Toward More Realistic Players

These posts have focused a great deal on the players in a story, not that they are the most important element, but it's hard for a plot to carry on without them. It's also a challenge to promote a plot with flat, un-dimensional players. (Recall that a player can be human, animal, machine, or whatever)  Real characters are inspired by motivations and purposes and employ different methods to achieve those ends. This is where a writer can imbue players with interesting characteristics, make them feel “real.”  The techniques have been with us like forever, but Phillips and Huntley* mapped it out in Dialectics way back when. It may seem a little confusing on the surface, so bear with me for taking this development in baby steps.

The last post listed eight players that help the Protagonist to shine and win the day. They come as pairs, each player in the pair being opposite the other. That’s easy to understand. The Protagonist and Antagonist are certainly opposite in what they want, but to fill them out they need certain reasons for behaving the way they do. The first to consider is MOTIVATION which addresses how the player makes decisions and how he acts on those decisions. Therefore, if our hero takes after pursuit, then the villain will want to employ ways to stop him. A sidekick would use faith and support, while the sidekick's challenge would be a skeptic who uses disbelief and keeps getting in the way of what is going on. This will become clearer below.

MOTIVATION

                                     DECISION                   ACTION

Consider 1. to think carefully about, especially in order to make a decision; contemplate; reflect on.	Logic 1. reason or sound judgment, as in utterances or actions.	Pursuit 1. to secure or attain; 2. to quest; seek.	Control 1. exercise restraint or direction; dominate; command.
Feeling 1. a consciousness or vague awareness 2. sensitive. readily affected by emotion; sympathetic: a feeling heart. indicating or characterized by emotion.	Reconsider 1. view to change a decision or action.	Uncontrolled 1. exercise restraint or direction; dominate; command.	Stop 1. to keep away from; keep clear of; shun: to avoid a person; to avoid danger. 2. to prevent from happening.
Faith 1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability. 2. belief that is not based on proof.	Conscience 1. the inner sense of what is right or wrong in one's conduct or motives, impelling one toward right action. 2. ethical and moral principles that controls or inhibits the    actions or thoughts.	Support 1. to sustain. 2. to undergo or endure, especially with patience or submission; tolerate	Help 1. to make easier or less difficult; contribute to; facilitate.
Temptation 1. to entice or allure to do something often regarded as unwise, wrong, or immoral.	Disbelief 1. the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true.	Hinder 1. prevent from doing, acting, or happening; stop. 2. hinder, impede.	Oppose 1. act against or provide resistance to; combat. 2. to stand in the way of; obstruct.

Before diving into this much further let me make this observation. The two sides of the chart are complimentary. That means that if the hero uses Consider as a the prime decision technique, then the action to achieve that is Pursuit. Conversely, if the decision technique is Pursuit, then he uses Consider to validate that his actions are correct.

Characters are more complicated than that, you say? Right. However, this is only one of several layers shaping the player and not all of them fit into neat packaging as you will see, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

 In the work in progress, A Pirate's Legacy: Order of the Brethren, Francois Evreux (A.K.A. the pirate, Dolphin) is a former pirate who is now a plantation owner with a prosperous, legal business, and family. His former occupation has been relegated to the shadows of history until that past comes to visit in the form of his pirate mentor, Aloysius “Hogshead” Shaver. He too retired until an old nemesis kidnapped his wife and son for ransom so to draw him into a trap and eliminate any threat he might pose as the East India Trading Company expands into the Caribbean. Hogshead wants our hero to help recover his family without loosing his head in the transaction.

While the Dolphin was the Hero in the last novel, not so here. That role falls to his first-born son, Jean-Paul, who is now fifteen. Remembering when his father left (albeit not willingly) the last time for two years, the young man has no intention of letting his father go off and have all the fun. Jean-Paul's motivation is PURSUIT – a quest, not just for adventure, but to find a way to stand out and establish his own modicum of respect or fall in the shadow of his father for a lifetime.

The Antagonist is the person who wants to prevent the Hero from succeeding. Initially, that might appear to be his father, however that role falls to Lord Bartholomew Chudleigh, son of Commodore Chudleigh who the Dolphin had a hand in destroying in the last book. His Lordship is the kidnapper and seeks to clear away the Caribbean pirates so to increase the East India Company's expansion plans and profits. Eliminating Hogshead and the others goes a long way to success.

Eliminating the Dolphin does this too, but also provides revenge for what happened to his father. Unbeknownst to him, by preventing the rescue of Mrs. Shaver and son, and killing these two pirates, he will also nip young Jean-Paul's quest in the bud. The Antagonists may not always be known to the Protagonists, or is not perceived as the Antagonists even at the end.

To better see this, let's superimpose these two characters on a chart to show how they relate and their course of action.

                                                      Motivation – Action

Pursuit A quest to attain respect (Jean-Paul)
	Stop To prevent from happening (Lord Chudleigh)

                       

Now, how will Jean-Paul and Lord Chudleigh know they are on the right course? By evaluating their choices. That is a problem in this story. Jean-Paul is a teenager, and as such operates on impulse more than judgment. (A constant throughout history) Thinking carefully on a matter in order to make a decision isn't exactly a teenager’s forte. Therefore, instead of using the category “Consider” let’s use “Impulse.”

                                                      Motivation – Decision

Impulse The influence of particular feeling(s) prompting action. (Jean-Paul)
	Reconsider View to change a decision or action. (Lord Chudleigh)

This is going to call on supportive players to become more influential. Who are they, and how will they react to a loose cannon ball in the form of a teenager? Using the overall chart at the beginning of this eFile we can determine this.

                                                      Motivation/Decision

Pursuit/Impulse Hero (Jean-Paul)	Control/Logic Reason Dolphin (his father/Captain)
Uncontrolled/Feeling Emotion (Rabbit)	Stop/Reconsider Villain (Lord Chudleigh)

In this story, Rabbit is a teenager in a young adult body. (Just the kind of support another teenager needs, right?). The son of Hogshead, he doesn’t want his father to know who he is (has never seen the boy). A cabin boy, his ship puts in at San Borondón, a mystical island, where he and the crew are drugged and sleep away much of the next eight years. Twelve at the time, his body continues to grow to adult size, but his brain hasn’t had that opportunity. He still think as a child.

Who will be the next set of four characters?

Support/Faith Sidekick (Cochran)	Help/Conscience Guardian (Maggie DuBri)
Hinder/Temptation Contagionist	Oppose/Disbelief Skeptic Jeremiah

For the Sidekick I have selected one of the Dolphin's crewmen, the Irishman Cochran. He takes both Jean-Paul and Jeremiah under his wing to teach them the skills needed to stay alive. Mentally closer to their age he subconsciously understands what’s going on (if much) in their heads.

Guardian is Maggie DuBri, Hogshead's adopted daughter and a pretty good pirate in her own right, who takes all the young boys in the pirate fleet aboard her ship. She is especially fond of Jean-Paul and wants to both help keep him safe and see him succeed in his quest. While the others believe the move will keep them from harm's way when the battle comes, she in fact provides a way to effectively contribute to the success of the rescue.

The Skeptic is Jeremiah, the son of the Dolphin’s manservant back home, a close friend to Jean-Paul, loyal. Mentally and emotionally he is more grounded, but perhaps too cautious.

The Contagionist is played by a shipmate, Pasquel who unknowingly places obstacles in Jean-Paul’s path to hinder progress, and lure him from the path of success.

While some will decry this as formula writing, so be it. Look at every successful story/movie produced and you will see these combinations over and over. The flops don’t. That’s not to say a writer can not deviate. I just did with the Protagonist, but there is one very important rule (if you will). One player can not successfully follow two masters. Yes, there have been exceptions such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hide, but even then, when they are in character there is a supporting cast to bring out the “best” of their play.

Using the Main Character (Mr. Omnipresent) to tell the story, and using these six supporting players, the writer can provide the audience a different view of the hero and villain that otherwise would leave them one-dimensional and flat. However, that’s not all we can do for these players.

In reality, players are not driven by motivation alone. As mentioned in the introduction, they aspire to differing purposes, employ different methods to achieve that purpose, and employ a means to determine how effective their efforts are to achieving their end. This I wish to explore over the next months, adding more complexity to each of our major players to create “real” characters, characters with substance to be remembered.

I hope you will refer to the two texts below as they go into much more detail with all-important examples.

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Phillips, Melanie Anne and Chris Huntley, Dramatica; A New Theory of Story, 4th ed.

Schechter, Jeffrey, My Story Can Beat Up Your Story: Ten Ways to Toughen Up Your Screenplay from Opening Hook to Knockout Punch, Kindle Edition.