The Essence of Bravery

Over at her blog A Wanderer in the Shadowed Land, Rosamund Gregory has started up a meme of her own: character letters.  It is an exercise designed to get the writer into the head of the character (it's dark in here!) by writing them in first person, and as such, it makes a splendid complement to the Beautiful People series.  To put it in Rosamund's words:

"There are a great many awesome "programs" of a sort for blogging writers--such as Beautiful People and Snippets of a Story--but I've noticed that most of them are in the third person. This is not wrong, of course, but it's very good to be able to get inside one's characters' minds in order to understand them. Even if you're writing in third person, you learn new things about your friends that you would never have known otherwise."

She has posted all the guidelines and those lovely things here and the very first edition, with the link-up and such, is here.  I'm afraid my entry does not follow the prompts very well, but hopefully no one will mind.  This letter is from Tip to his mother back home.  He writes on plain paper in a rather cramped, painstaking hand; put a quill in his hand and he seizes up (as if he wasn't awkward enough before), and so he tends to write out each word as though his life depends on its neatness.  He has no artistic talent and doesn't "doodle," but the edges of the page are severely blotted from his tendency to hold the quill sideways when he stops to think.  Also, he signs with his Christian name.

28 November, 1803 
Syracuse, Sicily 

Dear Mother,

This is no good. I must have begun the letter three times now, and I cannot seem to write beyond the first line. I was never much good at letter-writing, you know. Being so far from home seems not to have changed that.

Your letter reached me today, and only three months late, at that. There was a packet ship, the Lizzie Blue, waiting for us here in Syracuse when we dropped anchor; I’ll send my reply back with her, though God alone knows when she will make port again. Strange to think that with all my effort to write this, it may never reach you at all. If it does not, and if you never read this line, I hope you will know I tried.

I hardly know what to say to you, Mother. I know you must be thinking nearly five months have passed and in that time I have never once written, and for that I have no excuse but the one you already know, that things were very difficult when I left. Looking back I can see that it was difficult for you, too, and that I made life hard for you and Father both, but at the time I could not bring myself to write, and now my words have rusted—if I ever had them to begin with. Everything I think of to tell you how sorry I am, to tell you how I wish Molly were still with you, sounds callous even to myself. But I am sorry, and I do wish it. I know how much you loved her.

We have had our own death this past month, while we were at Gibraltar. I won’t upset you by telling you about it, only say that it was sudden and hit me harder than it ought. For I only knew him less than six months—less than half a year, Mother!—and yet it hurt as badly as your letter. Does that make sense to you? It makes very little to me.

Mother, I am finding out that I am not brave. I had never thought much about it before, but now it stares me in the face every day. Not that the idea of war or even the nearer thought of coming against a Tripolitan frightens me more than it does the next man; no, but it is living that is so hard. So often in the morning I wake up and feel ill with the thought of the day—and yet it gives me, too, a sort of hard satisfaction in the rising. Perhaps that is the greatest lesson the sea and the Navy will ever teach me.

Even my rusty words are spent now. So I will tell you only that I love you, and ask that you give my love to Father and tell him that I will try—that I am trying—to make him proud. I know I am not Harriet and will never make up for her, but I hope, all the same, that you will be proud of me.

Your rebellious son is not very rebellious tonight, Mother. He is simply tired.

With love,

Edward.

Thoughts on Thinking

 "There is no doubt that some people who look intelligent, are intelligent; and there is no doubt that some people who look idiotic, are idiots."

- arthur c. custance, genesis and early man

But whether idiotic or intelligent, all people do think after one fashion or another.  Self-conscious thought is one feature of Man that is uniquely his, an element of what it means to possess the Imago Dei, and I don't believe any scientist or doctor has yet proved that it can ever be lost to a human being. 

This is not, however, to be a particularly philosophical post - all breathe a sigh of relief!  I want instead to take a peek at how this profoundly common action of thinking plays a role in the lives of our characters. Naturally, the way our characters think will be reflected in the way they speak; but it comes out even more starkly and with less polish in what the Experts call "internal dialogue."  (I'm not sure who thought that was a good phrase to use for it.  It makes me think of some gastronomic complaint.)  These are simply the character's private thoughts, the ones he never actually voices, but which are recorded so that the reader can get a peep inside the his mind.  In "stream-of-consciousness" stories, as far as I can make out, the story is driven and formed entirely by the narrator's thoughts; but in most novels, the internal dialogue is limited to a few italicized lines here and there when the protagonist's thoughts need to be known.

Internal dialogue is a very useful thing, especially when you feel yourself drifting away from the narrator's point-of-view, but until recently I had never stopped and considered it in detail.  Internal dialogue was simply the character's thoughts, and I wrote them as they came to me and seemed necessary.  However, the other day as I was looking over my writing it occurred to me that neither real people nor characters think in exactly the same manner; the voice of one protagonist's thoughts will likely not be the same as the voice of another protagonist's thoughts.  (I do keep coming back to voice, don't I?)

For instance, at the time when this realization popped up, I was comparing the two narrators of The White Sail's Shaking - Tip Brighton and Marta Rais.  They are very different characters and neither talk nor think in the same manner.  Tip talks to himself, aloud and in his own head, so that in many of his thoughts he refers to himself in the second person.  Marta, on the other hand, is much more normal: she thinks of herself as an "I."  This actually makes her more difficult to write.  In the scenes where Tip is alone, there can be that invisible "second character" - his own projection of himself - to allow for some dialogue; with Marta, I have discovered that I can't use the same technique.  Instead, I'll probably have to go back through her scenes and give her something physical to talk to, like Scipio.

Another interesting thing to consider is how one character's way of thinking can develop through a story.  Even more words seem to be written about "character arc" than are written about "internal dialogue," but it seems to me that when as a protagonist matures, he or she has to mature in the fundamental area of thought as well as in action.  Although the character himself does not essentially change from page one to the end (just as we don't essentially change from childhood to adulthood), every aspect of his life is altered to one degree or another.  The very manner in which he looks at the world will be different, maybe vastly, maybe only a little.

What comes first to mind could either be an example or a counter-example, depending on how you look at it.  Whichever it is, it comes in the form of Margaret Mitchell's much-reviled character Scarlett O'Hara.  Throughout the story there is a recurring theme in Scarlett's thoughts: "I'll think about (whatever) tomorrow."  It comes up repeatedly and reflects Scarlett's unwillingness to stop and consider her own actions, to consider the world around her in an at least semi-objective manner.  This theme carries through all the way to the end and to the climactic scene, where Rhett has left her and Scarlett is sitting alone in her house, thinking about what she can possibly do next.  And then she recalls Tara.  Tara, which she loves above everything else, which is more important to her than anyone or anything in the world.  She'll go back to Tara.  And with that of course comes the famous last line: "After all, tomorrow is another day."

This ending drives home the fact that Scarlett has not changed - and yet, at the same time, it shows that she has changed.  Only a little, I'll grant you, but in the phrasing of that last quote there is a subtle development.  Previously her line was, "I'll think about it tomorrow."  At the end it becomes, "Tomorrow is another day."  And there is a difference in that, because in a way she is facing rather than hiding from the future.  Even a character like Scarlett does have something of an arc.

So internal dialogue, gross as the phrase may be, is really a fascinating and useful little thing.  It doesn't usually play a massive part in a story, but the part it does play is important and just plain interesting to consider.  How do your characters think?  Looking back over the course of a story, have you ever been surprised to see developments that you never planned?  I certainly have - and I think it may be one of the most rewarding aspects of writing.