Hey, ho, let’s go!
You’re gonna get in your way. You’re going to not be able to create a certain kind of character realistically because you can’t understand that character’s point of view. That’s not good enough. You have no excuse. You’re a writer. You don’t have the luxury of only understanding one kind of person. If you haven’t been watching people, watch them now. Look at the person, whoever they may be, in a restaurant. Try to decipher their life. Who at the table has a job? Who’s paying the ticket for the meal, or are they splitting the check? Who do you hate and why? Now, why do you admire them? Now, why do you wish you could be them?
As a writer, we need to be proud of the person we are so we can assert our voice, and step confidently into our work. As a writer, it’s also extremely important that we are not too proud of what we are and the things that make us up. If you’re extremely proud of your culture or your race, you should be. And I applaud that. I have Romani blood in me. I’m extremely proud of it. But that’s not the main focus of my work. I applaud it, I explore it, and I wear it, but it’s not everything.
Classless. You not only have to think like a rich person and a poor person, you have to be able to step into a rich person or a poor person. I don’t know how you grew up, but when I was six years old, my stepdad made $14,000 a year. My mom didn’t work. Everything is a crisis when you’re that poor. Everything.
You go out and start the car, if it doesn’t turn over and start up immediately, you panic. You either start cussing or you start praying, or doing both. I actually heard my stepdad take the Lord’s name in vain while praying to the Lord. The opening lines of his prayer, with his forehead resting on the steering wheel, foot hovering over the gas, key ready to turn, I heard him say, “Goddammit, God. You gotta help me. I’m desperate. I need this. Just this one time. I’ll do anything you want. But Goddammit, you have to start this car.” And he turned the key and it started up.
I can go into the theology of that if you want me to, but that’ll be in office hours. Even then, I probably won’t tell you how I feel. When you’re rich, other things become important. A lot of people will try to tell you that poor people live a harder life than rich people. As a writer, you don’t have the luxury of believing that. With rich people, the politic is more important. How this person talks to you at this party decides how the observers handle you during your business deals. You don’t have the right clothes, and you show up at a women’s luncheon at the country club.
I’m fiercely proud of being a multi-billion dollar junk bond trader. You should hear me talk about it. You should see my cuff link collection. I have over 55 different pairs of cuff links. I was drunk one night after a bad day at the stock market. I was pretty sure I could overcome, but I wanted to see what my options were. I took my cuff link collection to the local jewelry store. My 55 cuff links are worth $478,000+ dollars. I’ll never sell them, but I have options. I get comments all the time on my cuff links.
I am very proud of being the mother of the nose guard of the local AA high school in a middle class district. I have to be proud of that. I’m at all the booster meetings. I love going to booster meetings, guys. Especially when I dress up in my maroon and green, and I have the right earrings on, and I can show off my wedding ring. That’s a rock the bitch from the PTA will never be able to compete with. My son, who’s a nose guard, is also on the honor roll, but at the end of the season, they don’t give honor roll moms roses at the games. So we’re focusing on the nose guard thing, and I am extremely proud. He broke through the line on fourth and two against the Brackken Trailblazers, and you know those Brackken moms and how they brag. Well my son broke through and hit the quarterback so hard he almost put that poor kid in the hospital. I even heard a rumor that after that hit, that quarterback bit through his mouthguard. That was my son. They remember my son’s name, and I’m his mother. And I have never been more proud of anything in my life. At the end of the season, we might even be looking at college.
As a writer, I know how to put on that woman’s makeup. I know if she’s a spring, summer, autumn, or winter. If she looks so good in maroon and green, she’s an autumn.
As a writer, You have to erase yourself. Let’s take a look at how we do that.
Know your enemy and embrace them. We’re gonna watch a video now. Let me ask you, do these people know their enemy? What is the emotional impact this video has on you when you see the main enemy?
This is Disturbed, “Land of Confusion.” It’s a cover from a Phil Collins song that came out in the 80s. I would show you the Phil Collins version, because I’m partial to it. But it doesn’t serve what I’m talking about right now. Phil Collins’ “Land of Confusion” focuses on puppets and politicians that you might not be familiar with. So I’m going with the Disturbed version.
In this video, you have people of many different races and lifestyles and cultures coming together to fight an oppressive government. And by the end of the video, we’ll see what’s behind the government. This is an exaggeration, but we’re gonna talk about the main problem of this video. And the main problem is, when we get to the antagonist (God, I hate that word), we cannot see the world through their point of view at all, so their fall means nothing to us. Imagine the impact if we knew what he thought because this man thinks he’s better than all of us, thinks he’s better than everyone.
So if the makers of the video had been able to erase themselves, create the character, show some of his fell deeds, display how truly monstrous his personality is, imagine the impact this video would have. But here’s the trick. This is where a lot of writers get caught up, and they choke. Let’s say this isn’t a music video, this is just a short film. When I am creating the character, the antagonist, when I’m writing his dialogue, and I’m describing how he thinks, I have to feel like I’m right. I have to feel like everything I say and everything I do is flawless and just.
I wrote a character once named Atikka Stonefist. My wife hated, then she loved, reading Atikka. He’s an absolute despicable villain, is in an epic series, and there are a lot of different points of view. And you hated Atikka through all of them. But when she was reading Atikka’s chapters, she agreed with everything he was doing and thought he was the hero. This is not an anti-hero situation. This is just an “understanding the character you’re writing” situation. I understood Atikka so well that I knew how he rationalized things to himself. I imbued that rationalization in every single word and every single action he performed. And in doing so, confused the hell out of my wife, because she would finish reading an Atikka chapter and think to herself, yeah, that seems about right. She’d read the next chapter and she would see the true horror of what he had just done.
So, let’s pretend this music video is a short film. Imagine how much more powerful it would be if the same writing that applied to Atikka applied to the antagonist at the end of this video.
Imagine how much more powerful this video would be if we could get in the mind of the rich giant in the end. And we could hear all the terrible things he says that rationalize everything he does.
This video reminds me of Paradise Lost by John Milton. In Paradise Lost, the beginning starts in a lake of fire. All the demons are sitting around talking about how terrible their lot is. Lucifer led them all here. They’re all here because they followed Lucifer in a fight against God. That’s what brought them here. Well, Lucifer has to put a nice pink bow on this pile of shit. So he says a bunch of promising words. They get out of the lake of fire. They go walking around and figure out that hell is a nightmare. And Lucifer summons up a palace. Milton calls it Pandemonium. This is the first time you’ll find this word used in the English language. We’ve already been through that. Supposedly the castle is gorgeous, but there’s gotta be little things that are off. Gustave Dore, the printmaker, did a picture of Pandemonium. It was gorgeous, but you knew it was a lie when you looked at it. Too many bright spots to distract from too many dark. Can we pull it up?
There’s too many dark pits outshined by too many light spots on the print. You know it’s a problem.
But back to Phil Collins and Disturbed. There’s a part in the beginning of Paradise Lost where all the demons have gathered together to talk about what they’re going to do next. He names out demons. And there is one standing up high, who is talking, and Lucifer is beside him giving him advice.
It’s bits of information, it’s manipulation. Lucifer has control over this demon. This demon convinces the other demons they need to wage war against God by destroying his favorite creation. The big question becomes, but who will we send? Who will we send to destroy Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden? And wouldn’t you know it, a brave hero comes forward and offers to take on the burden himself. Lucifer says, “I’ll endanger myself. I’ll leave this glory I’ve made of Hell and I’ll go do the hard work,” which was his plan of course from the very beginning.
Now, in this video with Disturbed, we saw a lot of times where politicians were at a round table yelling and screaming and pointing fingers, screams of war behind them. They had all been whispered to by the man of money, the guy with the cigar and the hat. The guy with the cigar and the hat is the Lucifer character. So here we are.
The reason we sympathize with the Lucifer character is because we know him. We’ve heard how he thinks. We’ve listened to him talk. We see him go through the maelstrom. We see him suffer. We understand him. So Paradise Lost works.
I was taught Paradise Lost my senior year of high school by my brilliant teacher Mrs. Learmann. Now, I know she’s steaming right now as she hears this lecture, and let me explain to you why. What I just said about sympathizing with Lucifer is similar to what critics are saying now. I implied that he’s a great anti-hero and a great leader. And let me tell you, Mrs. Learmann’s not the only one who’s furious. So is Milton.
See, to be a great literature teacher, Learmann had to understand Milton, and understand the age he was living in. Milton’s assumption was that everybody would know that everything Lucifer was saying was a lie. They might get caught up in it. They were supposed to get caught up in it, but they were not supposed to sympathize. That doesn’t really help me in this lecture, though. In this lecture, I need an example, so I have to step away from Milton’s intentions. For just a moment, I need to ignore what Learmann taught me, because this is a great example. And the example goes like this. I’m going to gather it up and tie a pretty pink bow on it.
You need to be able to sympathize with the villains you’re writing, like contemporary critics do in this age when it comes to Lucifer and Paradise Lost. It wasn’t Milton’s intention, but it works as a great example here.
The reason “Land of Confusion” doesn’t work is because we do not see the antagonist (God, I hate that word) talking, moving, smiling, shaking hands. We don’t see him as anything but a symbol. He’s not a character.
If you’re going to be the root of all evil, and you want to represent yourself as money, if you’re going to be the root of all evil and you want to represent yourself as Lucifer, you have to make the reader understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, and why you think it’s the right thing to do. Just like that nose guard’s mom makes us all see, and all of us understand why she doesn’t give two rats ass what grades her son is making, just how hard he hit the quarterback.
—Prince
Jesse Teller 
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