Storytellersunplugged

by Gerard Houarner

Another in an occasional series of over-intellectualized approaches to writing which, at worst, will send you screaming into the internet abyss after the first paragraph or, if you get through a few lines, may remind you or jog into place a more coherent version of the notion you’ve had all along.

I’m not promising anything, I’m just throwing a bunch of suff out there….

Filters.

This is what you could call what folks, and characters, use to include and exclude information about themselves and the world.  Taking a look at characters in terms of the filters they use can be a means of generating and resolving conflict and developing emotionally satisfying characters.

I’m just saying….

We have a collection of these filters: ways of looking at the world driven by biological and psychological engines. They are ways we pick and choose (consciously and unconsciously) what we see, allow ourselves understand or influence us, or ignore. They range between logic based on “facts” (the belief in one’s logic and facts is, obviously, also a filter) and the purely emotional.

I know, they’re also called beliefs – religious, political – as well as values, interests, passions, biases, prejudices, perspectives, agendas, sensitivities, tragic flaws, faith, fetishes, appetites. They’re the (complicated) rules of the game we play, or don’t play, with ourselves and everyone around us.

But I’m looking for a term more specific than the usual “needs and wants” that sometimes serves as a basic sketch we might draw for characters as they come to life in our stories, and something not as limiting as those terms. I’m reaching for a framework that considers anything that could influence in an individual’s choices and still allow the imagination some room to play.

I’m choosing “filters” as the operative word because it describes the function of all those other aspects of ourselves and our characters. Like lens and noise and air conditioning filters, they alter our perception of the nature our environment, and our interactions with it as well as with ourselves. Their interplay determines what’s available to our particular decision making.

I’m also choosing filters because it implies active, constant choices being made, often unconscious.

We operate in spheres of perception – personality/background/training/culture/environment contribute to the filters we use to shape the reality that we perceive. And we swim through a world filled with resources, information, dangers and distractions, using filters to screen for what we want (again, consciously and unconsciously) to reach us and block out what we consider irrelevant.

As I writer, I’m on the look out for story and character ideas, and for material scratching my particular itches in urban environments, deserts, mythology and folklore, the bizarre and the fantastic. Those are some of my particular filters.

Apparently, I have filters designed to ignore all kinds of real money-making opportunities.

For others, significant filters may be based on a love for the Boston Red Sox or the latest fashions. Or a fear of water bugs or closed spaces.

For all of this filters stuff, volcanoes erupting, bombs dropping and asteroids crashing are pretty concrete aspects of reality that cut through all psychological games. Big stuff crashes through filters, re-shapes perceptions, which is also important to telling a story – as in The Stand and apocalypse stories in general.

But I’m thinking of the kinds of conflict that generate interesting stories that happen when spheres of perception intersect and culture/psychology filters clash, from two people sitting at a bar to two empires straddling a world.

On a personal level, filters you discovered or were taught to use, that helped someone get through a mad household or a tough neighborhood or an exclusive and socially pressured private school, are obviously conflict points once settings change. What worked in one place won’t in another. And other characters’ filters serve as barriers, or as resources and even solutions to problems.

(I don’t think I’m talking about Big Evil and Grand Good characters, here – Sauron is a force of nature, and frankly the elves and dwarves and Ents are pretty much one with what they are. But by the time you get down to the gaggle of hobbits, I think you can see the kind of external and even internal conflict I’m talking about that’s generated by different sets of filters.)

For example, if I screen out information that reinforces the fact that I am a 52 year old male with “limited” looks and athletic abilities (for whatever deep-seated psychological reasons, or simply because I’m an idiot), and instead allow information like “Telly Savalas was bald and he was still considered cute and studly” and “that waitress was nice to me so she must think I’m hot” through my reality filters, I allow for a lot of both tragic and comedic possibilities in my own private world as well as public and family life.

No, there are no examples on YouTube .

Besides glaring (and hopefully more subtle) “blind spots,” finely tuned filters also set up powerful character strengths – detectives, crusaders, mass murderers, that sort of thing.  They allow a character to be focused.  And as we all know, there is a cost for excluding information from our world even as there is a reward for specializing in a absorbing a particular set of facts and skills.

Being thrust into new situations leads to the discovery or the development of a brand new set of filters (and talents, of course).

Filters bring people together, and most interestingly, a single common way of looking at the world can form an allegiance among wildly different people (like, oh I don’t know, strangers trying to survive a haunted house or rampaging monster).

Obviously I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t already know about people and stories.

But sometimes, switching perspective on a writing problem can reveal interesting solutions. Since characters drive plot/story (sorry, one of my filters doesn’t let me see a plot driving a character – cars don’t drive people), it can be vital to dig a little deeper into the heads of even minor characters and see the world through their eyes, their filters, and find new ways they might behave and so contribute to the story.

So all I’m saying is, along with writing “bios” on your characters, or researching your historical figures until you know where they went to school and with who, or pulling stuff out of the “air” as you zip through your story, it can be valuable to make connections between whatever “facts” you’ve established about your character and the way they’re looking at the events unfolding in the story. That is, really explore what they are excluding, and what they might be picking up on, and how those filters might bring characters together or drive them apart.

One last filter note – editors have them, too. They’re called guidelines.