Building Backwards

This is kind of longer, and might not completely make sense to anyone but me . . .

Today I was talking with the wood duck, and he mentioned that physics—string theory and all its ilk—is easier to understand than social agendas. Now, in my mind, physics is about as impenetrable as it gets, so I had to defend the nuances of sociality, despite how tangled they can become.

“All you really need to know is what everybody wants,” I said, “and everything else follows after. If you can burrow down to a person’s motives, everything they do makes sense. Nothing to it.” Even less to it when I realized what I was really saying.

One of the first things a writer has to do with a character is determine what the character wants, what drives that person. After that, plot becomes simply a matter of obtaining what that character wants, plus a few obstacles thrown in the way. Any complicated situations that arise can be reduced to a question of conflicting desires. So, in essence, understanding people and social dynamics is just a matter of constructing characters in reverse. Instead of building a person from nothing, you are given a fully developed cast. You watch a few situations, you see how people react, you talk to them a little, and you start to dig down to what it is that they want, be it on a grand scale or not.

My thoughts kept moving along while my mouth logick-ed the wood duck into complacence, and I was allowed another insight as to why I am so unenthused about going to college. I have been with the same cast of characters for years. A good portion of the characters in my life have been around me as far back as my memory reaches. Slowly, the cast has grown, and changed composition, but always I had a base to work with. I had characters that helped me explore the minds, motives, and emotions of others. Every scene change left me with roughly the same people, and a change of scene doesn’t throw me off all that much when the people are the same.

I’m quite good at understanding the current cast that touches on my life. It isn’t difficult for me to accept and comprehend what is going on, why, and how I should deal with it—if I should deal with it at all. It is a rare enough thing that I know every detail of what is going on with my acquaintances: I’m not in tune with the local gossip (not that I’m upset about that; people skew things too much). But because I know people, when I hear about snatches of situations, when I latch onto fragments of gossip, I can generally puzzle out the details myself. I don’t need to know what’s going on, because I understand the people that are involved.

That is why I don’t like the idea of college.

More than anything else, I fear a change in my cast. Right now, even if everything isn’t perfect, it at least makes sense. When I move on to college, I will only be taking a small part of my former cast with me. With the current state of affairs, I will have hardly any of my time-tested characters to help me understand things. And when I don’t understand things…well, suffice to say that I don’t do well when I’m confused.

The second I get to college, I’m going to have to do some NaNoWriMo-pace character exploration, or I’m in big trouble.