More Full of People

A Window into the Vastness

I keep falling in love with characters. 

I have been doing this for years. 

I still do it every time a story settles into me. 

And I’ve gradually become fascinated by what that means. 

Honestly, I’ve been realizing that I deeply enjoy getting to know them. And I love finding all the details in how humans made them.

And I love that doing this has made the world feel more full of people to me. 

There was a time when my world was small even though I was surrounded by people.

But now my world feels large even though I am surrounded only by my small family.

Because I keep finding characters to know and to love. 

And when I find those characters, I realize that they are approximations of real human beings. 

When I meet people in real life, 

as rare as that can be lately, 

I know that they are far more vast a person than I can know immediately,

and I can come to them with my experience of someone I’ve seen in fiction who perhaps reflects a similar context.  

The stories I came home to

When I was a kid, it was about Disney characters.

Everyone said the Disney princesses gave up their lives and dreams for men. And that the men were blank and flat characters.

But I saw more in them every time I put the VHS back into the VCR and put it on repeat. 

The dulled bright colors lighting up stories for me that I began to visit daily. 

Coming in at varied points. Sometimes in the beginning, sometimes in the end, sometimes in the middle but always something different. 

Every character was so singular, every story so intentionally built and told.

I didn’t choose the scenes. I left the movie playing on repeat with the television turned off. I had figured out how to make the VHS do that.

When I came home, I could turn the television on and find myself anywhere in the story.

I knew what was happening. I knew what had already happened and what was coming next.

But I hadn’t chosen the moment I walked into. I simply arrived there. 

Sometimes I would come home to Hercules fighting the Hydra. Sometimes it was Meg singing “I Won’t Say I’m in Love.”

I would close the door and sing with her.

But I always let her sing the last verse. 

It felt like it was hers.

Sometimes I would come home to Tulio and Miguel traipsing through the jungle blazing a trail to El Dorado.

Sometimes I would see the moment Miguel, eyebrows drawn and furious, blood dripping from a small laceration, refuses to allow Tzekel Khan to sacrifice the

other team in the gods’ honor.

Sometimes it was the introduction of Chel, her sarcastic, wry perceptiveness allowing her to instantly recognize the two friends as frauds and ask to join them.

Other times it was Mia Thermopolis being told that she would be Princess of Genovia. Or having her first foot-popping kiss. Or missing her best friend Lily’s radio show.

Prince Naveen, stuck as a frog, proposing to Tiana before they are turned back,

preparing a feast of minced vegetables and having a friendly moth named Bow act as his bowtie.

Every moment was unique, and yet each belonged to a coherence that delighted me. 

Arriving somewhere in the story

Even now, once I’ve lived with a story long enough, I sometimes shuffle it. 

I’ll randomize episodes, or even quarters of episodes, and let myself arrive somewhere inside the story without choosing where. 

I know these people well enough to find my bearings. 

The strange thing about repetition is that it doesn’t make the people in the story smaller to me.

It makes them larger. 

I don’t know them because I have extracted all the information the story contains. 

I know them because I have spent time with them.

Human beings made an approximation of a person, and another human being, the child sitting in front of the television, fell in love with that approximation. 

A crafted representation of a human life, made with enough particularity that another human can spend time with it

and experience something of what it might be like to encounter a person in a context unlike their own.  

Fiction can give us practice recognizing that there is always more person there than we can immediately see. 

Beginning with who they are

Characters put me in a situation where the evangelical impulse to intervene has nowhere to go.

When I meet someone who is complicated, hurting, making choices I disagree with, misunderstanding something, behaving in ways I might once have regarded as morally significant, there is nothing for me to do about it.

I can’t convert the character.

I can’t persuade them.

I can’t pray them into a different person.

I can’t make their choices conform to what I think is right.

They can’t hear me. They never will. 

I can only spend time with the person the story has made and pay attention to what I find there. 

That has given me a different posture toward people than the one I was taught to have toward the world.

Instead of beginning with what someone needs to become, I can begin with who they are. 

Now that I have chosen to let the things I love speak to me in this way, my world feels more full of people.

Humans are full of apparent contradictions that, given enough attention, can resolve into such lovely coherence. 

Characters give us a little window into that vastness.

And when we allow time and space for that little piece of vastness, we allow time and space for people too.

Something to notice

Return to a story you love. Arrive somewhere you didn’t choose. See what you notice.

Find the detail someone made that you can’t imagine the character without.

Find something you have never noticed before.

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#Attention #CharacterAnalysis #EmbodiedStorycraft #Empathy #Fiction #Humanity #MediaAnalysis #Representation

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