Hi Guys,
So the second issue of my ongoing Transformers title, ‘Transfromers: Till All Are One,’ is out today and I saw a really good comment pop up in my feed about it. A reader was upset that one of the events in the issue was depicted inconsistently when someone referred back to it.
I’ve seen this a couple of times and it’s one of my favorite critiques. It shows these people are really reading the book because they’ll point out that what happens and how characters report what happens don’t always line up. (ex. Ironhide talking about the Badgeless arresting a suspect and leaving out that the suspect hit an officer. The news reporting the Badgeless fired ON a crowd instead of ABOVE the crowd. etc). And it’s true, the ‘facts’ in TAAO often don’t line up with the ‘story’.
That’s on purpose (Okay, at some point I’m gonna just mess up, it’ll happen, but most of the time it’s on purpose). Now, I won’t repost the exact posts that mention this because I don’t want people to give someone flak for not liking this technique, but I’m really excited to talk about this technique because it’s one of my favorites and one of the harder things I’m trying to pull off. I call it ‘the unreliable character.’
We all know the icon of the ‘Unreliable Narrator’ a character that is supposed to inform us truthfully as readers, but who is actually actively manipulating us. The classic example is Humbert Humbert from Lolita. But I wanted to take it a step further.
In my view, whenever possible, all characters should be at least somewhat unreliable. Study after study has shown that people struggle to accurately perceive pretty much anything that’s going on around them, even when they try really hard:
You can see a few neat examples here:
http://ift.tt/29ryRkMand here:
Even when we do have all the pieces of information we need, those pieces are colored by our values and beliefs in ways we’d never suspect. What information is important? What information can be assumed? How will others interpret this? These are all questions that are crucial to communicating but are given little thought in our actual lives.
Now, some characters in TAAO are ACTIVELY trying to manipulate and lie to others (Starscream being our Number 1 example) but I want an important theme in this series to be that even well-intentioned people consciously and unconsciously fail to report ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. Did Circuit know the Badgeless fired above the crowd, but ‘at the crowd’ made a better story? Did he feel it wasn’t his place to decide if the Badgeless intentionally fired into the air or was just a bad shot? Does he consider ‘above’ and ‘at’ to mean pretty much the same thing? Did he actually think the crowd was fired at? We’ll never know (Seriously, I’m never gonna write that scene). But especially in a medium like comics, where we have a visual record, we can really investigate the difference between reality and perception.
What does this mean?
For my readers: Keep your eyes peeled, because ‘the truth’ is a very murky place in Till All Are One and both our best characters and worst will have a hard time finding their way there.
For my aspiring writers: Look at your own writing. Is everyone being a little too truthful? (Ex. Who would mention the garnish if asked what they were served at a restaurant?) Are they remembering too much? (Ex. Can you list everything you ate yesterday? Did you forget a piece of candy off the receptionist’s desk? Did you forget to mention what you drank as well?) And how can these tiny mistakes start to cause real problems for your characters and those around them? Remember, big mistakes will likely be seen as your characters actively lying. But little mistakes, or mistakes made over a long period of time, can be a chance to show off a character’s values, perception and give a level of realism to your next story.
Happy Writing!
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/29ryI0t