“Find your own voice.” “Make each character sympathetic yet unique, with no stereotypes.” “Give the main character a meaningful arc, someone the reader can root for.”
These imperatives appear, over and over, in courses for writers. I’m noticing that our atmosphere of complex cultural chaos – in the news, online, among friends and family, and even in people’s private thoughts – is stirring chaos in people’s personal lives.
Feeling the ground shifting under my feet myself, I’ve developed a technique for identifying elements of the storm within – then moving the pieces around for new insights, new ideas for literary stories I want to create. Working with the process described below, I’ve also remembered actual personalities and events from my past and current lives, which show up as characters, arcs, and plots.
The process, if you want to experiment, is a dynamic system of Venn circles. The first step is to draw twelve circles in a vertical column. Start filling the circles, one element each, with six deep subtle motivators derived from the moral foundations model (Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity) and six general activators of the human condition: Survival, Sex, Money, Power, Love, and Image. (“Image” seems newly significant, online and in AI, beyond the millennia-long impulse toward local reputation.)
The technique works best if you ponder, in depth, how you’ve felt privately about each of the 12 elements across your lifetime, in notable settings and relationships – maybe with key quotes (watchwords, axioms) still in memory. Make notes as you go. Notice which ones particularly catch your attention and cause physical reactions. Some of them may pulse from the page.
Because the foundational morals are deeper, subtler drivers of identity and choice, frequently unspoken, there may be some surprises in memories that bubble up. The activators are more obvious sources of drama, and you can expand the definitions to include everything relevant to you. For example, “Money” could include crypto, assets, expected inheritances. “Love” has boundless definitions. “Image” can run the gamut from self-image to neighborhood reputation to global fake online portraits and click-counts. Again, notice the bodily sensations that get stimulated.
To launch the dynamism, choose two circles that feel especially important – two morals, or one moral and one activator. In your imagination, or on the page, overlap the circles into a vesica piscis. Notice the ideas and questions that rise from the central overlap (the almond shape). For example, What happens in the almond when Loyalty commingles with Money? When a situation sparks conflicts or blending between Authority and Love? When Liberty and Survival mix? When Fairness and Sanctity seem to pull in opposite directions or co-create new concepts? What happens when you push the circles together so they almost appear to converge? When you pull them apart, what happens?
The results will be different for each person (viz Rashomon). They will keep changing as individuals and situations change, and will be further altered when mixed with other circles. In no case are the results completely predictable, so stay open to possibilities – welcome and unwelcome. The process offers an essential flavor of complexity, the ways all parts of a system influence and are influenced by other parts, creating new “emergent” properties of reality. Deep realization of this phenomenon, which includes the “butterfly effect,” can open up new creative pathways that might’ve gotten overwhelmed by the challenges facing humanity.
As you go deeper into this, you can start overlapping more and more circles. For instance, if you’ve already plumbed the depths of interaction between Fairness and Image, open a new set of thrills by overlapping this combination with Sex, or Survival.
One of my favorite effects of this practice is a built-in softening, a diffusion, when I hear about some new potential threat or outrage: instantly, an array of bubbles fountains up, multiple factors that may’ve combined to produce the effect. I call it “story mind” or “science mind,” either of which opens my mind and heart to creative inquiry into the world and into myself.
We are all free to highlight the interactions most meaningful to us, as authors creating characters and as human beings, curious about the lives around and within us. The dynamic Venn offers ways to enrich our understandings and show how they evolve – and to remember that everybody else is experiencing their own impressions, in patterns of humanity across time.
My hope is that our burgeoning online culture, incentivized to grab attention by splintering everyone into conflict, drained of human sensibility by AI, won’t deprive future generations of the pleasurable, potent, creative truth of complexity. As Einstein is said to have said, “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Photo Credit: Daniele Levis Pelusi via Unsplash