A passing fancy

I've been reading a lot of my own writing, lately. I'd quite like a change.

Any of my writerly friends fancy doing me a drabble?

Have a picture:



This is something I just knocked up in DAZ Studio. I'd be interested to see what you might think led up to this obviously tense moment, or perhaps what happened next. I'm not promising prizes or anything--it's just a passing fancy, as the title of the post says, and if no-one responds at all I promise not to go into a decline. :)

But if you feel like it, by all means have a go.

A defence of one-dimensional characters

Martin Shaw, who played Ray Doyle in the ITC series The Professionals for a number of years, describes his character in that show as "one-dimensional." In reviews of films, books, telly shows, one of the harshest criticisms that can be levelled is that the characters have only one or at best two dimensions. In an age where "character-driven" is a guarantee of excellence in storytelling, and plot merely a vaguely desirable but purely ornamental feature, the cardinal sin is to shortchange the audience on the dimensionality of the characters. But is this fair?

Well, to start with, what do we mean by "a one-dimensional character"? Obviously, a character whose visible nature can be summed up in one line. A tough guy. A bored housewife. A big businessman. A prostitute. A weasel. A mother-in-law. Stereotypes, cliches, joke fodder, instantly recognisable tokens in the currency of fiction. There are many of them around, and not just in cop shows. You'll find one-dimensional characters in great literature and drama, perhaps not centre stage like Hamlet, but filling in the background. Stories need one-dimensional characters.

And come to that, so do we all. You'll meet thousands of people in your life once and never again. You'll buy a paper from them, or direct them to Copthorne Avenue, or exchange muttered, panicky monosyllables in the lift one day, and to you they will always be, as you will be to them, one-dimensional characters. How awful if, in every one of those brief and all but meaningless encounters, you were compelled to explore every multitudinous facet of each other's history and personality. You'd never get anything done. Perhaps in former times, when leaving your village was a major undertaking and you only ever knew six people in your life, you might get to know them inside and out, but that just isn't possible these days. People have to be one-dimensional, or we'd never fit them all into our lives.

So, one-dimensional characters are not by any means the big no-no that they might seem. But surely, you could say, when it comes to leading roles, the writers are under an obligation to flesh out their creations, to give them depth and vibrancy, to furnish them with rich and colourful back stories full of meaningful and piquant events?

And I say, are we?

Look at the aforementioned Ray Doyle. A tough guy, a one-dimensional character. Not, perhaps, very satisfying to play, for a young actor wanting to develop his craft. And yet in hundreds, maybe thousands of works of fan fiction, devoted admirers have picked up on tiny, almost subliminal hints in the canon and used those, combined with the power of their imaginations, to flesh out Ray Doyle and a hundred other one-dimensional characters to their own complete satisfaction.

And the key word just went by there. Imagination. Kids these days (he grumbled into his beard) want everything given to them, and adults do too. Gone are the times when a black and white, silent film was all the miracle of entertainment anyone could wish for. Now we want full colour, 3D (because we can't imagine things on a screen not being flat), 5.1 stereo sound, and if there's a dinosaur walking across the screen it had better be one hundred per cent realistic or there'll be hell to pay, because we no longer care to exercise our imaginations. We want it all handed to us, no effort required. And the same with characters. We can't be bothered (apart from those devoted fans I mentioned) to take a tough guy and flesh him out for ourselves with backstory and personality and vulnerabilities; no, it all has to be there on the page, on the screen, in the script, laboriously set down so that we don't need to think.

Or at least, that is what one might imagine.

The fact is that most people's imaginations are working perfectly well, and they can cope quite happily with characters whose other dimensions are left, as it were, as an exercise for the reader. It is only the vocal, vitriolic few, who love to point out "bad CGI" as if the existence of CGI at all were not a very recent technological miracle, who moan loudly when the animatronic model fails to be utterly convincing, who point and snigger at wobbly sets or hastily assembled costumes, whose piercing whisper of "he's not dead really" doubtless punctuated the climactic scenes of the Shakespearean tragedy which their school had generously allowed them to attend...it is these critics who, their imaginations failing them for lack of exercise, demand a degree of roundedness from the fictional characters they read about or watch which they happily waive in the case of the real person who sells them their newspaper.

Three-dimensional characters are unquestionably good. Two-dimensional characters are all right. But one-dimensional characters...

...they're ours.

A defence of one-dimensional characters

Martin Shaw, who played Ray Doyle in the ITC series The Professionals for a number of years, describes his character in that show as "one-dimensional." In reviews of films, books, telly shows, one of the harshest criticisms that can be levelled is that the characters have only one or at best two dimensions. In an age where "character-driven" is a guarantee of excellence in storytelling, and plot merely a vaguely desirable but purely ornamental feature, the cardinal sin is to shortchange the audience on the dimensionality of the characters. But is this fair?

Well, to start with, what do we mean by "a one-dimensional character"? Obviously, a character whose visible nature can be summed up in one line. A tough guy. A bored housewife. A big businessman. A prostitute. A weasel. A mother-in-law. Stereotypes, cliches, joke fodder, instantly recognisable tokens in the currency of fiction. There are many of them around, and not just in cop shows. You'll find one-dimensional characters in great literature and drama, perhaps not centre stage like Hamlet, but filling in the background. Stories need one-dimensional characters.

And come to that, so do we all. You'll meet thousands of people in your life once and never again. You'll buy a paper from them, or direct them to Copthorne Avenue, or exchange muttered, panicky monosyllables in the lift one day, and to you they will always be, as you will be to them, one-dimensional characters. How awful if, in every one of those brief and all but meaningless encounters, you were compelled to explore every multitudinous facet of each other's history and personality. You'd never get anything done. Perhaps in former times, when leaving your village was a major undertaking and you only ever knew six people in your life, you might get to know them inside and out, but that just isn't possible these days. People have to be one-dimensional, or we'd never fit them all into our lives.

So, one-dimensional characters are not by any means the big no-no that they might seem. But surely, you could say, when it comes to leading roles, the writers are under an obligation to flesh out their creations, to give them depth and vibrancy, to furnish them with rich and colourful back stories full of meaningful and piquant events?

And I say, are we?

Look at the aforementioned Ray Doyle. A tough guy, a one-dimensional character. Not, perhaps, very satisfying to play, for a young actor wanting to develop his craft. And yet in hundreds, maybe thousands of works of fan fiction, devoted admirers have picked up on tiny, almost subliminal hints in the canon and used those, combined with the power of their imaginations, to flesh out Ray Doyle and a hundred other one-dimensional characters to their own complete satisfaction.

And the key word just went by there. Imagination. Kids these days (he grumbled into his beard) want everything given to them, and adults do too. Gone are the times when a black and white, silent film was all the miracle of entertainment anyone could wish for. Now we want full colour, 3D (because we can't imagine things on a screen not being flat), 5.1 stereo sound, and if there's a dinosaur walking across the screen it had better be one hundred per cent realistic or there'll be hell to pay, because we no longer care to exercise our imaginations. We want it all handed to us, no effort required. And the same with characters. We can't be bothered (apart from those devoted fans I mentioned) to take a tough guy and flesh him out for ourselves with backstory and personality and vulnerabilities; no, it all has to be there on the page, on the screen, in the script, laboriously set down so that we don't need to think.

Or at least, that is what one might imagine.

The fact is that most people's imaginations are working perfectly well, and they can cope quite happily with characters whose other dimensions are left, as it were, as an exercise for the reader. It is only the vocal, vitriolic few, who love to point out "bad CGI" as if the existence of CGI at all were not a very recent technological miracle, who moan loudly when the animatronic model fails to be utterly convincing, who point and snigger at wobbly sets or hastily assembled costumes, whose piercing whisper of "he's not dead really" doubtless punctuated the climactic scenes of the Shakespearean tragedy which their school had generously allowed them to attend...it is these critics who, their imaginations failing them for lack of exercise, demand a degree of roundedness from the fictional characters they read about or watch which they happily waive in the case of the real person who sells them their newspaper.

Three-dimensional characters are unquestionably good. Two-dimensional characters are all right. But one-dimensional characters...

...they're ours.

Originally posted on http://avevale_intelligencer.dreamwidth.org. Comment here or there or both if you wish.