We are the “characters” we know best

We recently ran a Character-building course in which a participant was disturbed by the idea of sharing details from her life with the group.

“But why do we need to look at ourselves?” she asked. “Why can’t we just make characters up?”

In case anyone gets the wrong idea, we don’t ask for people’s deepest, darkest. But what makes our Character course unique is, we believe, that we run it with a psychologist. We look at ourselves first in order to understand and build believable characters.

Our tame shrink, Pierre, is useful in helping us look at how people tick. He’s an excellent writer in his own right, so he’s able to make the transition from people-shrink to character-shrink – in other words, from what people may need for a successful life to the narrative necessities of successful writing.

We don’t delve too deeply. We don’t run therapy sessions (except perhaps for characters). But we start with ourselves – as the “characters” we know best. From there, we move on to the characters that make up all works of fiction, non-fiction, scripts and screenplays.

We look at motivation: how people are formed by the seminal events that make up their lives - mediated by the nature they are born with. 

Pierre leads an exercise in which participants plot the events they think have been most formative in their own lives. What most participants found fascinating was how these events had developed them into the people they were.

And what was even more interesting was how seemingly positive events could become negative depending on other factors and events. And how some people could reshape the most negative events into positive influences.   

We looked at complexities and contradictions in ourselves – and in characters.  And what kind of flaws we are most likely to be sympathetic of.

A writer is by nature a curious person – someone who seeks to understand, even when true understanding may never be entirely possibly. But surely a writer’s curiosity begins with ourselves.

We look at ourselves first. We delve into our own motivations in order to discover something about human nature and to try to understand what makes people tick. That’s one of the reasons many writers use journals.

For our Character course, Pierre set certain rules of engagement, involving respect and confidentiality. But we try to run every writing course as a safe space.

Even when we’re not using our own lives as examples, our participants must feel safe enough to share their writing. And let’s be honest. That can be much scarier than using a few details from our lives. 

The next few dates for the Character Course are Saturday 5 June and Saturday 25 October in Johannesburg and Friday August 27 in Cape Town.