´I always wonder what “the other” is thinking about me, how he/she is breaking me down into a stereotype.´

exactly. getting down exactly what youre thinking / experiencing without filtering it.

that, to me anyway, is the response to working online where everything is filtered.

´I always wonder what “the other” is thinking about me, how he/she is breaking me down into a stereotype.´

exactly. getting down exactly what your thinking / experiencing without filtering it.

that, to me anyway, is the response to working online where everything is filtered.

This question sticks with me: “It’s a lot easier to skim the surface and slap on labels than to delve into the complexities of character or place–easier both mentally/artistically, and emotionally.But ultimately, that’s what we’re here to do, right?”

If you really want to develop your characters, get to know the people who will be in your story. Screenwriters and novel writers know and understand character development. You become intimate with characters and get to know them inside and out. They come to life on the BIG/Small screen or within pages of a book. The next time you meet people, instead of making judgments, get to know them. Your first impression will change.

I think this is the most important point. Writers are like the lens filters between the reader and the subject matter, be it a person or place. That filter can be opaque or it can be clear, or anywhere in between. But it’s definitely there.

A friend of mine who is American in heritage but has lived her whole life in Japan (she’s in her 50s now) once told me that there are very few books she’s read and liked written by foreigners in which the characters are Japanese. She said they seemed “fake” somehow. I always remembered her saying that and the points you make here could well be the reasons.

Although it’s very difficult to consistently remember to account for your own role in a story, especially if that story is not about you, it’s something for us to strive for as writers. Thanks for the reminder.

thanks for that passage.

“I am a stranger. I know nothing. I do not enter into their empires.”

I think this really gets at what I wanted to say more than anything. There are all different levels of immersion into place, into community. I feel like many people write as if they ‘know’ what happens in a place instead of acknowledging, as Saint-Exupery does here, the limits of our understanding of one another. ultimately, this is the kind of writing that is truly ‘placed’.

“What a space between men their spiritual nature creates! A girl’s reverie isolates her from me, and how shall I enter into it? What can one know of a girl who passes, walking with slow steps homeward, eyes lowered… More surely than if she were on another planet, I feel her to be locked up in her language, in her secret…

Punta Arenas! I lean against a fountain. Old women come up to draw water: Of their drama I shall know nothing but these gestures of farm servants. A child, his head against a wall, weeps in silence: there will remain of him in my memory only a beautiful child forever inconsolable. I am a stranger. I know nothing. I do not enter into their empires. Man in the presence of man is as solitary as the face of a wide winter sky in which there sweeps, never to be tamed, a flight of trumpeting geese.”

enjoyed the healthy humor in this too, dahveed.

i don’t know where the whole ‘first impression’ concept came from, but i’m with you; what’s under the surface is what counts, and it always takes time to know.

i’m seeing this new trend of writing where it all just stays on the surface; writers don’t even try to get to know characters or present characters other than as these kind of ‘objects’ through which they feel different emotions.

in some way this is a ‘way around’ falsely presenting characters-but i just can’t see the world like that…people more or less disconnected from one another.

i believe in common ground.