Think of your favorite character, the one that changed your life and
made you look at people and the world differently. What did the author
do in order to bring that character to life?
Some of you may remember Josh Hoyt and his amazing blog about using psychology to create characters. He went on an extended
blogging break, but he came back with his book! Congratulations to Josh. Today he's talking about perspective and how that affects your characters. Thank you, Josh. Take it away!
PERSPECTIVE
By Josh Hoyt
Recently
I had a discussion with my wife about support and how we both have a
different perspective of how support looks. The support I'm talking
about is how we help each other accomplish our goals. Her perspective
of the perfect support is a more hands off approach while I enjoy a
more hands on and direct approach. When we give support to each othe,r
we do give that support in the way that we perceive to be the best
way and as a result we really don't give the best support to the
other person that we could give. In fact, when we feel that we are
giving a lot of support often, the other one doesn't feel very
supported at all. She feels like I'm pushy and expecting perfection,
while I feel like she doesn't care when she supports me. This of
course leads to confusion, and uhm, let's call it a discussion. :) After 13
years of marriage, you would think that we would understand each other
perfectly, but alas we are still trying to learn each others
perspective.
Perspective
is the way we see things because of the experiences that we have had
and the personality that we are born with, and because we all have had
different experiences and we all have unique personalities, we each
have a different perspective. As a result of this uniqueness, we have
difficulty, at times, understanding those around us and regrettably
this can lead to fights and even wars.
When
we think about perspective, we also need to understand the different
filters that we have in place as we receive input from the out-side
world. When a person makes a decision on how to act they will take
what they perceive from the out-side world and mix it up with what
they have inside of them (feelings, thoughts, and past experiences).
After they have mixed all this stuff up they make a decision on how
to act. These “inside” things are the filters they have in place
to deal with the world around them and affect how they perceive the
world around them. For example if a person has an ex-wife who cheated
on them they will be more suspicious of their new wife when that wife
comes home later than expected or if a child is used to being hit
when they make a mistake when they are moved out of that situation
they will still flinch at an adult who raises their hand unexpectedly
even if the adult had no intention of hitting the child.
Now
back to the story of my wife and me. After discussing and learning
about each others perspective on support, we are now able to support
each other in the way that each other needs to be supported. More
importantly, we can now understand each other a little bit more and
this helps us grow closer and makes our relationship that much
stronger. As we learn more and more about each others perspective, we
grow closer together and are more invested in each other. Our
willingness to support and understand each other increases and we
want to learn more about each other. This can also be applied to the
husband and wife and the child and adult mentioned above. As the two
sides of the situations learn to understand each others perspectives,
they will learn to be more sensitive to each other. The wife will
call when she knows she is going to be late and the adult will be
more sensitive to their hand gestures around the child.
When
we create our characters, we need to understand their experiences,
feelings, and thoughts so that when they receive
input from the out-side world they respond appropriately to that
information and according to their own personal perspective of “life,
the universe, and everything.” In addition to our characters
responding appropriately and according to their perspective, we will
help our readers understand our character's perspective through the
responses those characters make. This in turn helps our readers
connect more intimately with our characters and want to learn more
about our characters (which will increase book sells!!! :)
SO
in truth to truly understand another's perspective, we must first walk
in their shoes.
* * *
HAPPY CANADA DAY TO ALL MY CANADIAN FRIENDS AND FAMILY!
