The Waterboys and Perspective

Hopefully you can all access the video up there... this one worked out great because I wasn’t sure how many people had ever heard this song – and the lyrics run through the video, which is important to illustrating the story... so go ahead and play the video... I’ll wait....


Still waiting....

Yep, I’m still waiting...

Couldn’t access it? Really? Well, that’s not flippin helpful is it?

Wait...

Okay, here... you can read the lyrics on this page and if you really have a hankering for 80’s British rock, just google Whole of the Moon and you’ll come up with a slew of YouTube video’s....

Okay.... ready now?

Eons and eons ago, when I was young and feisty and full of shit, someone played me this song and said that it reminded them of me... which, of course, was flattering as all hell. They really thought that I had some cosmic understanding... that I saw all of the answers before me and moved with some sure footedness that they lacked. The truth was, I made it up as I went along... I still do.

And these types of things have happened to me throughout my life and relationships. I’ve noticed that a lot of times, people project characteristics onto me that I don’t actually possess – both good and bad. A lot of the time, they’re projecting their own thinking... I’ve had women think I would steal their boyfriends or husbands, not because I wanted to or would, but because it’s something they’ve done themselves... In turn, though, some of the nicest people in the world give me a little more credit than I probably deserve, because they see their own good nature.

I think, for most of us, the person we know ourselves to be, the one we see in the mirror and face at night when nothing else moves or breathes or takes our attention, that person is not the same one anyone else sees. Not because we’re actively trying to hide our inner workings, just because there are other variables at play. When someone asks you how you are, you say ‘fine’... or, you give them a laundry list of complains in which case they will eventually start to actively avoid you... but, the deeper pondering for me, right this second, is not so much all the muck and garbage that no one else sees because we don’t want to bother them with it, but all of the traits they see that we don’t realize or think are there.

Is the me I am in my head more valid than the one other people see? Whose perspective counts more? Or are they equal? And let’s bring this around to the subject of writing, because that’s where it’s really coming from for me – how do you show this sort of duality in your characters? Do you show it? Have you thought about it before? Are your characters the same to the outside world as they are in the sanctity of their own thoughts? Do they project themselves differently? And is it on purpose or is it the perspective of other characters that comes into play?

And now I wonder if I’m explaining this accurately at all. Perhaps it’s just a tangent I’m on with regard to the writing I’ve been doing lately... the story I’m working on is boiling down to a dynamic that isn’t at all what it appears, and each person interwoven in this particular family has a different take on the others, that’s valid but not identical to what the separate characters see themselves... I think I may be floating in the literary ocean on this one, I’m afraid I might be in the middle of it with nothing but a little plastic ducky raft... but the bill squeaks and I haven’t seen any sharks yet... I sent the first page to a reader friend of mine, who liked the voice, and I do too, she’s a spitfire... but the whole of it, what’s fleshing out is so vast and uncontainable. Every character demands their own understanding, both the inner world and way they see themselves and the outer world – the way they’re seen... and here’s the kicker, the way a character is seen by one of the other characters is not the way they’re seen by every character...

Have you ever taken on a story that you just don’t know if you have the chops to handle? The real scary thing is, I have, as I mentioned in an earlier post, multiple other pitches fleshed out that I could be working on... but this is the only thing I feel compelled to write.

Perhaps I should go and listen to some nice fifties music... clean and easy, without the esoteric gibberish... How about you guys? How do you work with these complex characters? And have you ever started a project thinking you might not be writer enough to manage the scope it demands?