Nowadays, lamenting that everybody else seems to live in a separate reality is a not unknown pastime of the sane (assuming I do not presume too much by lumping myself into that sum). Whoever you are, you’ve probably run across somebody who simply saw the world around him in a way incompatible with your reality. It might be trusting the government or presuming gender ideology or sincerely believing that nobody could deny the superiority of flathead screws to hex screws.¹ Read books by authors that don’t agree with you (and once you get enough opinions and enough books, that’s an inevitability), and you’ll sometimes experience similar disorientation, realize that some element of the author’s thought is fundamentally apart from yours.² The application of this fact we’re going to make today is to recognize that just as we build worlds for ourselves, so too do our characters, albeit we’re puppeting them through the process.

We build worlds for ourselves. Consider yourself; you are the protagonist, whatever you think of your worthiness for the task. We can try to deny it, but even the most thorough self-victimization still places the victim at its center. Consider the people around you- family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, public figures, historical people, even fictional characters and figments of imagination. These are the characters of the stories we live in, conceived of by us in lesser complexity than their reality but loved or hated or forgotten nonetheless. Consider what you do and desire, what each person around you moves towards or away from, how wars and rumors and conflicts and relationships and conversions and elections and businesses crowd through the world. These are the million-million plots of reality, and at the center we can set different plots depending on perspective and self- a part of our own, usually, or a glimpsed part of God’s in us, by His grace.

We all see different such worlds, and we all conceive them differently, based on our perception, our predilection, and our state of soul. I can see in an action what another man would never see, and he the like from his perspective; in communication, of course, we seek ideally to bridge the gap, bring the equivocality (two voices) into univocality (one voice), but it’s a tricky game and never a complete transfer. Do not take this for a sad thing at its base, though certainly it can be in its particulars. Much of the beauty of reality is its immense diversity, and the diversity of perspective which exists within mankind is an element of that diversity-which-is-beautiful.

These worlds, as you’ve no doubt realized, are stories. Don’t think this is a coincidence, and don’t, like post-modernism too often imagines, think that therefore stories are the creators of reality. Stories, as we make them, are the imitation of stories, as we live. Stories are reflections of how mankind sees reality, how God shows us reality, and beautiful in that. Thus we can call a story, to expand J.R.R. Tolkien’s term, a ‘secondary creation,’³ a tiny, fragmentary reiteration of certain themes and structures which we see in reality, given a form of independence.⁴ Some are intentional fictions; some are attempted reflections of reality.

These stories which we perceive the world as are, as is implied by their formation, more or less coherent to reality. Where they match what they reflect, we see truly; where we do not see truly,  they do not match. To use some fancy philosophy terms, where equivocal to reality, they are lies, and where univocal, they are truth.

In fiction, when we apply this fact, we realize first that our characters need to develop their own worlds, their own ‘secondary realities’ within the wider story, ‘tertiary realities’ if we want to term them such; second, we realize that these tertiary realities will differ not only from primary reality in which we exist but with the secondary realities of which the character’s consist. In other words, characters will have incomplete understandings and ideas of their world, incomplete and even false. These worlds will be less complex than ours, even as their reality is less complex than ours, but they will exist- more strongly for a character the more important and complex he is.

Consider Frodo Baggins. This fine hobbit has limited, if impressive for his background, knowledge. He knows some elvish, some history, some geography, some woodcraft. In all of these, of course, he is excelled by multiple characters, from Legolas to Aragorn to Gandalf to Glorfindel.⁵ This knowledge is Frodo’s operating base, and never does he transgress beyond it. Knowledge, of course, is not the sum of any person’s existence. Frodo has also an impressive strength of character, a developing but solid moral code, and strong relationships, already present or grown through the course of the story, with various other characters. Each of these forms a part of the story of Frodo Baggins, and from these he acts, consciously or unconsciously, whether by commission or omission. He has too the Ring, which warps all else around it, at once his greatest danger and his greatest glory.

Each character we write has, in theory, an individual story within him, a story for his world, and from this story his actions rise. Most characters, of course, have this very much only in theory. Characters who merely perform a function will generally be, from the authorial perspective, very uncomplicated, mere superficialities. Other characters, more complex, will start to obtain their own internal stories, but they will be simple still. A very few characters, maybe only one, the centers of the story, these will have more complicated stories still, greater collages of knowledge and inclinations and beliefs and experiences. Even these, though, will be startlingly small in comparison to any real person, as is necessitated by our human stature.

Yet the characters are defined by these stories, and what is defined in characterization is the story of each character. How does he respond to a circumstance? It rises from the story and how that circumstance slots into his personal story, whether smoothly or with the disruption of a cannon ball smacking into a human torso. In conceiving of these characters as having stories, too, we can understand certain parts of character-writing by their resemblance to parts of writing in general. As the story must declare information to the reader before it can be used, so the character must learn information before he can use it. As the story must keep the plot coherent with the rest of the story and its world, not introducing plot holes and (most) contradictions, so the character’s motivation and action, his story’s plots, must cohere with the rest of him and of itself.

To return to the topic of a recent series of articles, too, this secondary-primary reality dichotomy can give us insight into a common element of Mary Sues: the relationship between their secondary reality, the story’s primary reality, and the primary reality of the author’s conception of it all. See, in a well-written story, characters generally have some incoherence between their world and the world they actually live in, whether an incoherence of desire or knowledge or ability. When this incoherence meets the character’s primary reality (a secondary reality, from our perspective), conflict occurs: the character’s world grinds up against the character’s reality, and, generally, reality wins. This process is and produces character development, realigning the character’s secondary reality with his primary reality, just as we are so often forced to realign our own secondary realities with God’s primary reality (of creation or of Himself, depending on the analysis’s perspective).

Conversely, the author of a Mary Sue story commonly projects their own believed reality into the Mary Sue’s internal story, then as the story’s internal primary reality develops, it is subordinated to the Mary Sue’s internal reality, her or his secondary reality, as that internal reality is actually the author’s self-story. Where there is a clash, it may be a facsimile of a good story’s breaking of the secondary reality by primary reality, but in the end the Mary Sue’s secondary reality, its moral and emotional components in particular, will be triumphant. In other words, a Mary Sue story generally subordinates the world of the story to the protagonist, making him or her the internal primary reality. This may seem a small offence, given that both are fictional, but it does not match the reality we see around us, does not reflect the inferiority of human thought to the realities it thinks upon. As a result, this breaks the story.

In sum, then, we must take care to show our characters as possessing what humans possess, a story of the world and a world created by that story. It must be placed too in right relationship to reality, even as we must seek to do in our daily life. Thus we may speak truth of reality; thus we may create true beauty; thus we may declare God and His image in us, for God is the original story-maker, we imitators in it of Him, imitators made by our sin fallible and not merely finite. It is our glory, then, to give Him glory in imitating His story-creation and in making our stories align with His story, both in fiction and in perspective of the world.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – I have no horse in this race, except that flathead screwdrivers are more useful than other types of screwdrivers to do things that screwdrivers aren’t meant for, while being worse as screwdrivers.

2 – Reading philosophy is a particularly potent way to get this effect, due to the concentration and explicitness of the difference compared to the relative subtlety of most fiction. It can also be interesting seeing how authors who in their own minds were opposites actually agree on certain fundamentals or how apparently similarly-cultured thinkers can have radically different basic premises (Ockham v Aquinas).

3 – A caveat is merited here. While I will term this world we live in as ‘primary reality’, it is primary only in relation to stories. God is the truly primary reality, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, definitionally self-existent and definitionally fundamental. We live not in a truly primary reality but in the secondary reality of a Creator beyond our compass, imitating His creation of this ‘primary reality’.

4 – Stories still exist within primary reality, of course, else they would not exist at all, else no story could be told of stories.

5 – If you don’t know who this is, read the book.