In 2005, whilst perusing the shelves at the
Hennepin County Public Library, I stumbled across CHANGING VISION by Julie
Czerneda (say it: chur-nay-dah), an author I'd never heard of, and was
intrigued by the aliens on the cover by artist Luis Royo. It didn’t matter that
the book was the second in a series, the cover entranced me and so I read. The
book was spectacular, I read others, and fell entirely in love with another
series of hers called SPECIES IMPERATIVE for its fascinating aliens and superior
characterization. A teacher deeply at heart, Julie Czerneda shares ideas and
methodology wherever she goes. On her website, http://www.czerneda.com/classroom/classroom.html
she shares ideas for writers. I want to share what kind of impact her ideas
have had on my own writing. They are
used with the author’s permission.
I need to come back
to this because I may have stumbled across a methodology for creating
characters.
I need to look at “real
people” first. Then I need to do some research into HOW a real Human brain
creates an imaginary world. So here’s the FIRST stage…
I was a science
teacher for 29 years touching on the entire spectrum of the subject – from astronomy
to zoology, I always say – and so was an inveterate reader, keeping up on my “subject”.
Four years ago, I
became a school counselor following a five year course of study that involved
weekly drives to a somewhat distant college where one of the things we studied
was adolescent brain science as well as general neurobiology…at least I studied
the neurobiology. That was my area of interest. As a result, I was introduced
to the fast-changing world of neuroscience. My wife got her BA in psychology
not long after, and last spring, my daughter got her own BA in psychology with
an intense interest in biopsychology after working with a professor studying
the possibility of using saccade and anti-saccade as a predictor for
schizophrenia...
At any rate, it occurred
to me recently that perhaps I could learn more about character building by
looking at how the BRAIN works.
Seems there’s been
quite a bit of study about how the brain reacts when it reads words:
“If someone read
a sentence like, ‘the shortstop threw the ball to first base,’ parts of the
brain dedicated to vision and movement would light up, Bergen says...when you
encounter words describing a particular action, your brain simulates the
experience, Bergen says.”
Cool beans! I can
totally see that and now that I know this is true, I can apply it to my writing
for young adults as well as to the few historical pieces I do.
But how does a brain
response like that apply to something like this: “Mac was several paces into
the Chamber of the Progenitors before she appreciated that what she thought was
the ceiling was a shoulder, that what she thought a floor was a hand…She
wrenched her eyes from a vista of hills and valleys cloaked in dark blue skin,
mottled with ponds of shining black liquid, and stared at what else lived here.
He first impression was of rather silly-looking pufferfish, her mind was
fighting for equivalents. Her second was that the creatures looked nothing like
fish at all.” (SPECIES IMPERATIVE: SURVIVAL, chapter 21)?
How can I imagine something
I’ve never seen – or something I can’t even imagine? It brings to mind the old
adage, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than
we CAN imagine.” (Arthur Stanley Eddington)
So what does the
brain do in such a situation? “A flying pig has meaning to us because our brain
is using things we have seen — pigs and birds — to create something we've never
seen. And Bergen says we also draw on personal experience when we use language
to convey abstract ideas — like truth, or justice, or even the word ‘meaning.’”
In addition, “The
brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an
experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same
neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of
cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist),
has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that ‘runs
on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.’ Fiction —
with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of
people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one
respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience
unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s
thoughts and feelings.”
So THIS is why
certain characters seem alive.
The question is:
What am I sometimes doing wrong? Why does Mackenzie Connor seem real, but
Emerald Marcillon elicits nothing but the statement: “I actually found the
language you used to be rather dense and information-heavy, which didn't make
for particularly easy reading. I would suggest revisiting it with a thought to
simplifying it a little for more ease of comprehension.” This
editor didn’t even NOTICE the character.
Why? I need to learn
MORE!
Resources: http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/05/02/180036711/imagine-a-flying-pig-how-words-take-shape-in-the-brain,
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscience-of-your-brain-on-fiction.html?pagewanted=all
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