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camwynWas driving to post office at lunchtime today, listening to radio, thinking about the Johnny von Neumann possibilities (tell me you don't think of a cybernetics scientist who gets into fights with five year olds as Johnny!). Was also thinking about ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nesmith's contention that Egon is not an emotionless Spock clone, and absently agreeing with her.
And then I heard the slight 'ahem' in the back of my head, and my blood froze. Because I've heard that kind of 'ahem' before, you see.
Another goddamn muse.
Well, I fell to thinking about muses, because it was easier than dealing with my head becoming even more crowded.
I've seen a mention in some community on LJ of the idea that one sign of Mary Sueish over-involvement in a particular fic is the author claiming that she (it's almost always she) has a muse in the form of one of the characters. I've also seen a statement by Judd Winick, the absobloodybrilliant cartoonist responsible for Barry Ween and Frumpy the Clown, to the effect that characters don't talk to their authors and that authors who think they do should be checked for schizophrenia. I don't know about the community poster as I can't remember where exactly I saw that line, but I know that I kind of winced when I saw Mr. Winick's words.
I'd just like to lay out exactly how I think muses work- at least, how mine do. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
When I say I have a muse, what I am trying to convey is something like this: "There is a character in my head that periodically pops up among my other thoughts and spits out insights or dialogue or some other form of activity about themselves and/or the other characters/rest of their world, usually until I either write it down or incorporate it into a mental story. Then, sometimes, they go quiet."
I am not labouring under the impression that the characters I call my muses are in any way actually separate from me. Neither do I consider them 'voices' in the classical sense. I may 'hear' them saying something, but I know it's only a thought; I do not mistake it at any time for a spoken word. It's like the difference between seeing a thing and remembering seeing a thing, or smelling a thing and remembering smelling it: there's a component missing that would be essential if it were to be real, or mistaken for real. Same thing. Heck, some of them don't even have voices, per se. If it's a character who originated inside my head, like Wayne Zhuang, then their words come across in print. Seriously- my brain processes any information offered by such characters visually rather than aurally.
I think what I am dealing with is a semi-automatic thought construction on the order of the human conscience. See, people with consciences don't have them automatically. Children have to be taught to have a sense of right and wrong. The most you can rely on without that teaching is for a child to develop a sense of 'fair' and 'unfair', and without any sort of outside formative influence 'fair' tends to mean 'in my favour'. To get a real sense of right and wrong, you have to start with the realization that other people are not you, and you have to add in the very concepts of 'right' and 'wrong', and you have to provide many, many examples of both 'right' and 'wrong' along with examples all in between. After a certain point the examples, plus the rules of right and wrong that are both explicitly taught and implicitly delineated by the examples, achieve critical mass and you no longer have to consciously think about them in order to get a basic level of 'sense of right and wrong'. You have a conscience. Granted, you have to consciously listen to it at times, or consciously use it at others, but there is a baseline thought-construct that operates in your brain without significant exterior prodding or influence.
Muses are rather like that, at least for me. In the case of an original character (Wayne Zhuang, for example), I most often start off with a fistful of concepts that get tossed around my mind for a while. You know, ideas to worry at, like a dog on a bone. Sometimes it's images. Sometimes it's just a vague sense of 'gosh, I wish. . .' Whatever. If I'm deliberately trying to create a character for a book or story, I try to pull some of these ideas together, and then I start supplying samples of how I think this person would act or what they would say. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, I have to start over, or else make changes in what I think of the character. Eventually, though, enough gets thought and said about this original character that it achieves critical mass. There's a set of rules to their behaviour, usually, like the way there's a set of rules to a chess robot's actions or a set of infinitely more complicated rules to the behaviour of honeybees; when there are enough rules, and enough examples of behaviour that may or may not be directly connected to those rules, the thought processes involved no longer need deliberate, conscious revisiting in order to produce new examples. Hey presto, muse.
It happens much faster if I've got a pre-existing fictional universe to work with (e.g., Aidan Davies, the first Mage: The Ascension character to achieve self-sustaining mass inside my head, or Xiang Fang), because then there are implicit assumptions of 'how the world is' and 'how people act in this world' that get automatically added to the character model. This happens whether it's one of my own created universes, or an RPG setting, or even a work of someone else's published fiction or a movie. Certain basic assumptions exist within the context of that world, and all that remains is to define how the character buys into those, or doesn't.
When the character is someone else's character entirely (like John Constantine), it happens really, really fast. Then I have assumptions-of-world, assumptions-of-character, and examples laid out for me already. If there are author or actor interviews available to clarify stuff that isn't explicit in the work, that helps as well. All it takes in a case like that is enough thought about the character- and on some level, a desire to understand them better, or to see more of them.
I've had some insanely scary characters show up in my head, characters I didn't much want to see, but they were originals. Those sprung out of bits of my own psyche. The unsavoury aspects of my psyche tend to be easier to deal with if I can put faces on them, whether I ever express them or not. The illusion of separate-ness means that they're easier to think about and understand, and ultimately either turn away from, or inflict on the rest of the world as antagonists. But I know they're not separate, and like any of the other thought-constructs, I do not take orders from them.
I will admit that from time to time I do claim to get 'voices' or 'compulsions', but in those cases it's stuff like 'learn to knit' or 'get a cookbook and learn to make schnecken'. That's just an aspect of my subconscious mind coming close to the conscious layer, repeatedly, without bothering to bring along any of the reasons or justifications behind the aspect. And even then, like I said, I'm not hearing it. Neither am I thinking I'm hearing it. It's in text, too- granted, sometimes all capital letters and repetitive right-to-left scrolling, but still text.
So- that's what I mean by muses, or characters in the head. It's all very sensible once it's laid out; it's just that it's damned inconvenient at times to have the semi-autonomous functions coughing up 'ooh, and here's what happened to Wayne!' while I’m in the middle of trying to run a campaign performance analysis report.
But it's still fun to talk about them as separate characters, so I do.
nesmith's contention that Egon is not an emotionless Spock clone, and absently agreeing with her.And then I heard the slight 'ahem' in the back of my head, and my blood froze. Because I've heard that kind of 'ahem' before, you see.
Another goddamn muse.
Well, I fell to thinking about muses, because it was easier than dealing with my head becoming even more crowded.
I've seen a mention in some community on LJ of the idea that one sign of Mary Sueish over-involvement in a particular fic is the author claiming that she (it's almost always she) has a muse in the form of one of the characters. I've also seen a statement by Judd Winick, the absobloodybrilliant cartoonist responsible for Barry Ween and Frumpy the Clown, to the effect that characters don't talk to their authors and that authors who think they do should be checked for schizophrenia. I don't know about the community poster as I can't remember where exactly I saw that line, but I know that I kind of winced when I saw Mr. Winick's words.
I'd just like to lay out exactly how I think muses work- at least, how mine do. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
When I say I have a muse, what I am trying to convey is something like this: "There is a character in my head that periodically pops up among my other thoughts and spits out insights or dialogue or some other form of activity about themselves and/or the other characters/rest of their world, usually until I either write it down or incorporate it into a mental story. Then, sometimes, they go quiet."
I am not labouring under the impression that the characters I call my muses are in any way actually separate from me. Neither do I consider them 'voices' in the classical sense. I may 'hear' them saying something, but I know it's only a thought; I do not mistake it at any time for a spoken word. It's like the difference between seeing a thing and remembering seeing a thing, or smelling a thing and remembering smelling it: there's a component missing that would be essential if it were to be real, or mistaken for real. Same thing. Heck, some of them don't even have voices, per se. If it's a character who originated inside my head, like Wayne Zhuang, then their words come across in print. Seriously- my brain processes any information offered by such characters visually rather than aurally.
I think what I am dealing with is a semi-automatic thought construction on the order of the human conscience. See, people with consciences don't have them automatically. Children have to be taught to have a sense of right and wrong. The most you can rely on without that teaching is for a child to develop a sense of 'fair' and 'unfair', and without any sort of outside formative influence 'fair' tends to mean 'in my favour'. To get a real sense of right and wrong, you have to start with the realization that other people are not you, and you have to add in the very concepts of 'right' and 'wrong', and you have to provide many, many examples of both 'right' and 'wrong' along with examples all in between. After a certain point the examples, plus the rules of right and wrong that are both explicitly taught and implicitly delineated by the examples, achieve critical mass and you no longer have to consciously think about them in order to get a basic level of 'sense of right and wrong'. You have a conscience. Granted, you have to consciously listen to it at times, or consciously use it at others, but there is a baseline thought-construct that operates in your brain without significant exterior prodding or influence.
Muses are rather like that, at least for me. In the case of an original character (Wayne Zhuang, for example), I most often start off with a fistful of concepts that get tossed around my mind for a while. You know, ideas to worry at, like a dog on a bone. Sometimes it's images. Sometimes it's just a vague sense of 'gosh, I wish. . .' Whatever. If I'm deliberately trying to create a character for a book or story, I try to pull some of these ideas together, and then I start supplying samples of how I think this person would act or what they would say. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it doesn't, I have to start over, or else make changes in what I think of the character. Eventually, though, enough gets thought and said about this original character that it achieves critical mass. There's a set of rules to their behaviour, usually, like the way there's a set of rules to a chess robot's actions or a set of infinitely more complicated rules to the behaviour of honeybees; when there are enough rules, and enough examples of behaviour that may or may not be directly connected to those rules, the thought processes involved no longer need deliberate, conscious revisiting in order to produce new examples. Hey presto, muse.
It happens much faster if I've got a pre-existing fictional universe to work with (e.g., Aidan Davies, the first Mage: The Ascension character to achieve self-sustaining mass inside my head, or Xiang Fang), because then there are implicit assumptions of 'how the world is' and 'how people act in this world' that get automatically added to the character model. This happens whether it's one of my own created universes, or an RPG setting, or even a work of someone else's published fiction or a movie. Certain basic assumptions exist within the context of that world, and all that remains is to define how the character buys into those, or doesn't.
When the character is someone else's character entirely (like John Constantine), it happens really, really fast. Then I have assumptions-of-world, assumptions-of-character, and examples laid out for me already. If there are author or actor interviews available to clarify stuff that isn't explicit in the work, that helps as well. All it takes in a case like that is enough thought about the character- and on some level, a desire to understand them better, or to see more of them.
I've had some insanely scary characters show up in my head, characters I didn't much want to see, but they were originals. Those sprung out of bits of my own psyche. The unsavoury aspects of my psyche tend to be easier to deal with if I can put faces on them, whether I ever express them or not. The illusion of separate-ness means that they're easier to think about and understand, and ultimately either turn away from, or inflict on the rest of the world as antagonists. But I know they're not separate, and like any of the other thought-constructs, I do not take orders from them.
I will admit that from time to time I do claim to get 'voices' or 'compulsions', but in those cases it's stuff like 'learn to knit' or 'get a cookbook and learn to make schnecken'. That's just an aspect of my subconscious mind coming close to the conscious layer, repeatedly, without bothering to bring along any of the reasons or justifications behind the aspect. And even then, like I said, I'm not hearing it. Neither am I thinking I'm hearing it. It's in text, too- granted, sometimes all capital letters and repetitive right-to-left scrolling, but still text.
So- that's what I mean by muses, or characters in the head. It's all very sensible once it's laid out; it's just that it's damned inconvenient at times to have the semi-autonomous functions coughing up 'ooh, and here's what happened to Wayne!' while I’m in the middle of trying to run a campaign performance analysis report.
But it's still fun to talk about them as separate characters, so I do.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-13 12:50 pm (UTC)(Than again, this is me who considers such things to be somewhat like vmware for brains .. running a brain (or part of one) in a brain for the heck of it to see what it does. I used to like watching shows to pick up alternate viewpoints that way, just to try ideas out. (Current favorite viewpoint: Aramis from The Three Musketeers, although you've made me consider looking for Egon quotes. (Ok, could my brain please structure things as something other than a parenthetical now? *I* can't parse this, sigh. Sorry.)))
no subject
Date: 2004-04-13 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-13 09:18 pm (UTC)How can you ever write anything if characters don't talk to you?
no subject
Date: 2004-04-13 09:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-14 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-14 07:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 07:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-15 07:50 am (UTC)