Fiction doesn’t have to be all about verisimilitude — there’s a tendency to adopt the “it’s my world, and I can make it better” attitude, or even the “I’m not gonna let the unimportant things get in the way of telling my story and slowing it down” point of view.
Yes, I understand all that.
But — I put it to you — you do want to simulate real worlds (for certain values of “real”) and in particular you want to present real characters in that world (whatever their age/species/patent # may be).
Well, you may have noticed that things don’t run all that smoothly and friction-free in the real world with real critters. I’m not talking about the villains and conspiracies and all the plot-specific infrastructure that make up the bones of your story. No, I’m talking about the little things that provide friction or irritation or misunderstandings or … the illusion of quotidian reality.
What’s reminding me of all this is a personal irritant… I’ve had to send my hearing-aids in for battery-service, and I’m not getting them back for more than a week. Sure is nice and quiet here in no-hearing-aids land, just the faintest external sounds to catch, and an easier to ignore than usual random husbandly commentary from another room. But while it’s tempting to just doze off, a session of Merlin bird call listening reminds me that 30 birds can show up and be identified by my cell phone, but I can only personally hear the mourning doves. Hearing loss is actually pernicious — leave it uncorrected for too long, and you seem to get more permanent deficits — you would be wise to fear that comfy silence.
What happens in a social encounter when one of your characters can’t hear well? Misunderstandings, missed cues, perceived insults over accidental missed responsiveness, etc. Does the character know his hearing is bad, that he’s creating some unintended chaos? Do the others know? Is it temporary? First time? The result of an injury? A characteristic of his breed?
I sing in a (men’s) barbershop quartet (being a tenor). Sometimes one of us is missing for a gig or double-booked and we have to make do with a temporary fill-in. Suddenly you realize that not just the notes and the words but every breath that was synchronized, every nod, every gesture is suddenly not working quite right, in real time, in front of an audience. The world has acquired a chaotic element, and you have to adapt quickly (or fail to). It’s a test.
It’s not just senses that may be out of true. Individual character backgrounds and expectations may impede the smooth working of teams or any social group. Some of those differences can be played up for humor or character bonding, but some may be misunderstood or not recognized. A traumatic event may only make itself visible to others through the disturbance it leaves behind. Maybe that’s recognized by others, or maybe it isn’t, isolating one of the characters further.
Social groups where one or more characters have issues are fruitful places to really flesh out the character interactions and the remnants of past events (jokes, insecurities, disasters), not to mention providing the reader with a suspenseful anticipation of possible future problems ahead.
And don’t forget that a character who is part of more than one such group (Family/Work/Friends/etc.) will have opinions about the differences. Lots of opinions.
This sort of recognition of the wires that hold the characters of a team or other social group together provides a kind of mechanical tension, useful for both humor and serious focus, a kind of grit in the working parts that makes them matter more to the characters and the readers.
I have to resist the urge to explain every character’s reaction in social interactions — sometimes not even the character knows why he behaves the way he does, or maybe he will reveal that later on (to me, as well as my readers).
What about you? Where’s your detent on how much tension/grit you put into your social groups/teams and how much you use it to ground the readers in backgrounds and anticipated story directions?
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “Things out of true, and other valuable irritants”
I don’t know. I rarely write ensemble casts, so to speak. Hmmmmm.
Handicapped characters are tricky to write because they are not interchangeable with each other or with able-bodied characters. This is because a handicap that doesn’t handicap is a joke. At the very least, there has to be something in the story about how the character choose his job/residence/something, at least in part, to ensure that the handicap is not a problem.
Here’s a weird handicap for you. I’m… more than a bit Aspie. Even when I was young and had great hearing, I did not go to bars and other noisy social events because I could not understand anyone. That is not to say I can’t hear people talking – I hear everything, but lack the discriminator most people seem to have to pick out individual voices from the incessant background noise. I have no idea what the lyrics to most songs are. I don’t go to theaters, I watch movies at home with the subtitles turned on. In short, I need a high signal to noise ratio, plus a bit of time and concentration, to process sound into speech. Everybody wearing masks during the recent unpleasantness made me effectively deaf.
Imagine an alien with a translator device, dented and covered with coffee stains, bought cheap at a flea market.
“Put into” implies a level of foresight that isn’t usually there, in my case. Like TxRed, I tend not to have big ensembles, and what friction I have among not-evil characters tends to be basic differences of outlook or agenda. Given the setting of the series I’m working on, it makes sense for the hero’s ex-flame to have never told her husband that the hero rescued her from a monster, and given the circumstances under which the ex-flame and her husband blunder into the monster part of the WIP’s plot, it makes sense for the heroine, rather than the ex-flame’s brother, to get the ex-flame’s husband up to speed on this whole monster thing. But none of that is why I put ex-flame and her husband in the book – it felt important to have her in there as a foil for the heroine, for reasons I didn’t fully understand at the time.