So since my article from last week, I’ve recently joined up to be in the cast of a play called The Great God Pan. For the past week, I’ve been going to script readings and thoroughly examined the characters and plot with an awesome group of people. While these meetings have been wonderfully fun, it was astounding to find that we could examine this 70-some page play for three hours four days out of this past week (only skipping Friday for St. Valentine’s Day). I’m sure that we found some things that didn’t really exist (and weren’t intended by the author–but authorial intent and its insignificance are topics for an article for another day), but we managed to stumble upon some amazing bits of characters in the recesses of the text and our own minds that really made the whole thing come alive.
Our director has a habit of hammering in the idea that we need to form connection, connecting with our characters and the other characters, surely, but also allowing the characters to connect with us! We contribute just as much to our characters as they have to offer on the page, and I think that it’s important to analyze how the characters you create are you unique to your creation of them. No one else could have written Harry Potter the way J.K. Rowling did, or Gandalf the way that Tolkien managed. These characters, as do all characters, have a unique and intimate relationship with the people who write them–even when that person is George R. R. Martin and he’s murdering everyone that you’ve ever loved in a novel.
Why a character does what they do and how they do it is important, but why they’re doing what they’re doing how they’re doing it for you (their writer, player, or actor) is equally significant. Authorial intent might not matter, but it probably does to the author! And for that reason, I think it should matter to you. There’s a lot of debate about whether characters continue on after you finish that last sentence of your short story, defeat the final boss of the campaign, or the red curtain closes–but if they do, if they really experience everything that they’re put through in the writing, wouldn’t you want them to experience a fullness of being? I mean, sure, some characters aren’t going to go out happily or be good people, but as fully-written characters, maybe they can reach that kind of fulfillment that everyone’s always seeming to be searching for, which isn’t to say that it should be handed on a silver platter, but certainly attainable.
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