The relationship between protagonists and their writers

The question that sparked this post was "Are protagonists what their writer wishes they were or even what they are?". By this it could be seen that the writing of a protagonist is a form of self exploration and revelation. But my answer to this question is no, not really. The relationship between and author and their protagonist is far more complex than that, not to mention their relationship with the other characters in their stories.


Writing is cathartic in a way, in that you can express a lot of the pent up thoughts and emotions you otherwise find to impolite to reveal, but that doesn't mean that what you write necessarily has a direct relation to what is causing you to think or feel in a certain way. A writer might be angry over something, grief stricken or even tortured with indecision, for example, and have no one they can talk to about these issues. Thoughts build, the mind wanders and a story pops into mind that just begs to be written. And within that story is a range of characters. (This is one example of how a story comes into being but there are, of course, many others. Some far less organic.)


Of the characters that are formed in the mind of the writer there are some that are wholly born of the imagination, with little to no research involved and barely a flicker of more logical creation (as brought about when you're trying to find a character to fit a certain role). These characters are the ones that are the most related to the writer's own personality as they are born directly from the writer's mind. Yet in the range of characters you will find good, bad, righteous, ugly, cowardly, brave, foolhardy, ignorant, close minded, open hearted, learned, sexy, disturbing and mentally broken people. Which is the writer? Your first option for identifying the writer as a character is by saying they're the protagonist but what if the protagonist is a gung-ho army man and the writer is a tiny woman with a family of five who spends most of her day tapping away on a keyboard?


The relationship between a writer and a protagonist isn't straightforward. There isn't so much wishful thinking as there is exploration or sympathetic identification and even that is stretching the buck when it comes to the antihero protagonist.


So what is really going on is more a form of dreaming where every character written has some reflections of the writer but none have the entire writer revealed through them. All the good, bad, righteous, ugly, cowardly, brave, foolhardy, ignorant, close minded, open hearted, learned, sexy, disturbing and mentally broken characters share something with the writer as they are all understandable enough to the writer to be written in the first place. It is nearly (only added nearly as someone may have done it, possibly) impossible to write a character without any correlating features or characteristics as your own. You could push the boundary with writing everything as the opposite but then all you get is a reverse reflection so that the good and bad are swapped, leaving the impression that there is something oddly familiar about the character.


To find the writer in the story is to read the story as a whole, pull every possible meaning, hint, characteristic, personality, event, reaction and thought from the book and remould it into a piece of the writer, then continue reading any other work they've ever written and hope that eventually you'll have enough overlapping pieces to figure out which are the most dominant features of the author and which aren't. Then and only then, can you say that you know part of the author. But as a reader only, you'll never know the author entirely by reading their works. And assigning the writer as the protagonist is just delusional.


The gift of this is that there is an endless array of reflections of humanity out there, not simply a list of writers as protagonists. The characters in books reveal aspects of humanity, what it means to exist and what we experience along the way. Through this we can learn to form methods of identifying with those we'd otherwise struggle to connect with. We can pass on information, so much so that a person reading works written centuries ago can see that the essence of what it is to be human hasn't changed all that much over the years. This lets you think that maybe it hasn't changed much since we first evolved as humans. That there might not be that many differences between our experiences and that of apes. In essence, connections are born of writing, connections that allow us to see the individual, the global, the historical and the entirety of creation depending on the mindset we're in when reading.


So writing a protagonist as yourself isn't exactly a bad thing but it does defeat the purpose of fiction, which is to bend the mind to realise our realities. Whether a writer starts out intending to bend the reader's mind or starts out simple to entertain or vent is neither here nor there really. That only works as a partial guide to distinguish between literature and fiction. A distinction I argue in many cases.

On ideas, originality and creativity

Have you noticed how often there's a proclamation or a new, fresh, original or creative idea or concept and when you go to find out all about it you’re disappointed to see it is either a rehashing of old ideas in a new format or a blending together of themes already well known but the blend just happens to be a little different?

By this time in my life, after hearing the terms new, fresh, original and creative being thrown about for nearly every newly popular book or fad out there I've come to expect to be disappointed. In fact, experimental science is about the only thing I find worth getting excited about after hearing those words. Today's example of exciting news was "Eye microchip gives sight to blind".

Now that is as new, fresh, original and creative as we get. Which is pretty good as far as I'm concerned, even if the discoveries were based on years of research, bandied ideas from multiple scientists and thinkers and a collective effort on the part of the IT industry to come up with the chips in the first place. As you can see, the originality is all in the application and the ability to connect the dots.

For a while I pondered why there weren't any truly new ideas about, ones that are completely disconnected from anything that has come before. A few years back I came to the conclusion that we don't have new ideas, just blending of old ones in new ways. Sometimes in incredibly outstanding ways and sometimes in incredibly idiotic ways.

Many I conveyed this thought to didn’t accept this idea of mine as most like to think they can come up with new ideas, particularly in the age of copyright. But I think the arguments just came down to the definition of a new idea. They thought that if no one had done it just like they had then it was a new idea. I thought that if you’d used multiple old ideas and concepts to create your new idea then it wasn’t really new, just a new or different blend (one others have possibly had too).

Instead of new ideas, completely disconnected new ideas, what we have is like an endless building process. Over the course of our existence as a species, humanity has gathered data on the planet, ourselves, our fellow inhabitants of the planet and the universe. It is even possible that the data collection may have even started before we could be labelled truly Homo sapiens. The amount of information we have collected is beyond extraordinary. To the point were it is now absolutely impossible for one single human to hold and remember all the information at once, let alone access it all in their lifetime. We have truly amassed a sea of data.

So what a person holds in their mind is the knowledge passed down to them (sometimes correct and sometimes erroneous) and the information they've searched out for themselves. They do not and cannot hold information in their minds that they've never encountered before in any way, shape or form. Not even a hint. Otherwise we'd be psychic of a sort. Or fore-thinkers. I really don't know the category or extra-human you'd like to class such a type of human as so suffice it to say we'd be other than bog-standard Homo sapiens at that point.

Instead of trying to come up with information we've never encountered before we in fact have a better solution for data gathering and application than any encountered in the animal kingdom, although many animals will have a similar ability to part of ours. We have two things. We have synapses that fire scattered and uncontrolled impulses along with controlled ones. And we have the ability to record our thoughts, writing, crafts and art being the first forms of this recording.

Our synapses are constantly firing, zapping each other over and over or disregarding each other to fire at others instead. The weaving patterns of emphasis and disregard create memories and forgetfulness. If particular synapses don't fire then they become dormant, as you read in that article about lost coloured dreams suddenly returning after years of darkness. The unused are sometimes overwritten for use by another skill you find more important. So you forget one thing and remember another (thus you can't remember your old maths solutions but can remember how to go through the stages of cooking a BBQ). The used connections become stronger and more permanent. But even in their use they change, much the same as an over-trodden path in the woods does through the years. So you memories change over time, and truth is lost almost immediately (don’t go hunting for absolute truth – it will drive you mad.)

With all the firing, misfiring, ignoring and whatnot come your memories, movements, sensations, thoughts and consciousness. But there is also something else happening. There is a lot of "static" going on, particularly in the misfiring, that can link thoughts, memories, movements and sensations together to change your conscious awareness of any particular thing. And this static and misfiring happen all the time. A simple test is the old tongue twister. After a very short time you simply can't say what you wanted to say and start saying complete gobbledegook.

Maybe even gobbledegook, a new way of iterating sounds, could be used as words if given a meaning. And those words built into a language. People do this all the time too, for example: "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I'm anispeptic, frasmotic, even compunctuous to have caused you such pericombobulation." – Blackadder.

Your brain just keeps making connections over and over, through misfiring and static, mistakes or intentions, discoveries and new information gathered. And anything newly added to your memories becomes fodder for another odd blending of ideas that comes from your brain doing something that seems quite impractical from the outset but is in fact one of the most practical and magnificent things about the brain at all.

The other thing that humans do, that which no other in the animal kingdom does, is record what knowledge we've gathered. We don't just pass on our discoveries through "monkey see, monkey do" anymore, we write it down and store it for anyone (mostly) to see and use. And we've been doing this for thousands of years. There is too much to handle for any single person. Ever. But that doesn't mean any particular person couldn't go a research any particular subject, blend it with whatever else they know and apply it in a new way. They could and do.

The upshot of all this is that humans are constantly coming up with combinations of ideas and developments that astound us. No single human could think of them all so most are amazed when anyone comes up with one, particularly so when that person comes up with one that benefits so many and seems so simple an idea but is so complicated and requiring extreme skill to develop. 

Humanity doesn't come up with new, fresh or original ideas. It never has. The advertising that we do is false and the self-congratulations we give ourselves are attributed to the wrong skill. Humanity instead has this gorgeous mind that constantly blends and mixes data in creative ways to come up with solutions to problems and answers to questions through experimentation. It is our problem solving skills and our ability to actively search for answers that should be acknowledged. That and our ability to write and communicate.