the examined life:

The outer limits of inner lifeBringing Characters to Life

by Looking WithinDavid Corbett, Instructor

The Examined Life:

“Everything I learned about human nature I learned from me.”

--Anton Chekhov

The Examined Life Re-Imagined

“Write what you don’t know about what you know.”

--Eudora Welty 

Writers possess only four tools: • Research• Experience• Empathy• Imagination

Fortunately, whole worlds can be built from them.Simply ask: What if …?

What if?

Goal:Expand our powers of

“personalization:” Using our own experience to expand

our empathy so we can build

an intuitive bond with the character.

Intuition

We need an understanding that’s INTUITIVE:expresses itself in vivid, affecting

imagerybuilds a sense of a psychic bondforms an imaginative and emotional link

between our own inner life and the inner life of the character.

IMPORTANT:Personal experience is necessary but not sufficient. Research and imagination help form a bridge between our world and the story world.

HOWEVER:We shouldn’t—and frankly, can’t—leave behind our own emotional life when we explore the unfamiliar.

Empathy and Experience

Experience and empathy reinforce each other.Experience permits our understanding of ourselves to enhance our understanding of others.Empathy permits our engagement with others to deepen our self-understanding.

The Examined Life, Redux

A deeper understanding of our own experience serves three key purposes:

It helps form an intuitive bond with the character.

It provides us with the one genuinely unique element we can bring to our stories.

It mitigates the tendency to be writerly instead of open and honest.

A good time to break for questions

Exploring Emotionally compelling moments

In the exploration of emotionally significant moments that follows, don’t suffer over the superlatives—“greatest,” “most,” et cetera. Allow the moments that suggest themselves to emerge fully, whether there is one or several—or dozens.

Think in terms of scenes—not Q&A.

Exploring Emotionally compelling moments

Explore these moments honestly and without judgment.

Be specific, down to what you were wearing, what everyone else was wearing, where you were, what

time of day. The devil, as they say, is in the

details, except in this instance the devil is your friend.

Exploring Emotionally compelling moments

The most important emotional incidents to explore in a character’s

life, and therefore your own, are moments of helplessness.

Why? They expose us.

Our personality gives way to our character.

EXploring emotionally compelling moments

The mask of the ego drops, if only for an instant. Stripped of any pretense of control or power, we’re forced to confront a side of ourselves we routinely avoid or actively keep hidden.

We turn from creatures of habit into mere creatures.

We turn from creatures of habit into mere creatures.

EXploring emotionally compelling moments

How we handle that helplessness:How profoundly we’re undone.How quickly we regain our composure.Whether we run or fight or bargain our

way back to normal.Says more about us than we often care to admit.

Stories are built from such revelations.

Exploring Emotionally compelling moments

What are the most useful moments of helpless to

explore?

Desire & Yearning

Desire & Yearning

Desire

Motivates the pursuit of the outer objective in the story: save the miners, find the killer, find the antidote, marry the beloved, etc.

Desire:Puts the character in motion.

Places the character in conflict.

YearningThe deeper unresolved craving which,

left unfulfilled, renders the character’s life meaningless.

(Usually, as the story begins,the character is unaware of his true

yearning.)Yearning defines the stakes.

The relationship betweendesire & yearning

The conflict encountered in pursuing the desire awakens the character to

his yearning.Otherwise, after so much struggle and failure, the character might simply say: Why go on? It’s recognition of the yearning – the

realization that, if it remains unfulfilled, life will feel squandered,

misbegotten, or empty – that motivates the character to continue

in his quest despite the odds.

Personal Yearning

In a previous Write Brain, Page Lambert noted that

to understand the character’s yearning,

you have to understand your own yearning

in wanting to write the story.

Personal Yearning

I’d take that one step further:What is the fundamental

yearning in your life?What makes your life

meaningful?Is your yearning unfulfilled?

Why?

Yearning as symbol

Sometimes it’s difficult if not impossible to put a single word to

your yearning.Sometimes it’s better to imagine it

imagistically or symbolically: Picture the world, way of life, or state of grace that you believe would fulfill

you.

Yearning as Image

Yearning as image

Yearning as image

Yearning as image

Yearning as image

Personal desireIdentify a goal you pursued with particular intensity:

finishing your novelgetting your degreecourting your loved onegetting revenge against an enemy buying your first home.

How did the pursuit of that desire reflect the yearning you just identified?

Another good place to stop for questions

Fear

Courage

Sorrow

death

•First experience with death.•Most shattering experience with

death.•Most recent experience with death.•Most devastating loss other than

death.

Joy

hate

Love

shame

Pride/success(the Golden Moment)

Golden Moment,Part 2

The Golden Moment, Part 3

Guilt

Forgiveness

Rage

tenderness

violence

passion

Illness

Best Time!•With a family member.•At a gathering of family, friends, or

neighbors.•With a stranger.•With a lover.•With an animal.•Alone

additional “prompts” to key significant emotional moments

• First time as an adult you told someone you loved him (or her)

• A time you said “I love you” and wished you hadn’t

• A time when you were struck or beaten• A time you struck or beat someone else

•“Please stop. I’m scared.”•“I’m telling.”•“Don’t hurt me.”•“Give that to me.”•“Do as you’re told.”

•“I could kill you.”•“I’m not that kind of person” (or “You

can’t ask me to do that”).•“I thought you loved me.”•“No matter what I do, it will never be

good enough.” 

Don’t restrict yourself to just these suggestions.

Imagine other episodes in your life that have proved meaningful, painful,

inspiring, devastating, profound. Embrace them.

Be grateful for them.

Another good place to stop for questions

Shaping Moments into stories

Shaping moments into stories

Once you’ve assembled your set of scenes, you may detect a thematic unity connecting some of them: violence at the hands of authoritya need to placate indifferent or even hostile

adultsa sense of being second (or third, or last) in

line. This thematic unity is the connective thread that can turn these isolated scenes into a possible story.

Shaping Moments into stories

Another technique: Choose moments of opposing emotional polarity:

Fear vs CourageShame vs PrideSorrow or Loss vs Joy

Think of these as endpoints on an arc.What happened in between? What needed to happen?

Shaping moments into stories

Envision the scenes you’ve explored as episodes in a journey,

not disjointed fragments.Understanding this is helpful not just for your characters, but for

yourself.

Moving toward insight: Finding the story

We don’t move from shame to pride, fear to courage, misery to joy in a seamless, effortless glide.Our pains, sorrows, miscues, and wrongs misshape us, disfiguring our spirits, our hearts, our consciences.

MOVING TOWARD INSIGHT,FINDING THE STORY

Our lives can become a kind of moral and emotional sleepwalk.It often takes a devastating loss, tragedy, or crisis to shock us out of the habitual behavior that has come to identify us.

Moving toward insight,Finding the Story

This crucial moment of insight forms one the core epiphanies of our lives, and forges the decisions that point toward change.Anyone who has experienced a therapeutic breakthrough, or been obliged to perform a “fearless moral inventory,” as those in twelve-step programs must, know this kind of self-scrutiny. But writers must know it as well.

Moving toward insight,finding the story

Such “crises of insight” and moments of decision form the cornerstones of drama. They may take the form of a dark night of the soul, a sudden horrible feeling of What have I done?, or a hard-won acceptance of ourselves, warts and all. We can’t expect to portray them well in our characters without understanding them in our own lives.

MOVING TOWARD INSIGHT,FINDING THE STORY

Moving toward insight,finding the story

Return to those moments of failure and shame and guilt and loss you’ve explored.Not just to flesh out the emotions.Reflect on how that fear, shame, failure, or loss changed you.Recognize how pain has made you fearful, untrusting, obsessive, brash.

MOVING TOWARD INSIGHT,FINDING THE STORY

Moving toward insight,Finding the story

Next, search out those moments in your life where you’ve wrestled with those shortcomings, faced them squarely, and made the difficult decision to find a new path—toward success, or joy, or acceptance.

MOVING TOWARD INSIGHT,FINDING THE STORY

Moving toward insight,finding the story

Identify the people who inspired you, or obliged you to be honest about what you were doing.As long as you put words on the page, those moments, those people, will guide you to the psychological, moral, and emotional territory where your truth lies. Ground yourself there. Write from there.