You Need To Be A Little Insane
Posted by Craig Mazin on 06 Jul 2009 at 09:21 pm | Tagged as: The Craft & Trade
So 17 years ago, I had a dream. I don’t remember much about it; it wasn’t particularly interesting in terms of setting or substance. I was wandering through a mall and talking to people about mundane things.
But something happened in this dream that I can’t stop thinking about.
Someone in the dream made a remark, and other people laughed, but I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand what was so funny about what the person said.
And then, about an hour after I woke up, I got the joke.
I wish I could remember the joke itself. I can’t. All I can remember is that maybe a week after this happened, I sat up like a shot at my desk and realized the implications.
My mind had manufactured a character. That character had a thought process independent of “my” own, and the proof of that independence was in my initial lack of comprehension. I had been surprised by a creature of my own creation. And then it occurred to me that while the joke had made this clear, it was happening every night when I went to bed.
Consider this: if you are at all surprised by anything that happens in a dream, your mind has successfully fragmented itself. You are, for lack of a better term, experiencing something akin to multiple personality disorder.
I’m sorry if you find this boring; I still can’t quite get over it. Consciousness is an extraordinarily complicated phenomenon that no one has ever satisfactorily defined. What we do know is that it’s an illusion like everything else the brain creates. We don’t actually see the color blue. Photons traveling at a certain wavelength smash into photopsin molecules in the cones of our retina, triggering an electric impulse that travels to cells in the occipital lobe, and then…
…well, that’s the magic part. “We” “experience” “color.” Yeah, each of those words needs quotes, because each is misleading. What the hell is the “we” that we think we are, are we “experiencing” anything at all or is the experience part and parcel with what we are, and what’s color other than a biological quirk of our detection of a wavelength?
Consciousness is the GUI, if you will, that interprets all the machine code of our brain’s trillions of ons and offs.
That’s big enough to contemplate (consciousness metaphorizing itself, hooray!), but now add into the mix this fun fact: our consciousness can fragment. In the dream state, it seems as if the ego consciousness, i.e. the consciousness we experience as self, can be separated apart from satellite consciousnesses that think, reason, plan and employ language as easily as we do.
The point?
When creating characters, it seems to me that the best situation is when we allow this dream-like process to fragment our consciousness and cede some control to the satellite mind of the person we’re creating. The worst situation is when we force our ego consciousness to pretend to be someone we’re not.
It’s the mental equivalent of good versus bad acting.
That’s not to say that we have to slip into frickin’ fugue states or anything. This is still work, people. But if your mind gets rubbery enough to move quickly between the different consciousnesses of your various characters, maybe even as quickly as you can type, I think you’ll find that certain mistakes will simply cease to be.
Like the “your character’s voice isn’t consistent” mistake. Or the “your character’s reactions aren’t consistent” mistake. Or the “your character doesn’t feel like a real person” mistake. Or the “your character is boring” mistake.
Naturally, the more interesting and astute your ego consciousness is, the more interesting and well-crafted your satellite consciousnesses will be. But even then, our minds are capable of creating things almost beyond our understanding. How else to create something like Hannibal Lecter? Research, yes, stories and facts, yes…but then there must be a fragmentation of the mind. In this fragment of our creation, the repugnant becomes beautiful and the will is unrestrained.
Or maybe you just need to fragment off a chunk of space for a 15 year-old girl with boy troubles. They don’t all have to be profound.
They just have to be independent.
Ideally, the ego consciousness creates the basic story and its themes and determines what characters are required. But those characters themselves need to live on their own in some small but real way. This is something we all theoretically have the capacity to do; we all definitely do it when we dream.
If you can do it when you’re wide awake, the phone’s ringing, there’s a deadline hanging over your head and you’re not sure if anything you’ve written yet is any damned good at all…well, you’re probably a writer.
What a brilliant post… it fleshes out the idea that made me think I could be a writer.
Dreaming was actually my proof to myself that I was capable of being a writer, before I had ever written a single story. I figured that since I could unintentionally come up with interesting stories while I slept, then if I ever got my conscious and unconscious minds to cooperate (or whatever the parts are which dream and act), then I would be a good writer. I’m still working on it, but every night my dreams give me hope
.
“What we do know is that it’s an illusion like everything else the brain creates. We don’t actually see the color blue.”
Puh-leeeese. Your slavish allegiance to the monism of Newtonian mechanics is laughable. Consciousness is a quantum phenomenon arising from the Bose-Einstein condensed phases of neural tissue’s cell membranes when they vibrate at sufficient frequencies. Join the 21st century, Craig.
Quantum mechanics is a lie! A DIRTY LIE!
It’s not an “illusion” per se – it’s an “emergent phenomenon”. (The difference, to my mind, is that illusions don’t exist, or are distortions of reality; emergent phenomena are super-real, in that they exist on top of the nuts and bolts of the underlying system.)
There are lots of examples of this, where the underlying rules of physics/mathematics are very simple and lead to incredibly complex systems on top of those simple rules. This is actually built into the universe at its most basic level (via Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle).
BTW, the notion that each person experiences their own reality and that nothing is provably real except one’s one consciousness, which you can’t measure (because there’s no objective standard against which to measure), is called solipsism, I believe. (A solipsist interacts with others by essentially agreeing with them on what’s real and defining a consensus reality. I find it very interesting on a philosophical level, if not much use in my day to day.)
Emergent Phenomenon…I like that. And for what it’s worth, I’ve included a reference to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem in my script for the Bruckheimer movie (I’ve been fascinated by that one ever since reading Godel, Escher, Bach). Let’s see if it survives.
I’ve always thought of solipsism as the belief that you, the thinker, are the only thing that is real in the world (rather than provable). I don’t believe that.
I guess what I’m talking about is more akin to Berkeley’s “immaterialism,” which posited that our experience of the world is entirely processed through sensation, and that we do not actually experience true connection with physical objects in and of themselves.
“Quantum mechanics is a lie! A DIRTY LIE!”
Einstein said, “God does not play dice with the Universe.”
Or something like that.
“Fragmentation” and “multiple personality disorder” may not be the most useful analytical parameters. In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle of MIT writes of personality as a cluster of appropriate behaviors.
What we do when we put characters together in fiction may be a process of selection of what’s in us for what works the stories. That’s a little more elegant an explanation than considering ourselves to have multiple identities locked away from our consciousnesses. The inner-multiple which could sneak out works fine for horror tales. Having written about Lepke Buchalter, Meyer Lansky, Ben Siegel, Charlie Luciano and criminals at that level, it can be pretty scary finding their truths inside. The process of staying sane while dealing with characters like that involves knowing what’s appropriate, and where boundaries of self-definition are strongest.
I am not sure it goes as far as fragmentation of the personality: I think creating an “independent” character is mainly an exercise in empathy.
One of the social traits of human beings (present in some other species as well) is the ability to interpolate the thoughts and feelings of others from external cues – facial expressions, body language, actions and words. We “create” representations of other persons as though they were characters in our personal dramas, and we use these representations to help us guide our own behavior toward or relative to those other persons. (A poker table is an excellent laboratory for this type of social interaction.)
It’s not far from that ability to the ability to synthesize a “person” from our imagined representation of his or her thoughts and feelings, extrapolated to external cues of gesture and action and word.
(By the way, the leaders of both the WGA and SAG have experienced what I believe is essentially empathy gone haywire: they conceived “representations” of the persons on the other side of the bargaining table that didn’t quite jibe with the behaviors and attitudes of the actual persons. As a consequence, the union leaders imagined the reactions of the artificial constructs to union actions and assumed that these imagined reactions would take place in reality. The union leaders failed to test their representations against reality and to adjust their representations to match the actual observed behavior of the real adversaries.)
Interesting thought, Craig. We are strange creatures of thoughts, habits and words. Your attempt to describe the “process” of characterization is plausible.
Mind is an amorphous substance, and intangible too. And for writers to create characters, “we” need to be able live them, look at the world through “their” POV. The consistency of a character can only come when “we” begin to live them as vividly as possible.
It is true that we live inside our heads all our mortal lives. And there is no way my reality can be validated by you and others. But what really matters is this that I find the resonance of “your” reality rhyming in “my” reality, and hence the story telling has remained one of the most beloved act of life…
Craig, here’s a quote you may like:
“A self is deciduous, it leafs out as one grows, changes with one’s seasons, yet somehow stays briskly the same. The brain composes a self-portrait from a confetti of facts and sensations, and as pieces are added or removed the likeness changes, though the sense of unity remains, thanks to well-furnished illusions. We need illusion to feel true.
“A medley of different selves accompanies us everywhere. Some are lovable, some weird, some disapproving of each other, some childish or adult. Unless the selves drift too far apart, that solo ensemble works fine and copes well with novel events. As the psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg writes in Standing in the Spaces: ‘Health is not integration. Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about – the capacity to feel like one self while being many.’ ”
– Diane Ackerman, from An Alchemy of Mind
You’ve hit on my favorite part of the process. When a character does or says something and I don’t know where it came from, but it seems “right,” that’s when I know that what I’m writing is going to work.
I think your relating it to acting is on the mark. It’s basically improv, where you really have to “get into” a character’s mind and react the way s/he would. Just on the page, and you play every part.
Did Craig just disprove Solipsism? Or did he, sort of like Roger Zelazny, prove that the “real Amber” is one more level of abstraction away than we thought it was?
The I that I think of as me, is just the real me’s first and most well-developed creation?
Now I want to go re-read Heinlein’s “All You Zombies–” again.
Ha, Craig.
Good post.
I actually live inside my character’s minds while I’m writing them.
Hell, even when I’m not writing, I live in a dream world where my imagination is limitless.
I actually PREFER my dream world to that of real life, and have to FORCE myself to leave said world in order to deal with real-life people.
Even then, if the “real-life people” aren’t interesting enough, my mind splits itself in half — on the surface my conscious mind appears to listen to them and make the appropriate responses, but in actuality, I’m inside the other half of my mind, rewriting my current project.
Deftly handled.
That’s heavy man.
Great post. Great discussion. Love Subrata Sircar’s emergent phenomenon contribution. Would add a thought to Craig’s reply, that “I guess what I’m talking about is more akin to Berkeley’s “immaterialism,” which posited that our experience of the world is entirely processed through sensation, and that we do not actually experience true connection with physical objects in and of themselves.”
To the extent that we are not physical objects this is true enough, but on the other hand, “we” ARE experiencing true connection with “objects.” What we experience has nothing to do with what is so. It is so that there is no solid matter, including us or the objects with which we interact, but we nonetheless experience it that way.
Great insight, Craig. Your dream shows a lot of creativity. I feel inspired when you say, but then there must be a fragmentation of the mind. In this fragment of our creation, the repugnant becomes beautiful and the will is unrestrained. I have trouble conceptualizing “bad” characters sometimes.
Geo – consider the evolution from SimCity to The Sims to The Sims 2 to The Sims3.
Can you prove that we are not simply avatars in The Sims42?
Craig: speaking of three-noun book titles, have you ever read “Rats, Lice and History”? It discusses the way plagues shaped modern history.
“1491: New Discoveries about the Americas before Columbus” has a similar discussion about how plagues changed the Americas from the land engineered by populous pre-contact civilizations to the wilderness encountered by 16th and 17th century European settlers.
Though this may be off topic, I find it incredibly interesting that we, as humans, have a great desire to understand our self-existence.
We are the only beings on this planet that question our state of mind, our purpose, and our constant dire need to find some sort of truth to all of which we see, hear, and touch. Seeing how incredibly intelligent we are as the human race, we constantly struggle to fully understand ourselves.
-How intellegent yet, primitive we are.
We continue through our own individual perceptions, create complex ambiguous reasoning to define ourselves in a way of which we may never understand…
I believe as humans, are purpose is to search and seek understanding. What he or she searches for, is up to the individual.
Thank you Craig for such a stimulating post; as well as, all the other comments posted thereafter. As a student who has reached the college of choice for majoring in Film and English, this place is a haven for developing my creativity and voice as an aspiring filmmaker and writer.
-Carlos
Is artfulwriter.com having hosting problems lately? It seems to be popping in and out of existance kind of semi-regularly for me the last couple weeks. Could be DNS issues at my ISP too tho.
Sounds like a new Matrix movie.
Way to “pop” it wide open.
More than fascinating, I find this one of the most fun parts of writing. Whenever a character says or does something I hadn’t planned I get a rush that I don’t get when, say, I have an epiphany about it hours after getting frustrated.
Of course, intellectually I understand that the idea either just occurred or just consciously occurred at that one moment and so happened to be the best solution. By sheer chance, the vast amount of time spent writing should produce many such moments.
But I guess it’s also human nature to assume motivation and independence for not-met objects that refuse to listen. For the same reason I get mad at my TV for my being unable to operate the remote, I sometimes get pleasure from my characters for refusing to listen to me.
I think everyone needs to be just a little bit insane. I have been reading your aticles now for about 4 years now and this is my first comment. I tried to leave a comment in 08 but i somehow refreshed and the damn thing got erased and i was like…. oh, anyway, back to this comment. I am in the process of making my first video script right now. It is quite fun to think of the characters involved, figure out the props and settings. I am not filming it, just coming up with a theme and script. anyway, I have committed “Consciousness is an extraordinarily complicated phenomenon that no one has ever satisfactorily defined” to memory and I can’t wait for it to pop out of my moth some day making me sound extraordinarily clever, lol. thanks. I will give you the credit, eventualy… probably. oh yeah, one last thing, this wouldnt be a typical comment unless it contained spam, so here goes sm: )e If you or a loved one are addicted to drugs or alcohol and you need a drug rehab treatment center may I suggest http://www.StGregoryCRT.com drug addiction help is available now. thank you!
One of my favorite sayings: “The only ‘normal’ people are the ones you don’t know very well”.
There are very few non-oddballs who’ve made much of a mark on this world. And, really, why would anyone expect it to be otherwise?
As Norman Bates said, “We all go a little mad sometimes.”
One of your most thoughtful and interesting posts, thanks for putting it up.
The first thing that came to my mind upon reading it was:
“so this explains why you’re attracted to comedy”
That gets to the heart of what makes a Writer a Writer.
I once realized I’m more Compelled to write when I’m more motivated to mentally escape my current set of circumstances. To dis-integrate myself.
There are healthier reasons to write, such as Curiosity, the desire to speak Truth to a Propagandist, or just wanting to tell a Story your friends and family.
But whatever your motivation, you simply can’t Completely Participate in Life while you’re Observing and Critiquing Life. Either you’re totally Here, totally There, or you’re split to some degree between the two.
You can’t be Marlon Brando while thinking like Bill Goldman.
“In a mad world, only the mad are sane.”
“Man is a genius when he’s dreaming”
On the fragmentation of (self-)consciousness, try “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Julian Jaynes. Snappy title. The late Douglas Adams and I wanted to get the movie rights but in the end we couldn’t agree on casting (though we were as one on Schwarznegger as the Bicameral Mind).
I wish I could sum up Jaynes’s thesis but… well…
(1) We used not to be self-conscious. We operated a bit like when we’re driving and suddenly Pasadena is 130 miles behind us and we remember nothing of the interim.
(2) If things went awry, though, we used to hear/hallucinate admonitory voices telling us what to do. The kid would hear his father’s voice. The field-worker would hear the overseers voice. The King would hear… god’s voice.
(3) Something went odd around the third millennium BC. The pictures of the kings listening to the gods disappeared. Religious texts began to ask why the gods no longer spoke to us. We became (says Jaynes) conscious.
(4) Consciousness is a sort of metaphor. You need language in order to be able to do consciousness. Words aren’t how we think; they’re WHY we think. The inner voice (“Here’s the famous WWI fighter pilot…” as Snoopy has it) is just the language centre of the brain doing its stuff: commenting on what we’re up to, depicting ourselves /to/ ourselves, above all telling us stories /all the time/ and whether we’re listening or not.
(4a) Perhaps dreams are where we /have/ to listen to those stories.
(5) …er… well, there’s lots more but really it’s the most wonderfully stimulating book that you just /know/ isn’t true ever written.
(Actually of course it should be the jolie-laide Ms Gainsbourg as The Origin of Consciousness, and Sir Ian McKellen as the Bicameral Mind, now I think about it.)
Michael:
I took a class with Jaynes in college. Very influential on me for sure.
I was reminded of this thread the other day while watching Jeff Dunham: Spark of Insanity on Comedy Central. Ventriloquists are very skilled at dancing back and forth across the line between self and created character. It’s funny to watch Jeff Dunham ask two of his puppets to stop conversing in Spanish: they ask why, and he says, “I don’t speak Spanish!” That gets a laugh, but what gets the bigger laugh is when one of the puppets then turns to the audience and sings the theme from The Twilight Zone….
Speaking of insanity (on multiple levels):
Is he going to ruin the classic, or introduce it to a new generation?
(Reference: Scientific American: September 6, 2007 “It’s No Delusion: Evolution May Favor Schizophrenia Genes”)
“…researchers reached a striking conclusion that several gene variants linked to schizophrenia were actually positively selected and remained largely unchanged over time, suggesting that there was some advantage to having them…”