![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I've got quite the backlog going at the moment, obviously, and sadly I'm running a bit of a fiction backlog as well; this has not been a very productive week. Tomorrow I think I'll start posting daily wordcounts again, it seems to provide a pretty good motivator.
So. Today's topic.
Several weeks ago, in a soundtrack post, I went off on a tangent:
And I've been saying ever since that I would come back and explain in more detail what I meant.
I do not believe that my characters, in role-playing or writing, have any independent existence from sentience from my own. They are not "real people" in any sense. But I have at times heard their voices in my head, and (family history notwithstanding) I don't believe that makes me a schizophrenic.
More specifically, I have had characters think of things that are totally alien to my own patterns of thought -- who exhibit lateral thinking skills I do not find myself in possession of -- and I think that, when I have spent enough time obsessing about how a character thinks, speaks, and acts, the mirror neurons in my brain become good enough at replicating that behavior and extrapolating from it to manufacture parallel chains of thought that are distinct from my own in significant ways. The easiest metaphor for me would be to say that I partition the hard-drive (my brain), and install a different operating system (a character, a personality) on one of the other partitions. It works differently than I do, and separately from my own stream of consciousness, but it is dependent upon the same input and processing power. Now, of course, I have absolutely no notion whether in physiological, psychological, or neurological terms any of that is even remotely possible, and that's okay. I'm describing an extremely subjective experience in a way that makes sense to me, and while I'm interested in the plausibility of it; I'm not really invested in being factually correct about the mechanism.
I can visualize that piece of my headspace very clearly...
Sometimes, when I am thinking about a character in the abstract -- not as a part of their narrative -- I picture them as if they were residents inside my head, in a two-story hotel with gilt banisters, marble floors, and walnut-stained walls. The hallways of the hotel are shaped like an ankh -- the vertical bar is the atrium, the horizontal bars and loop are hallways with private rooms to either side, and there's a courtyard with a pool in the middle. I have no idea where I picked this idea up or when exactly (Erin or Sarah might remember, if I blathered about it at sufficient length at the time. Lin or Kat likewise, if either of them is still actually about on the blogosphere, which seems unlikely). I also have very little idea why. But it's useful to me. The characters talk to each other, and to me. They complain in metafictional ways about what has been done to them and why it isn't right -- they would never do or say that, their reaction would be this. They idle about and entertain themselves, visit one another's rooms, and generally behave like bored vacationers stuck in a hotel for whatever reason, providing helpful ways of analyzing their characters as people, independent of the needs of any plot.
Sometimes, all of this seems pretty crazy to me. Other times it seems utterly unremarkable. I have to admit, I'm pretty curious to find out how it seems to other people -- and how other creative folks view their own characters, and what debatably-crazy things they may do in order to connect to them better.
ETA: Oh, and the character who "Heroes and Thieves" infallibly gets me into the right headspace for is Tim Drake from the DCU.
So. Today's topic.
Several weeks ago, in a soundtrack post, I went off on a tangent:
6) Heroes and Thieves by Vanessa Carlton. Romance and moral confusion? Yes please. It's a little embarrassing for me to admit that this song is meaningful to me not because I identify with it myself, but because a character I role-play on the Internets does. But then, that just helps with submerging myself in someone else's consciousness in order to write from their perspective, so maybe I shouldn't be embarrassed. When it comes to acting and roleplaying, I'm kind of Method about it. I don't buy into otherkin and soulbonding and characters really existing on the astral plane... but I do sort of believe that I have partitioned my brain like a hard-drive to contain the imaginary people I write about, and whose brains I can run parallel to my own. I can visualize that piece of my headspace very clearly, and... man I am getting far afield from this soundtrack thing. I think that's a whole 'nother post, if anyone is interested.
And I've been saying ever since that I would come back and explain in more detail what I meant.
I do not believe that my characters, in role-playing or writing, have any independent existence from sentience from my own. They are not "real people" in any sense. But I have at times heard their voices in my head, and (family history notwithstanding) I don't believe that makes me a schizophrenic.
More specifically, I have had characters think of things that are totally alien to my own patterns of thought -- who exhibit lateral thinking skills I do not find myself in possession of -- and I think that, when I have spent enough time obsessing about how a character thinks, speaks, and acts, the mirror neurons in my brain become good enough at replicating that behavior and extrapolating from it to manufacture parallel chains of thought that are distinct from my own in significant ways. The easiest metaphor for me would be to say that I partition the hard-drive (my brain), and install a different operating system (a character, a personality) on one of the other partitions. It works differently than I do, and separately from my own stream of consciousness, but it is dependent upon the same input and processing power. Now, of course, I have absolutely no notion whether in physiological, psychological, or neurological terms any of that is even remotely possible, and that's okay. I'm describing an extremely subjective experience in a way that makes sense to me, and while I'm interested in the plausibility of it; I'm not really invested in being factually correct about the mechanism.
I can visualize that piece of my headspace very clearly...
Sometimes, when I am thinking about a character in the abstract -- not as a part of their narrative -- I picture them as if they were residents inside my head, in a two-story hotel with gilt banisters, marble floors, and walnut-stained walls. The hallways of the hotel are shaped like an ankh -- the vertical bar is the atrium, the horizontal bars and loop are hallways with private rooms to either side, and there's a courtyard with a pool in the middle. I have no idea where I picked this idea up or when exactly (Erin or Sarah might remember, if I blathered about it at sufficient length at the time. Lin or Kat likewise, if either of them is still actually about on the blogosphere, which seems unlikely). I also have very little idea why. But it's useful to me. The characters talk to each other, and to me. They complain in metafictional ways about what has been done to them and why it isn't right -- they would never do or say that, their reaction would be this. They idle about and entertain themselves, visit one another's rooms, and generally behave like bored vacationers stuck in a hotel for whatever reason, providing helpful ways of analyzing their characters as people, independent of the needs of any plot.
Sometimes, all of this seems pretty crazy to me. Other times it seems utterly unremarkable. I have to admit, I'm pretty curious to find out how it seems to other people -- and how other creative folks view their own characters, and what debatably-crazy things they may do in order to connect to them better.
ETA: Oh, and the character who "Heroes and Thieves" infallibly gets me into the right headspace for is Tim Drake from the DCU.
