Between good and evil
Between darkness and light
Between antibodies and the flu
It's a bloody mess inside my arteries, hemoglobin scattered everywhere, poor little parentless platelets running scared. It's chaos. But let's get straight to the heart of the matter with one question. Is this struggle against a foreign body all in vein?
I'm sorry. I should be locked up in a cell for my careless use of puns.
Anyway, I'm planning on keeping this short so I can get lots of rest tonight. I just wanted to say how this cold reminded me of what a realistic character always needs. External, and Internal conflict.
External
My external conflict in this case is my battle against a cold. I know, that sounds like it's going on inside my body, but it's something that manifests itself in a physical, visible way, so I count it as external. If others can see it, then I think it's external. Also, external means it's against something other than yourself.
Characters that are never conflicting with anything around them are boring, uninteresting, and very unrealistic. Most people don't have too much difficulty with this one. You need to have something opposing your hero, or else nothing will happen. There won't be any action.
Internal
This is the one that gets people sometimes. For example, you probably didn't guess just by what I said here that I had some internal conflict going on where part of me actually wanted to be sick did you?
It's true! Part of me was saying last night "I actually kinda hope I am really sick tomorrow. Because then I'd take the day off work." Now, don't get me wrong, I love my job, it's a great place to work. However, I'm leaving in a little over a week, and with all the stuff that I have on my plate right now, a day off right now would be really nice.
Having said that, I probably would have just slept the whole day if I had been really sick. That's fine for the most part, except for the whole being sick part.
The reason why I had this conflict, was because of my opposing values.
1. I love being healthy.
2. I love having days of rest.
Last night, these two values were at odds with each other, because I knew that I could only really have one thing. Either I'll be healthy(ish) tomorrow, and work and get really tired, or I'll be sick enough to take the day off to rest. In this particular case, I didn't actually have a choice in the matter, but that's really moot at this point.
What's important is that this conflict changed everything. This conflict was what made my thoughts even slightly interesting to listen to. If you're inside a character's head for any length of time, it better have some wicked stuff going on in there, or else you're gonna put me to sleep. If all he's thinking is Oh no, I better beat this cold! Then woop-dee-do, wow, he doesn't want to get sick.
If the princess is in a tower, and Prince Charming wants to kill the dragon to rescue her, then that's great. But if he's only rescuing her to appease his controlling mother who wants him to marry the enchanted princess instead of his little village sweetheart, it's suddenly more interesting. Why is he doing it? Does he actually care about this princess' fate? What is it about the village girl that's so appealing? And why is he so concerned about what his mother thinks?
Clearly Mr. Charming has a lot to think about besides fighting dragons. And that makes you want to read about him. At least that's the kind of thing I'm looking for.
There it is! Short and sweet. Now I'm going to fight this monster for all I'm worth, because as much as I hate working while under the weather, I hate letting people (including co-workers) down more.
No comments:
Post a Comment