Hey, ho, let’s go!
Reading Assignment for this class: “Strong Urge to Fly” chapter from Teardrop Road
We’re gonna talk about character creation today. I had you read “Strong Urge to Fly.” It’s a story of when Smear Lord of Ire was created. The one that, in my mind, we call Artist. I remember earlier during the day, I had been walking around my backyard, which was very small. Not exactly pacing, just kind of walking in different directions and turning around, just marching around the yard, and I was in emotional pain, some kind of distress. I don’t remember what bothered me that day. I don’t remember why I was so upset. I remember feeling ugly.
A butterfly flew into the yard, and it perched on a trash can. This was back when all trash cans were metal, the metal lids, you had to carry them out to the curb. I looked at the butterfly. I remember plainly thinking, I wish I was that beautiful. I wish there was anything about me beautiful at all. Teth reached out, I shifted into the alter known as Teth, who is more beast really than any of my other alters. He reached out and grabbed the butterfly, put it in his mouth and he ate it. To him it made perfect sense. Butterflies are beautiful and now I have something beautiful inside me.
That happened at about 3 p.m. Five hours later I’m listening to The Wall. I don’t know if you guys have ever experienced The Wall. You can’t listen to the songs by themselves. You have to hear the whole thing played out at one time. No breaks. It’s best to do it in the dark. You have to be completely sober. No alcohol. No weed. No drug at all. Your mind just can’t move right when you’re intoxicated. I don’t have a soap box for this, but I’m gonna climb on one anyway.
Your mind works differently when under the influence of a substance, and it moves in a way that you can’t truly decipher when you’re sober. The two minds that are created when you are intoxicated don’t communicate on one-to-one. If you start writing when you’re intoxicated, you won’t remember it correctly when you sober up. I guess what I’m saying is if you’re gonna create anything, it’s best to do it when your mind is clean, because you won’t remember it the same. You won’t understand it the same when you’re sober if you write it when you’re under the influence of anything. The best way to describe it is if I wrote when I was drunk, when I was sober it would be the same as the and the. When I’m sober it’s the and when I’m drunk it’s the. You just look at things differently. And the next day, you don’t decipher it one to one, A to A. It’s always slightly off.
This is extremely important for creation. There’s one story I wrote while I was intoxicated. It’s in one of my short story collections. And I remember feeling the emotion of the story extremely strong, to the point where I was crying while I was writing it. When I sobered up, the same words were all there. But they didn’t have the effect on me. I’d written scenes just as intense like this when I was sober, and they affected me. But this one that I had written while I was drunk just fell flat. So, that was very interesting to me and confusing.
So the next time I got drunk, I read the story again, and again I wept while I read it. So how am I supposed to lecture on that story to you? I don’t come to class drunk. So how am I supposed to lecture if I understand it completely differently when I’m drunk than when I’m sober, and I wrote it when I was drunk.
This really drives me crazy a lot, because I’m bipolar. And I’ve heard the argument that bipolars are some of the greatest artists in the world, and I don’t disagree. I’ve also heard the excuse that “I can’t take my medication for bipolar because my creativity goes down.” And that is absolutely ridiculous. The whole ‘I have to be depressed’ or ‘I have to be manic in order to write,’ is insane. I am completely unwilling to listen to that.
When I was unmedicated I filled five comp books, you know, the black and white ones with the huge line spacing. I filled five of those. In my entire career when I was unmedicated.
Medicated, I wrote 38 novels plus four epic length autobiographies. In order to create good work and be prolific, you have to have control of your mind. It’s funny to hear me say that, isn’t it? You have to have control of your mind in order to create good work. So if you’re bipolar, take your meds. If your meds aren’t working, get different meds. If you take your medication and you feel hazy and exhausted and thick headed all the time, talk to your doctor and get on other meds. I take my medication every day twice a day. And I think perfectly clear. It can happen. It does happen. But you have to have control of your mind in order to do the job that we do. Anybody who tells you differently is not being honest with themselves or with you. And you can trust me. I have been through all the therapy. I have had all the emotional breakdowns. I had to fight through years of finding the right medications. And I created before and after. I’ve created drunk and sober. And I can tell you that sober is, clean mind, is the best way to generate creativity.
So I’m eight, maybe nine, going into fifth grade. I might have been ten. And there’s Pink Floyd’s The Wall. There’s no room you can go into and close the door. When my sister was playing her music loud, you walked into my room, closed the door, and you couldn’t hear hers. You could only hear The Wall. There was no room in the house where you can’t hear it. There’s no amount of stuffing cotton balls in your ears that’s gonna help very much. You’re just going to listen to this. There was no such thing as noise cancelling headphones. Never been able to sleep when there’s music going on in the background. I’m just gonna have to see my way to the other side of this. All I know is country music, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens. I know soft oldies. The Everly Brothers, The Monkees. My sister had not taught me about heavy metal yet, it’s what she listens to. My mom calls it “just noise.” And now I’m in the middle of The Wall.
A character was created by the environment. It was the environment. And the character was Smear Lord of Ire. He’s the very definition of creativity purified and boiled down. He’s concentrated. We’ve seen him at work before, Artist. We’ve read his first conversation with a girl, first time he wrote a letter to a girl. This is the moment of his creation. Now, he looks into the mind, this is when he’s first created. He looks into the mind, because he’s not quite part of it yet, and he sees everyone. I wanna pay close attention to when he sees Assassin.
Assassin really has no level of creativity. Assassin is not about creation at all. Assassin is cold at this point in my life, and he’s death. He’s always prepared to kill the person standing in front of him. Assassin was created by my father, who showed me how to get into his safe, where he kept his snubnose revolver. He pulled the gun, showed it to me, and he said something along the lines of, “I want you to get this if anyone is ever hurting your sister.” Then he pointed it at me and he pulled the trigger. And that was the moment Assassin was created.
Later Assassin will get that gun and he’ll point it at his father and he’ll pull the trigger and it won’t go off. He was taught how to load it, he was taught how to hold it, he was taught everything about it except the safety.
So Assassin and Smear Lord of Ire are meeting each other for the first time, during The Wall at the creation of Artist.
I want you to get out of your mind the concept of the protagonist and the antagonist. Now there are some people who are villains. I think in the movie Batman: Dark Knight, Alfred is talking about his time in the military. He describes a guy who is stealing massive jewels and throwing them away. And he says some guys just wanna see the world burn. So there are actually villains in the world. But I don’t like to look at it that way.
When you’re writing a book, imagine you’re sitting in this room right now. Tapestries on the wall, sleeping dogs, wife taking dictation. There’s two chairs on the far wall. On the side wall is like a couch/loveseat piece of furniture, it’s like a long loveseat. And then shoved in a corner is a cheap, fake leather chair that I sit in. It’s terribly uncomfortable.
Now imagine you’re looking at this course, but you’re sitting looking at it from this chair, from my chair. I’m the guy creating it. The story you’re looking at, the curriculum we’re going through right now. I’m the guy creating it. So I have total freedom. I have complete freedom to say and do whatever I want, to put my ideas and my beliefs into this.
Now imagine you’re sitting on the sofa. Your freedom is more limited. You’re getting the information as I’m putting it out. And you’re going to leave this room, you’re going to leave this house, get back in your car and drive home. You can decide what you choose to take with you and what you choose to put into motion.
My wife has almost no freedom. She has to write down every word I say. She has to stay strict with spelling and punctuation. She has to look up the videos that come to mind, she has to…
This is very much like a story and very much like a book. I’m not the hero of this story. I’m not the protagonist. I’m in complete control of what’s happening in this room, but I’m not the protagonist. I’m a character in the story. You’re sitting on the couch. (I’m pointing at you right now but you can’t see me pointing at you.) You’re not the hero either. You’re just a character as well. Bekah is not the hero and she’s not a minor character either. There’s no side characters in here. There’s no heroes. There’s no villains.
What we have when we look at this room and the three of us sitting in this room is we have three different stories.
My story is everything that brought me to this point, all the writing that I’ve done, waking up exhausted, having to go back to sleep. Taking my shower, prepping for my next book, and coming here to do this before I go off and do anything else. This is a scene in a story about me.
The other story that’s going on in the room is your story. You had to get up. You had to go to class. You had to eat, you had to get dressed, talk to friends, charge your phone. You had to take a Claritin because you know you’re allergic to dogs and you were gonna end up in Teller’s house today. After Teller’s house you gotta get in the car, drive, read, homework, bed. That’s a full story. That’s the story going on in this room right now.
My wife is another story going on in this room right now. She got up, she did some of her graphic design work, she worked on two covers for some books I’m putting out. She fed the dogs twice, she ordered the pizza we ate today. She helped me prep for the book I’m about to write. And right now in this room, in her story, she’s not a side character. She’s just as important a player in this story as I am.
What I’m saying is there’s no hero, there’s no protagonist, there’s no antagonist. Because they are all heroes and they are all antagonists.
When you create a character you have to understand that you’re creating a full cathedral, not a buttress. When they first started creating cathedrals, they were building buildings where the walls were so high that they needed support in order to keep the wall from tumbling, so they invented buttresses. And the buttress was a, kind of like a stone crutch for the building to lean on. When people start talking about supporting characters, they’re talking about the buttress on a cathedral. That’s not really how it works. That’s not really how it works. A side character’s not support for the character being written about. The side character’s a full cathedral in itself. If I’m the priest of the cathedral of my story, you, everybody in this room is not a member of the congregation. You’re cathedrals of your own.
If you look at character creation this way, you’re in for an extremely hard experience. But a much more realistic book. Because everybody in your book will have their own motives. They’ll all have their own backstory. They’ll all have their own trauma.
Now, when I’m creating my work, I don’t truly understand a character until I’m writing them. I don’t do character descriptions or character bios. I tried that, but what ended up happening was I ended up detailing out things I never used. I would say, this guy is a vegetarian because in his past, this, this, and this, and I’d write that down. Then in the course of the story it never would become important. There’d never been a dinner scene. And the issues that cause him to become a vegetarian, they never came up. But there were other things that would come up. Like why this person was nervous around dogs. And I hadn’t put that in the character bio, but I needed it, so I’d have to create it. So I just gave up on character bios and character sketches. Because they never contained the information that I really needed.
My best advice to you if character bios and character sketches are necessary for you, what I would do is write a writing session in which you create a character. After that session is over, write down what you now know about that character. You had a character in which there was some sort of fight scene, and the moment he heard dogs in the background, they just turned around and ran. You wrote it down in the story, you like it, so you write it on your character notepad. Before your next writing session you pull that out again. You look at that. The character did this, they ran away from a dog, so why? Come up with a backstory for it, write it down, do your next writing session. That is how I would do it if I still needed to do character bios. My mind works differently, as you can imagine. So I don’t have to, but that’s what I would do if I had to.
You are developing your character as these things are needed, as this information is needed, you are developing your character. It gives you a great amount of freedom and as you flesh out the character, after you’ve written your session, and for example you’re writing why they don’t like dogs, you are learning more and more about that character as you move along that can go into the creation of the book.
It’s not really prewriting, it’s more like postwriting. You’ll understand what this is even if you don’t realize it. Because you do it every day.
See this course as if it were the writing of a novel. Any prewriting that you do, outlines, any readings you have for the class, that’s your prewriting, that’s getting ready to write. This class that you’re sitting in right now is as if you’re sitting at the keyboard pounding away, creating the story. And as you go home and do the homework, that’s the equivalent of you sitting down and writing why your character doesn’t like dogs. Postwriting. Taking notes about the things you discovered about your character while you were writing them.
So I had a guy come and visit me a few months ago. He was actually in the book. He was in my autobiography. Around my house we just call it the book. He had a lot of questions, and he had a lot of things he wanted to say to me. After he read his character, he was unhappy with the way he was portrayed. He came in aggressively, sat right there where you were just sitting. I brought my entire family into the room so they could listen and if I needed to make any apologies to this person, my wife and children would witness it. And we talked, and a lot of it sounded like an argument. Personally, there was nothing false that was written. I agreed to his side of one particular thing. But it is the way that it happened. It was accurate.
When we were in high school, we were friends. He came back to my house, I thought I was meeting up with an old friend, but in actuality I wasn’t. We argued. We argued in that way that it’s talking but it’s arguing. Everybody’s kind of being nice, but not really. And what had happened was, the misunderstanding was that he had left high school, and he’d left that small town, and he’d gone off and he’d had a big life. And he had changed, as characters should, and he had come back to my house, furious about me writing how he had been instead of what he was now.
There’s a lot of people who are ashamed of the things they do when they’re younger. Or they were proud of the way they acted, and even though they act the same way now, they’re no longer proud of it. I’m meeting up with a lot of that.
If you’re writing the story of my life as a child, as a teenager, you create that character, his character, based on how he acts. When you get him in The Veil, in a room covered in tapestries with two sleeping dogs and a family, you have to realize you’re creating a completely different character. Too many issues have been dealt with and put away, and too many issues have sprouted up.
He came into my house, he was aggressive and rude, and by the end of the evening, he had gotten physical. I still don’t call him a villain of the scene, of the story of that day and that night. I’m not comfortable calling him a villain. Because as I said before, he came here and brought his own story. He’s his own cathedral. His sermon is just different than my sermon. His congregants will never step into my church. So even though you could classify him as a villain in my story, you really can’t. If I was writing a chapter about that night and him coming to visit me, I would have to capture everything he had been through since the last time I saw him that made him aggressive towards me.
And this is how I’d do it. The reason he was so aggressive towards me is because time had passed and he’d become a different person. I’d spend time in my descriptions describing how different his clothes are, what he wore then versus what he wore now. Things that had nothing to do with fashion. Things that were personal choice. How he wants to be perceived now. The differences in the length of his hair and the shape and the way he wears his hair. Tattoos. I’d talk about the brand he got on his chest. The subtle ways he talks and the subtle ways he moves that were different than how he had moved when we were kids.
By doing this, the reader sees that the character has moved on from what he used to be. I don’t have to tell his entire background, because I just don’t know it. He told me a little bit about what had happened since high school, but not a lot. But in describing the character’s appearance and how they move, how they talk and how their vocabulary has changed, we can portray to the reader that this is a completely different character than they have previously read, and that the reader doesn’t know what to expect, and neither do I.
Some touchpoints are the same, but not all. At this point, the character they used to be becomes legend and myth. And the character they are now is reality.
And in this room, when I talked to my friend, the guy who had once been my friend, we had the collision of two completely different people, two completely different characters. The person I had become and the person he had become had changed so much that they were unrecognizable in trying to coexist.
The thing that was so crazy about it was there was an illusion that since we had grown up and known each other years before, that we should know each other now. But we all should have known better than that, because since I had last spoken to him I had been through 19 years of intensive therapy. But still the illusion was that it was two old friends and we were gonna fall right back into it. And then you had the collision of two completely different characters.
This is exactly the same as the day my friend came to visit me. And the day that Artist was created. Artist is a creature of protection and light and beauty and fantasy. Not everything he creates is wonderful and joyous, but he’s about life, showing life and preserving life. And he had a collision with Assassin, who’s the exact opposite.
Now the drama of the scene was somewhere else. The drama of the scene was in the moment of birth of Artist. So, that’s what I stuck with when I was writing the chapter. When I was writing the story that’s what I stuck with. But there were things that happened between the one who would become and was becoming Artist, and the one who was already Assassin. Things were happening, conversations were being had. The two of them were bumping up against each other. It was a collision of two completely different characters whose goals and beliefs were completely opposite, yet they were not enemies. That’s what I’m getting into now.
The collision of two completely different characters can create the illusion that one of them is a villain. I was definitely a villain in my old friend’s case. After he got physical with me, he was a villain in my case. But thinking about characters in heroes and villains is counterproductive. So I don’t do that.
I’m gonna show you now a video clip of the collision of two different characters. This is how dramatic it was when me and my, well the guy who had once been my friend, got together in The Veil. This is how dramatic it was.
Let’s look at this trailer. It’s from the movie Daredevil with Ben Affleck. Stop laughing. It’s got Joe Pantoliano. If you know him as well as I do, you call him Joey Pants. Let’s focus on the part of the trailer where someone says, “There’s no proof that Daredevil exists.”
Here is a collision of two characters. Daredevil and the journalist. Until this moment, this is just a subway station with cops being interviewed by reporters.
What you have here is the creation of a foil, not a villain. You guys have been through the writing classes, you know all the terms, but I’m gonna talk about foils anyway. In this particular situation, Joey Pants and Daredevil serve as the foil to each other. A foil is a character that is not necessarily the enemy of its opposite. We’re not talking about the nemesis situation. But the foil believes the complete opposite belief of its counterpart. It is attempting to do the exact opposite. It’s character and characteristics are the exact opposite.
Joey Pants plays a reporter. He wants to get to the truth. He wants to expose Daredevil and let the entire city know, let the entire world know, what he is. And he wants to show that he exists at all, to a police force that won’t acknowledge the existence of this vigilante superhero.
Daredevil himself wants his existence as quiet as possible. Doesn’t wanna be seen by anybody but his enemies. He wants no information about himself to be given to anybody at all.
Now it’s important to point out here, these two characters are not enemies, they’re not nemesis. They’re just foils. In order to create a foil to Daredevil, we have to create somebody that’s burdened with the desire to expose the truth. We have to create a character that is not physical at all. We have to create a character with completely opposite methods than Daredevil. But more than anything else, we have to keep in mind that the foil is the hero of their story. When you’re writing the screenplay of Daredevil, you have to realize that every minute Daredevil is doing something, his foil is busy working in the opposite. You don’t have to necessarily show it. But you have to let it be known. You need clips of Joey Pants getting closer and closer. And you need shots like this one.
In this shot, Daredevil created the DD symbol in gasoline, but he didn’t light it. Only somebody that knows to look for it sees it at all. Partially, the pouring of the gasoline is a taunt. Daredevil is taunting the police and he’s taunting this journalist. Partially it’s a desire for his presence to be known by certain people, but for the most part he still wants his secrecy.
So this is a foil creation. Foils are really fun to create because you get to list off all the main beliefs and core values of your character along with their strongest attributes, and then you get to create a character that is the exact opposite of that.
Joey Pants has the resources to expose and the ability to do the research to find and identify Daredevil. He has the ability to make the cops aware that Daredevil exists so they can move against him. Those resources are not something Daredevil has access to, or that he would ever use.
However, this character Joey Pants probably can’t fight. Physically, he’s not imposing at all. During the course of this movie, he will not show any kind of physical prowess at all. He’s short, he’s thin. He’s got an attitude that’s completely opposite of Daredevil’s. He’s extremely jaded. But again, we have not yet created a nemesis. The class about creating a nemesis is coming up, but we’ve not created a nemesis. We’ve created a foil.
I have a pair of foils in my work. Their names are Rextur Cherlot and Revenge. Rextur is huge and physically imposing. He commands hundreds of thousands of warriors and conquers and decimates entire nations at a time. Revenge, she is a chemist. Extremely intelligent in subtle ways. She is a poisoner, a murderess. And usually when you get killed by Revenge, you are unaware of it. Rextur wears huge, thick, heavy armor and carries a massive sword.
Revenge, evening gown, slippers. And her two major weapons are the cigarette that she’s smoking that she’s tainted with an airborne poison, and the lipstick she’s wearing that is also poison. She is wearing an evening gown and slippers everywhere she goes.
Rextur could literally reach over and squeeze her to death with one hand. She could also kill him by lighting a cigarette and blowing the smoke down a hallway, and never get within 60 feet of him. They’re on the same team, they don’t like each other. But they are on the same team. They’re not enemies.
Writing Assignment
So your writing assignment is this. You are going to write a 3-page story that is the collision of two foils. You’re going to get their entire background captured by the way they act and the way they move, just like my friend, and the way they look, just like my friend. The clothes he was wearing, the way his hair worked, the way his facial hair worked, the tattoos and the brands he had gotten, they all, all these things should have told me, and in some small way did tell me, that I was dealing with a completely different person. I wanna see that in your story. Find a way to describe each character in such a way that I know enough about them that I know why they are the way they are. And the two foils must have some kind of collision, like Joey Pants and Daredevil did in this clip.
No less than 3 pages, no more than 4. That’s the challenge right there. Everybody in here knows that if you’re going to capture a character and you want me to really understand that character, and you need me to understand that character by their background then you need more than three pages. You’ve gotta do it twice. And you have to have a collision of some sort in four pages or less. In my personal opinion, this is the most difficult assignment I have ever given you. I would also like to remind you that I am now merciless when it comes to deadlines and accountability. This assignment is due in three class periods.
Reading Assignment
Reading assignment for next class: “Darkness of Slinger Middle School Part 2” chapter from Teardrop Road
Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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