To and Frollo
I've always been a fan of method acting. I had an early translation of the Stanislavski System I used as an insomnia cure in my early to mid teens. The method is (very briefly and simplified) you identify the feelings and emotions of the character in the scene you wish to portray and find a personal memory or experience that is sideways comparable to what the character is going through and use it to literally evoke truthful feelings in your own body and mind using the character as a lens to shape and distort. Let's say for example, your character is a gargoyle on Notre Dame Cathedral and is in a scene where she realizes her only human friend (a certain hunchback) isn't going to survive the mess he's gotten himself into by ignoring her advice. You find memories where real life friends have gotten themselves into less fatal but no less self-perpetuated messes and focus on remembering exactly how this made you feel. What parts of your body reacted? What thoughts ran through your head? What emotions rippled through you warring and conflicting? You exaggerate the things that are most pertinent to the character and keep them in your head as you deliver the lines, all the while remembering that you're made of stone and a gargoyle which affects how you move and means you will continue to exist for hundreds of years after these events. It's a mix of research, memory, and fiction the actors tell themselves-- and when it works they convince themselves it is a form of truth. In other words, the process is really close to writing fiction.
Most of the time it's just as mechanical as the above explanation makes it seem. Complicated and cobbled. It works with varying degrees and some people are more comfortable with the process and its results than others. Maybe once or twice in an actor's lifetime, it will all click effortlessly into place and the actor lives the role. It doesn't happen very often so you can't depend on it, you have to use the method finding glimpses of that magic with certain lines or scenes and making the rest work with craft (aka hard work). Like I said, REALLY close to writing fiction.
In the same production described above (a play called "Quasimodo!") a friend played the lecherous priest, Frollo. The director wasn't pleased with Frollo's performance during a scene where he's threatening Esmeralda (the object of his desire). The actors playing Esmeralda and Frollo were good friends in real life and the actor playing Frollo was frankly about as far away from that character as is humanly possible- an incredibly nice guy who had serious problems with girls relegating him to the "friend zone". The director coached him to use an event from his own life where he wanted someone or something very very badly but wasn't allowed to have --I think she said it could even be a candy bar-- and made him go through the scene again. His performance was 180 degrees from before. He became Frollo. He certainly wasn't thinking of a candy bar, because next five minutes TERRIFIED every female in the room. When the scene ended everyone in the cast kinda sat there and went, "Holy Shit". The actor playing Frollo got really uncomfortable. The fact that it was possible for him to become that person for even a few minutes scared him. He not only never recaptured the performance he gave that day in rehearsal, he never tried to, no matter how much the director or anyone else coaxed him to. It was a shame in one sense, but we all understood why he couldn't do it.
It takes a lot of work to write a character who has drastically different experiences from you, but it's far from impossible. Some writers are going to be more comfortable doing it than others. Some writers aren't going to like the places in their own soul it requires them to tread. That's fine. It takes a lot of research and learning the method of thinking outside your experiences isn't like learning math. There aren't neat and orderly rules. You're going to fail sometimes. It isn't something you can ever master. Sometimes you'll succeed... but you won't like who you have to become to get there. Sometimes you just can't even bring yourself to try.
I don't talk much about gender inequality for the simple reason that it wasn't a major force in shaping my identity (it greatly affects me, but did not shape me the way other forces around me did). No trusted (or even untrusted) adult EVER told me I couldn't do something because I was a girl in my formative years. The adults in my life echoed Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street and all of those other programs that told me I could be anything and they meant it as far as I know. I don't even consider gender to be a very big part of my identity in general. It's there, and has shaped my experiences, but it doesn't define me.
This is a very long way of pointing out that articles like this bug me. Why on earth should it matter if the gender of the author is not the same as the gender of the character? I mean sure it matters when someone gets something fundamentally wrong. Reading a sex scene by someone who has CLEARLY never had sex will illustrate that quite graphically. It also bugs me that women who write strong male characters are somehow to be lauded and celebrated but men who write believable women are a footnote, something to round out the article and make the editor happy. What the hell is that about? It's harder for women to think like men than for men to think like women? Frankly if I'm thinking about the author at all while reading the book, they probably aren't doing their job properly. Something in particular about an author might get me to pick up the book to start with, but as soon as I start reading it should be about the characters.
A recent article I DID like was Blake Charlton's article on Writing Strong Women I think it's particularly illustrative of why there's no shortcuts, no secret handshake a different writer can share with you, no magic tome on writing that's going to explain it to you. There's a reason that good writers have interesting lives and know interesting people. If you only interact with the same kind of people doing the same kind of things, you only have so many characters you can create and only so many stories to tell.
Every time I write from the perspective of an antagonist or even an anti-hero I try to keep Frollo in mind. To create a truly terrifying character I have to plumb the deep dark crevices of my own psyche, to find the me I don't want to show to anyone, not even myself. Most of the time I probably end up doing what my friend did, taking a few steps back and looking away. I hope I still manage to capture even a shadowy miasma of that darkness, to make sure my antagonists are as much a reflection of my experiences as my protagonists are.
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(Seriously If you like speculative fiction do yourself a favor and go listen to the story Blake references in his article. http://escapepod.org/2011/02/18/endosymbiont/ I listened to it while driving back from Seattle on Monday and... wow. It packs a hell of a lot into a short story. I felt like I'd been to hell and back afterward.)
Most of the time it's just as mechanical as the above explanation makes it seem. Complicated and cobbled. It works with varying degrees and some people are more comfortable with the process and its results than others. Maybe once or twice in an actor's lifetime, it will all click effortlessly into place and the actor lives the role. It doesn't happen very often so you can't depend on it, you have to use the method finding glimpses of that magic with certain lines or scenes and making the rest work with craft (aka hard work). Like I said, REALLY close to writing fiction.
In the same production described above (a play called "Quasimodo!") a friend played the lecherous priest, Frollo. The director wasn't pleased with Frollo's performance during a scene where he's threatening Esmeralda (the object of his desire). The actors playing Esmeralda and Frollo were good friends in real life and the actor playing Frollo was frankly about as far away from that character as is humanly possible- an incredibly nice guy who had serious problems with girls relegating him to the "friend zone". The director coached him to use an event from his own life where he wanted someone or something very very badly but wasn't allowed to have --I think she said it could even be a candy bar-- and made him go through the scene again. His performance was 180 degrees from before. He became Frollo. He certainly wasn't thinking of a candy bar, because next five minutes TERRIFIED every female in the room. When the scene ended everyone in the cast kinda sat there and went, "Holy Shit". The actor playing Frollo got really uncomfortable. The fact that it was possible for him to become that person for even a few minutes scared him. He not only never recaptured the performance he gave that day in rehearsal, he never tried to, no matter how much the director or anyone else coaxed him to. It was a shame in one sense, but we all understood why he couldn't do it.
It takes a lot of work to write a character who has drastically different experiences from you, but it's far from impossible. Some writers are going to be more comfortable doing it than others. Some writers aren't going to like the places in their own soul it requires them to tread. That's fine. It takes a lot of research and learning the method of thinking outside your experiences isn't like learning math. There aren't neat and orderly rules. You're going to fail sometimes. It isn't something you can ever master. Sometimes you'll succeed... but you won't like who you have to become to get there. Sometimes you just can't even bring yourself to try.
I don't talk much about gender inequality for the simple reason that it wasn't a major force in shaping my identity (it greatly affects me, but did not shape me the way other forces around me did). No trusted (or even untrusted) adult EVER told me I couldn't do something because I was a girl in my formative years. The adults in my life echoed Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street and all of those other programs that told me I could be anything and they meant it as far as I know. I don't even consider gender to be a very big part of my identity in general. It's there, and has shaped my experiences, but it doesn't define me.
This is a very long way of pointing out that articles like this bug me. Why on earth should it matter if the gender of the author is not the same as the gender of the character? I mean sure it matters when someone gets something fundamentally wrong. Reading a sex scene by someone who has CLEARLY never had sex will illustrate that quite graphically. It also bugs me that women who write strong male characters are somehow to be lauded and celebrated but men who write believable women are a footnote, something to round out the article and make the editor happy. What the hell is that about? It's harder for women to think like men than for men to think like women? Frankly if I'm thinking about the author at all while reading the book, they probably aren't doing their job properly. Something in particular about an author might get me to pick up the book to start with, but as soon as I start reading it should be about the characters.
A recent article I DID like was Blake Charlton's article on Writing Strong Women I think it's particularly illustrative of why there's no shortcuts, no secret handshake a different writer can share with you, no magic tome on writing that's going to explain it to you. There's a reason that good writers have interesting lives and know interesting people. If you only interact with the same kind of people doing the same kind of things, you only have so many characters you can create and only so many stories to tell.
Every time I write from the perspective of an antagonist or even an anti-hero I try to keep Frollo in mind. To create a truly terrifying character I have to plumb the deep dark crevices of my own psyche, to find the me I don't want to show to anyone, not even myself. Most of the time I probably end up doing what my friend did, taking a few steps back and looking away. I hope I still manage to capture even a shadowy miasma of that darkness, to make sure my antagonists are as much a reflection of my experiences as my protagonists are.
-----
(Seriously If you like speculative fiction do yourself a favor and go listen to the story Blake references in his article. http://escapepod.org/2011/02/18/endosymbiont/ I listened to it while driving back from Seattle on Monday and... wow. It packs a hell of a lot into a short story. I felt like I'd been to hell and back afterward.)