When characters do the unthinkable

Thanks for starting this discussion, Ruv. I'm hating the inadequacy it makes me feel but hoping it will do me good in the end.
Your list, for instance:

Ruv Draba said:

• Slow down
• Ask questions
• Seek the uncomfortable
• Be contrarian
• Nurture the perverse
• Question received wisdom
• Rattle the paradigms
• Try making passionate arguments for things we don't believe, and see if they're just as good as the things we do

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is really excellent, and I can't think of a thing to add to it. And yet -

Could such a process have arrived at Wuthering Heights? I think so. Did it? I have no idea.

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I don't think it did. From what we know of Emily, she never set out to 'think the unthinkable' and was actually profoundly distressed at the way in which her novel was received. For her, Heathcliff simply was, and she had no idea that to other people he would be received as a perverse monster.

Emily was a genius. But studying the Brontes' lives in any depth immediately helps us realize how much of what they were depended on absence of things, rather than adding them on top. They didn't read 'novels' in the same way others did - Charlotte had never even read Austen until her publisher made her. They read political newspapers, had no lively social intercourse, they wandered the moors and skipped about the graveyards. They had enormous intellect, but very little life experience - and had therefore not developed the brakes civilisation normally imposes.

For me, there's a profound truth in there somewhere. 'Taking off the brakes' can't finally be done by adding sophisticated layers of logical thought. We can produce a damn good imitation that way, and the geniuses of sci-fi (starting with H.G. Wells and even Asimov) have proved it. But the 'unthinkable as human knowledge so far goes' is not for me the same thing as the utterly unthinkable.

For me, taking off the brakes is not a process of adding but of stripping. Taking away the conventions one didn't even realize were strangling imagination. Taking away inhibitions. Taking away received knowledge and fashionable concepts. Finding what's really there underneath. For the 'unthinkable' to work, it needs ironically to be also recognizable - so that we not only didn't see it coming, but also acknowledge its absolute truth when it does.

Children think the unthinkable all the time. Cutesy magazines and blogs quote them constantly - OMG, you'll never believe what my five year old just said!!! What they say is only 'funny' because somewhere in an unacknowledged part of us we recognize their truth.

I'm with MAP here:

MAP said:

I think our subconscious mind is much smarter then our conscious mind. I think in our creative endeavors, we make better choices instinctively then we do rationally. The "soul" aspect of writing is part of our messy emotional human side. It is apart of the reason we love reading stories, the reason we fall in love, the reason we get frightened at things we rationally know don't exist, and why faith sometimes supersedes intellect. The things that make us human. At least that is my take on it.

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A decent writer is someone who can plumb down to the sub-conscious. A top one can go deeper and mine the unconscious. A genius has a direct line through to Jung's 'collective unconscious' and can tap directly into the archetypes recognized by every nation throughout the world and throughout history. Shakespeare, for instance...

That's, er, kind of beyond me. I know only that to get to the place where the 'good stuff' is I need to strip off a lot of other things. Some use alcohol to do it. Some use caffeine, nicotine or harder drugs still. Some use music. A friend of mine eschews tight clothing and can only write in a floppy dressing gown, which is the nearest she can get in our rotten climate to writing nude.

Weird? Maybe. But it's why many of the early comments in this thread aren't as irrelevant as they may have seemed. Those who speak of characters taking over are on exactly the same lines. It isn't always for us to dictate our story, sometimes what we need to do is shut up and listen.

A great piece of music we hear for the first time sounds familiar - and a great composer will often say he didn't make it up, he just wrote down what he heard. I believe that.

I don't believe this:

There is no such thing as an original idea.

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In one sense I do, in that everything we think of probably already exists in our unconscious, but I don't think all of it's yet been written. I don't think we're even close. There are only a limited number of musical notes, and I don't believe every piece of possible music has been written. There are a lot more words than music notes, and human variation itself has far more permutations even than that.

I think we've scratched the surface pretty well, and in some areas we've damn well covered it with graffiti. To astonish we may well not be able to move wider, but I really do think we can go deeper.

Not me probably . I rarely get even close. But it's there sometimes, tingling on the edge of the mind when I wake at 4.00am, and I dream one day I'll be able to snatch it in time before the conscious mind crashes in like a dirty great Monty Python foot.

Sometimes I wonder if 'think the unthinkable' actually means it's better not to think at all....

Louise

Here are some thoughts by Shaw Ryan on a successful TV show he created, The Shield. It may be relevant to this discussion.

I will take credit for one decision I made early on that I think benefited the show tremendously, and that was after that first season where we got a lot of praise, we won some awards, my first instinct at beginning of the second season was I said, "I think the success of the show will come from going smaller rather than trying to go bigger."
Meaning, that, there was a lot of ass-kicking and out there sort of stuff. And it's not that the show didn't do that again, but the show to me became more and more and more personal to the characters over the years, and that's why I think we were able to keep it going. And it got to that point of being so personal that literally in these final two episodes you have whole segments which is just the camera on an unspeaking character and yet you've lived with them and gone through the journey with them for so many seasons that you understand what they're thinking, even if you don't necessarily empathize with them.
And I think that was a key to the longevity of the show, was not trying to say, "Boy, you know, we did all this outrageous stuff, what can we do that's more outrageous?" I think the show became less outrageous over the years, and I think if we had gone the other direction I think we would have flamed out quicker.

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The Shield is the most astonishing TV show I've ever seen.

Sons of Anarchy is excellent as well, but the most astonishing show nowadays is Breaking Bad. It 'plays with the socially unthinkable' as much as The Shield. But given that none of these shows are very popular, maybe astonishment isn't high on the list of what most people want from fiction. Maybe we are astonishment addicts, always on the lookout for the next thrill. Maybe people don't understand what you mean by 'unthinkable' because they never read books that make their hands shake and render them temporarily unable to understand writing (it happened to me).

Ruv Draba said:

When do your characters do the unthinkable? Why do you have them do that? When do you prefer them to simply do the unexpected? Why?

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If it's unthinkable for them then I have a problem since it would be out of character. Why would they do something out of character? I've been told that my characters sometimes surprise my readers, but not, I think, because of acting out of character. They tend to do what they feel they must because of who they are. If I had to force them to do the unexpected when it wasn't what that character would do I would feel that I had failed as a writer.

I don't write to rattle paradigms, and I hope the passionate arguments I make are for the things my characters believe, not what I do. I know for sure that anyone reading my novel will guess wrong at my religious beliefs.

Albannach said:

If it's unthinkable for them then I have a problem since it would be out of character. Why would they do something out of character? I've been told that my characters sometimes surprise my readers, but not, I think, because of acting out of character. They tend to do what they feel they must because of who they are. If I had to force them to do the unexpected when it wasn't what that character would do I would feel that I had failed as a writer.

I don't write to rattle paradigms, and I hope the passionate arguments I make are for the things my characters believe, not what I do. I know for sure that anyone reading my novel will guess wrong at my religious beliefs.

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But people act out of character in real life. Those are the stories that fascinate me the most I use a lot of that in my work; it's probably why I write.

Swordswoman said:

I don't believe this:
There is no such thing as an original idea.

In one sense I do, in that everything we think of probably already exists in our unconscious, but I don't think all of it's yet been written. I don't think we're even close. There are only a limited number of musical notes, and I don't believe every piece of possible music has been written. There are a lot more words than music notes, and human variation itself has far more permutations even than that.

I think we've scratched the surface pretty well, and in some areas we've damn well covered it with graffiti.

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It's speculation whether there are ideas that no one has ever thought of. New ideas come as a product of a new time and environment- until we are in a radically new one, we will essentially be writing variations on ideas that already exist.

It's futile to try and write something totally 'original' unless you are somewhere far up on druggy celestial planes. Lots of writers think they have to write something totally original so instead of going for quality, they go for obscurity and just being awkward.

Lady Ice said:

It's speculation whether there are ideas that no one has ever thought of.

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Yes, of course . It's speculation as to whether there remains new music to be written or pictures to be painted. I'm a believer, but I know that's not true of everyone.

New ideas come as a product of a new time and environment- until we are in a radically new one, we will essentially be writing variations on ideas that already exist.

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This is absolutely true of some aspects of fiction. Dickens could not have conceived or written 'Hard Times' before the industrial revolution. 2001 could certainly not have been written before the invention of the computer, or at least the dream of space travel.

But was Iago a product of Shakespeare's 'time and environment'? Was Heathcliff a product of Bronte's? Personally I don't think so.

Even with those characters or ideas largely shaped by their society, those questions remain. Lady Chatterley must have existed for hundred of years - but why did no-one write her before Lawrence, especially in the days when such books need not be banned? Scarlett O'Hara had already been and gone with her environment, but what changed between 1936 and 1937 except that Mitchell wrote 'Gone with the Wind'? Children haven't changed in centuries, but our perception did forever when Golding wrote 'Lord of the Flies'. People have always said 'there are no new ideas' until somebody goes and comes up with them. Unless the 21st century is indeed radically different from every other that's preceded it, I think the odds are in favour of a few new ones occuring this time too.

At least I hope so. They almost certainly won't be mine, but that doesn't make me hope they won't be someone's - if only because I'd like to read them.

It's futile to try and write something totally 'original' unless you are somewhere far up on druggy celestial planes. Lots of writers think they have to write something totally original so instead of going for quality, they go for obscurity and just being awkward.

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You could be right here. I'm not even sure the 'druggy celestial planes' would work in themselves, since the only established writer I know of who deliberately and consciously tried it for that purpose (de Quincy) was ultimately pretty mediocre. I don't think Thomas or Hemingway, for instance, necessarily chose alcohol with that purpose in mind - from my (limited) knowledge, they would have been drinkers whether they wrote or not. Keats, Coleridge and the rest of them? Maybe. I don't enough about their 'sober' writing to tell one way or the other, so I'm not qualified to comment.

Where I certainly agree is the problem of people trying too hard for originality. It can work in comedy perhaps (Jane Austen with Zombies!!!) and occurs relentlessly on TV, where Come Dancing becomes Celebrity Come Dancing, becomes Celebrity Come Dancing On Ice. It's also common in theatre, where directors set plays in the nude or play Othello as white, or stage oral rape scenes (recently happened in the UK) just for the shock value with the audience. It's where novels (and TV series) can just escalate nastiness on nastiness in the bid to go further than last time - and why I love Mad Queen's example of 'The Shield' as a show that avoided exactly that.

I'm not so familiar with it in novels, though - do you have something particular in mind, with the 'obscurity and just being awkward' point? I've heard 'Ulysses' described that way, but to me it is original. It's not my personal taste, but I can see a radically different world-view there, and what Joyce seems to me to be grappling with is not the desire to be different, but the urge to make his different vision comprehensible. Is it a different area altogether you're thinking of?

Either way, gimmickry or strained originality isn't 'thinking the unthinkable' for me, except possibly in the simplest area of breaking the (acknowledged) taboos. As I've already said, I'm not even sure originality can be this consciously 'tried for' - and people like Bronte weren't even aware they were doing it. She wrote what she saw - and it happened to be original.

None of us can do more than that. We all write the world as we 'see' it - and if we see it in exactly the same way as everyone else, then perhaps we have just that much less worth communicating. I don't think for a moment I have anything better - I just aspire to it, that's all.

And for me, so far, the best and clearest advice is Ruv's right here:

But professional writers (arguably) need to astonish with (nearly) every attempt. So we can rediscover our childlike astonishment by being kidlike, but (I'd argue) that we also need (or would benefit from) method that (hopefully) doesn't take us six drafts like M. Night Shyamalan before we find that there was a saleable story waiting for us -- or (worse!) ten drafts to find that there wasn't.
I don't think that we can get by on knowing nothing. But I think there's a strong case to know a lot, think a lot then forget it all.

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I wish I'd written that.
Which I suppose in a way is what this whole thread is about

Louise

Swordswoman said:

Yes, of course . It's speculation as to whether there remains new music to be written or pictures to be painted. I'm a believer, but I know that's not true of everyone.



This is absolutely true of some aspects of fiction. Dickens could not have conceived or written 'Hard Times' before the industrial revolution. 2001 could certainly not have been written before the invention of the computer, or at least the dream of space travel.

But was Iago a product of Shakespeare's 'time and environment'? Was Heathcliff a product of Bronte's? Personally I don't think so.

Even with those characters or ideas largely shaped by their society, those questions remain. Lady Chatterley must have existed for hundred of years - but why did no-one write her before Lawrence, especially in the days when such books need not be banned? Scarlett O'Hara had already been and gone with her environment, but what changed between 1936 and 1937 except that Mitchell wrote 'Gone with the Wind'? Children haven't changed in centuries, but our perception did forever when Golding wrote 'Lord of the Flies'. People have always said 'there are no new ideas' until somebody goes and comes up with them. Unless the 21st century is indeed radically different from every other that's preceded it, I think the odds are in favour of a few new ones occuring this time too.
Louise

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The character's role was nicked from Shakespeare's source story. It's the way that Shakespeare took an idea and adapted and refined it that makes it seem original to us. Personal ability does have a great deal to do with it- Shakespeare was adept at drama and language. Emily Bronte presumably had a muse in the wild moors. A writer's ability to observe and extract is what separates them from us mere mortal writers

As for Chatterley, Lawrence wandered around a lot, so he had a chance to experience many different environments- and he had novels about sexuality prior to Chatterley. And he was gutsy enough to write it.

If you think about a dream, it may be lucid and incoherent and wonderful as you dream it, but in the morning you can trace it back to the tiniest little things. It is actually a composition of your experiences and observations- things that already exist.

One of my main characters loves junk food, most especially McDonald's. I hope she never invites me out to lunch.

Ruv Draba said:

I don't think it's so hard to construct fresh ideas. It's sufficient to take the ideas of the day and invert one or combine them. For example, these days we generally believe that:

1. hard work makes happiness; and
2. the environment should be protected.

So suppose we invert the first (hard work makes misery) and add the second -- what does it get us?

That the environment should be protected by forbidding people from work.
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Is that totally original? I don't know but it's an utterly new and fairly unthinkable idea to me.

Or suppose we invert the second and add it. We get:

That hard work makes happiness and therefore the environment should be destroyed.
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Another fun idea, perhaps even more satirical than the first.

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Yes, but no offence, both sound like they would make pretty bad novels because the idea is so silly and it's asking too much to get the reader to stretch their imaginations to encompass something which isn't grounded in anything to do with nature.
You have to be a very good/charming writer to get away with absurdism.

Lady Ice said:

Yes, but no offence, both sound like they would make pretty bad novels because the idea is so silly and it's asking too much to get the reader to stretch their imaginations to encompass something which isn't grounded in anything to do with nature.
You have to be a very good/charming writer to get away with absurdism.

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I disagree. I think you could make the point that working implies destroying the environment, since hominids were destroying trees to make spears so they could hunt and lead several species to extinction. And making tools and building things is what make us human, isn't it? It's hardly absurd. You just have to play devil's advocate.

Lady Ice said:

Yes, but no offence, both sound like they would make pretty bad novels because the idea is so silly and it's asking too much to get the reader to stretch their imaginations to encompass something which isn't grounded in anything to do with nature.
You have to be a very good/charming writer to get away with absurdism.

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Er.....

How are those ideas not grounded in nature? Before this century those were strongly held ideals. In some parts of the world they still are. To our ancestors, the very notion that we could do enough damage to actually destroy nature was absurd. That's what led to the demise of the passenger pigeons, woodland bison, and near demise of the great plains bison among other species.

Even the Nazis put the motto "Arbeit Macht Frei" above the entrances of the concentration camps. Roughly translated: Work will set you free. Yeah they were evil, but someone believed it.

I also think you're seriously underestimating the intelligence and creativity of readers out there, in their ability to stretch their minds around unfamiliar concepts.

It was unthinkable for Oedipus to kill his father and marry his mother -- utterly out of character for him -- and yet he did.

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No, it was not because he acted out of ignorance. His acts of killing and marriage were very much within his character. He had no control over his ignorance of his parentage.

It's utterly out of character for a pair of homebody hobbits to walk across the world to the most evil place in the world, carrying the most evil item in the world, and yet...

King Midas was certain that a golden touch would bring him joy, however...

Have you ever known someone to say 'I could never...', or 'I couldn't stand it if...', or 'It's not possible that...', or 'I'd love it if...' but be wrong?

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No, because that is NOT acting out of character.

Exceeding ones' own expectation is NOT the same as acting out of character. It would have been acting out of character had the hobbits been evil beings. Wanting to DO GOOD was very MUCH in character for them as was caring for each other.

You are totally twisting what I said rather deliberately.

What makes a good story is putting characters where they have to face the unexpected and make choices (leave the shire with Frodo? Or let him go on alone?) that they find unthinkable.

Ruv Draba said:

Well, it doesn't matter because the idea didn't have to be viable to prove the point. If you don't like that idea, just take some other examples until you find one you do like.

But I think it is very viable. Here's an example.

Theme:

Hard work makes happiness, so the environment should be destroyed.
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Premise:

Gorfle is a dwarven Master Miner whose mining activities are being threatened by protesting elves. Something to do with the eggsalts from his tailings dam killing a bunch of trees further down the mountain. To make matters worse, the humans who normally buy his copper are importing from overseas, the arse has fallen out of his ore prices for three years running, and he's had to let a lot of his staff go. Worse still is that the younger generation of dwarfs has grown lazy -- hanging out in human towns, swilling beer, chatting up the elven girls, going to anti-mine protests and forgetting the mining and smithing skills of their forefathers. He can't find a decent apprentice for love nor lager -- and he's tried both. The whole dwarven race is going to rack and ruin!

But the worst of it all is, Gorfle is dying. He's the last Master Miner of his people, and he wants to pass his skills onto someone before he goes.
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Do you still think it's not viable?

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The problem with that is that it doesn't fit the second part of the theme. Destroying the environment is merely incidental to the plot you describe and not an aim. Nothing in that says that the environment SHOULD be destroyed, merely that he doesn't care if his aims harm others.