Cycle of Anger

In my journal, I have been writing about my anger about people. Some people make me angry as most people do to everyone. When I am driving at home, I am often mystified by road rage because people will get angry over the most littlest details of someone else's driving. For the most part, I never see who is driving and the source of their anger is and remains a mystery to me. I make surmises that they were mad at their spouses or parents or just got a pink slip at work.

This post is not why I am angry at people but how as writers we deal with emotions in our characters in fiction. I decided to write about an angry person named Adam on my "Zebrareader's Much Ado About Nothing" Blog. I described a middle-aged Korean and why he was so angry.

One time in a writers' editing group, that I may have written about before, I asked another writer why a character wanted to quit her job and get another one. Her changing jobs was essential to the plot of the story. She said it wasn't important. I said if you could not explain the character's motivation the story would fail. All you needed was a sentence or two. She disagreed. I think the same goes for anger. If a character is angry, there has to be a reason for it. If a character in a film played by Clint Eastwood is angry, it can't be because it looks good on the screen. That's bad plot development. The film medium isn't always able to explain motivation although good films managed to do so. The same goes for print fiction.

I did not wake up angry at certain people this morning for no good reason. I had reasons for it. I have a past and a present. They are integrated and the experiences and emotions that make up who I am explain the reasons I am mad at certain people. If I am very sure of myself as a writer and an editor tells me my stuff is not right for his magazine, it would not bother me and I would just send it to someone else. If I am very unsure of myself and it took a year to get the courage to send it out because my mother was always telling me I was no good and my teachers reinforced this I would be very angry. If I am writing a story about a writer who is trying to send his or her stories out this would be important.

I don't think it is necessary to explain with huge blocks of detail on characters' emotions and reasons for being otherwise you put the reader to sleep. That is where reading other people's work comes in. You just get a sense of what keeps you interested and what generally turns you off. It is so important to read. I think, personally, that you should read what is popular now and what was popular in the past. I am reading everything I can get my hands on right now by W. Somerset Maugham. It isn't easy here in Korea but I have managed. I was also able to pick up one of his favorite authors, Charles Dickens. I am going to read "A Christmas Story" again but this time with a pencil. I have been reading current authors too.

Sometimes it is useful to read bad books so you know why they don't work. In every instance of a bad book, I don't like reading about characters who act in such ways that I can't figure out why they do and then they change and then I can't figure out why they change. Even in Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Alfred Conan Doyle, characters are consistent and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson characters in all of the stories remain the same. There are other things I don't like in some other books but those are the most outstanding criticisms.

If a character named Judy is consistently happy and never depressed, some sentence should address why this is so, such as being born and raised in a happy and satisfied family. If by reading a book about a happy character named Judy who turns out to be a serial killer, you need some kind of explanation why Judy turned out to like chopping up her boyfriends such as her family wasn't such a happy and satisfied family and that her father was a ritual satanic worshiper who practiced on his family.

In the popular series, Harry Potter Books, there is an evil character named Lord Voldemort. J. K. Rowland explains as the story progresses through the books why this evil lord is so evil. Characters do not develop in a vacuum. In this case, Lord Voldemort was a poor boy named Tom who was disowned by his father who also rejected his mother. He felt a growing sense of vengeance towards the world that rejected him. He also felt anger towards those who would oppose him including Harry Potter and his parents who Voldemort killed. Potter, on the other hand, felt anger but also felt the love and acceptance of those around him at Hogwarts. He was a gifted wizard too but had a heart willing to accept love.

Part of the magic of creating characters is making them real. Real people are not people who live only on the surface of life. They have likes and dislikes, pasts and presents. They also have emotions and ways of looking at the world. We all develop philosophies. We have hopes and aspirations. We have fears and things that makes us angry. We are not stereotypes. I am a bit overweight and many people relate to me as that. I was at a monastery once for a weekend and one monk could not tell one woman guest apart from me because we were both over-weight although we had thirty years difference in age and she was Hispanic and I was not. He never looked beneath the surface of people or he had a disability that make it impossible for him to do so.

Whenever I create a character, I always make an inventory in my mind as to where that person is from and why he or she is who they are. I may not use all of the material that is in my head but it is there. It makes it easier to keep the plot going or at least I have found that to be true. To go back to poor Judy, she gets caught because she sends notes to a reporter who looks uncannily like her first victim. Her father used to scare her with stories of ghosts as well as satanic stories of possession. The reporter working with the police never gives up and seeks her relentlessly because unknowingly to her he is the brother of that first victim and the identical twin. The brothers look like her father who is dead. She leaves clues because she wants to be caught as she is scared of the ghost of that first victim who is in her mind her father. The story is called "Cycle of Anger". The story would not have worked if motivation was not forthcoming.

There are people who express the opinion that writers would make good detectives. No, they would not. If detail is missing, we make it up. That would not work in a court of law. We make good guesses if we are therapists but I am not convinced we would make good therapists. What we are good at, is writing stories.