Thu, Dec 10 2009

Responsible characters

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny. --Albert Ellis

I've had that quote as one of the random quotes on this blog for some time. There's a lot I like about Mr. Ellis' comment. It is important to take responsibility for our reactions to situations. Where Mr. Ellis and I part company is on the idea of the problems themselves. The truth is that none of us chooses the whole of every situation we face in life. And we rarely get ourselves out of, or through, any situation without the help of at least one other being. Still, I liked Mr. Ellis' grown-up approach of not pointing fingers at everyone else every time we get into hot water.

Do the characters in our stories take responsibility for their problems? Do things just happen to them and then do things just happen to get them out of a mess? Is there a bit of magical thinking to their problem solving? That sort of thing can leave readers feeling a bit cheated, since most of us don't ever get to solve our own problems with magical thinking. Oh, there might be that occasional miracle or other intervention in real or fictional lives. But most of the time it's character and moment-to-moment choices that shape our destiny in life. It's something to think about as we pull together a believable cast of characters for our stories.

posted at: 22:47 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry