they have hurt me in the past and it's hard to see beyond that pain. Across the board, however, we're pretty similar in the realm of between positive and negative personas.
I played around with this list, placing myself in the role of the character, and tried to balance it out. Here's what I came up with:
Creative Insecure about my abilities
Sets goals high so I can challenge myself Easily distracted
Tries to put others first Has difficulty getting beyond hurts in the past
Adventurous Afraid of the unknown
Passionate about what I love Has difficulty getting beyond my own POV
This is a great challenge to take as a writer, but also as a regular human being. Being a writer doesn't just mean creating stories and characters: it forces you to have a deeper understanding of the human condition and to convey that through your writing.
I have a lot of people to thank for this understanding, especially my creative writing professors: Colin Rafferty, Jon Pineda and Warren Rochelle. Thanks so much for your support and instruction - I promise to make the most of it!
Cheers,
Victoria
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