The Burning Stage #4 Cats and Characters

Writing for the Burning Stage

Talking about the Burning Stage, let me return to something I wrote earlier in Writing Drama.  And ask the question “Why do you write?”  Ok, there are thousands of answers to that but let me put it on a more comprehensive scale.  Why do so many of us have the urge to write?  Poetry, plays, stories? Why do we create anything?  At all? Where, indeed, does creativity come from?  And how does that relate to the human-sized Burning Stage? I must emphasise I am not a psychologist or philosopher or sociologist so my answers, such as they are, originate entirely from my own experiences.  But, bear with me and let’s give it a go anyway.

I’ll start with my daughter’s cat, Tinkerbelle.  Well, why not?  It would be an excuse to put up a picture of her if she’ll stand still long enough and thus have the post go viral.

Tinkerbelle

She’s quite a good hunter when she can be bothered.  She’s an indoor cat so it isn’t (I hope) mice she’s after but the little red laser dot that keeps appearing under her nose.  She flattens herself to the carpet and inches forward ready to pounce.  But then, some superior force causes the dot to disappear.  If she’s got the energy to wait, she will crouch there ready to spring at a moment’s notice.

The point I am making here is that she hunts using her memory of where her prey went last time she looked.  And, like any other hunting animal, she uses her memory of the past to begin the hunt.  She lives in a present informed by the past.

What she is not so good at, is thinking of the future:  Asking herself where the red dot will come from next.  Her lack of future forecasting means that she is entirely uncertain about where dinner will come from if she eats all her breakfast now.  Her knowledge of the future is limited to her awareness of the past.  She knows where her litter tray was this morning and she expects it still to be there later.  It is said that some animals can forecast earthquakes or sense changes in the weather but this is more likely down to subtle atmospheric changes humans are not sensitive enough to detect.

The little tweak that humans and higher primates have is the ability to forecast the future.  When hunting, we not only know where the prey went but we can extrapolate where it might appear from in a while.  So, hunters will lie in wait, not where they last saw their prey, but where it might come from afterwards.

We humans, on the other hand, see a deer disappear behind a rock and a hunter will go to the other end of the rock to pounce on it as it emerges.  But we can also add in another element.  We have to reckon on the fact that from behind the rock, our prey may dash off in a different direction unseen by us.  This depends on whether we have learnt from past observations that this is possible.  If we are hungry and need to eat, we cannot afford the energy to wait where we expect on the deer’s reappearance and hope for the best. We apply a statistical analysis of the possibilities and conserve our energy by hiding out near the Most Likely place for it to reappear.

So, what seems to have given humans the edge in this world is the ability to forecast the future and to bet on the outcome.   We are able to use the past to extrapolate the future.  And this is a transferable skill that applies to farming (which is basically hunting carried on by lazy people) or any other undertaking.  With the transition to farming, if we saw a particularly fruitful berry bush that we have marked out as being worth returning to, we might settle down near it to look after it. Perhaps observing where new bushes grow and burying berries in more favourable locations.  Our success stems from our ability to make calculations and bet on the future.

And we have another element to add to this.  Human beings, for all sorts of reasons, are social creatures.  We need to operate together to nurture our young or to look after the sick or elderly who might still be useful to the tribe.  This gives us the ability to empathise with others.  To think ourselves into their heads. We understand their pain and discomfort because it will be very much like our own.  And we can act on this empathy for good and ill.

Thereby our hunting ability advances another notch forward.  We can extrapolate the future based on our knowledge of the past allied with our understanding of what is going on in the head of our prey.  The hunter thinks themselves into the mind of the prey.  Our efficiency goes up accordingly.  And while, in the twenty first century, we may not spend the day tracking down deer, we still have these tools at our disposal for other uses.  And, like a cat, we exercise what skills we have to keep our claws sharp.  We exercise our memory. Develop our forecasting skills and we practise our empathy by living and thinking with others.

Add in a soupçon of cooperative working and a dollop of language and we have a complete ready meal.

Now our empathetic awareness means that we have a desire to share that delicious skill feast with others.  The skilled hunter will relate the details of the hunt, not only demonstrating their actions but also, those of the deer they have been chasing.  The hunter relates how they entered the mind of the deer and how they felt and what they saw through the deer’s eyes.  The journey of the hunt becomes a story told from the point of view of the deer and how it has been outwitted by the skill of the hunter.

And, of course this applies to all the other aspects of daily living for us in the 21st century.  We can tell stories through the eyes of others.

These stories are created from transactions or interactions between characters using the knowledge we have of the past, our empathy with them and our extrapolations of the future.  A story teller uses hunting skills to enable their journey to progress and reach an end.

A little while ago in Writing for the Drama about creating characters, I suggested that a character is made up of many different strands and creating a character is merely a question of weaving these character traits together in odd sequences.  Following this pattern, any character you create will be true because somewhere out there will be someone who matches your selection.  The writer’s success depends on hunting down a character’s past and extrapolating their future.  And this, I think is where story telling can run into the mud.  Too often, we rely on a character we have seen or heard of before.  We have a character in mind but we do not apply enough analysis to unravel all the strands that may be possible.   The more strands our character has, the more likely they will appear authentic to our listeners.  The more likely they are to strike a chord and apply in a real world.

This sort of awareness contributes to the idea of the Burning Stage. The Burning Stage thrives on story telling that is compressed but complex. It is essentially a human sized endeavour. The characters in our story walk towards the future carrying the past on their backs.

I have often written for historical or adapted from characters in literature.  Here, I need to write back to front.  I know their end point, which must be true to the historical record or the literature they come from, and then follow back all their strands of character traits to the beginning of the story.

This is also why it is unwise or less than fruitful to write about ourselves.  We seldom have the self-awareness to create a whole, rounded character based on our own experience.  We will follow a bare strand, most likely an issue we have, and not be brave enough to have all the other stuff at our disposal. Better is, I suggest, to create another character that contains some of these issues we want to portray and leave writing about ourselves to others.

So, does any of this answer the Why of Writing?  Well, I think it suggests that it’s all hard wired into the system.  It is almost as though, as human beings, we have an obligation to write.  To observe and learn from the actions and interactions of others. And to share these possibilities so that others may see the world through other eyes. Why not give it a go?