Schema’s and traits part 2

Yesterday we talked about schemas and traits. In schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey e. Young, Janet S. Klosko, and Marjorie E. Weishaar, there are 18 different maladaptive schemas. All of us express these maladaptive schemas to some extent. It is when you get into the extremes that they become a problem. Most of the characters that we create will not express these schemas. Villains on the other hand are villains because of these schemas. There are very few villains that are just pure evil; they had to come from somewhere. (Disclaimer this in no way insinuates that if you or someone you know has these schemas, are evil or a villain, only that truly evil people generally are that way because of maladaptive schemas.) From time to time I will be going over these schemas in greater detail but for now I just want to list them and talk about coping styles. The 18 maladaptive schemas are: Abandonment/instability, mistrust/abuse, emotional deprivation, defectiveness/shame, social isolation/alienation, dependence/incompetence, vulnerability to harm or illness, enmeshment/undeveloped self, failure, entitlement/grandiosity, insufficient self-control/self-discipline, subjugation, self-sacrifice, approval-seeking/recognition seeking, negativity/pessimism, emotional inhibition, unrelenting standards/hyper criticalness, and punitiveness. Like I said I will be discussing these more over the coming weeks and what they would look like. In the meantime imagine what maladaptive schema your own villain has, he probably has several.

Now, on to coping styles, there are three different styles and they correlate with our basic instincts of threat: fight, flight, and freeze. The three coping styles are overcompensation, avoidance and surrender. Coping styles are how a person reacts to his schema being threatened (the way he/she believes being attacked).

In a nutshell overcompensation is when people react by believing, feeling and acting as if the opposite is true. If, for example, as a child they felt worthless, when they acquired the schema, as adults they will do anything they can to be perfect. On the surface they are confident but underneath they are falling apart. Avoidance is when a person does all they can to avoid the maladaptive schema, they pretend it does not exist, they do not acknowledge it. They do this by using drugs, alcohol, become workaholics and other activities to avoid (trying to take over the world and be an evil dictator). Surrender is when a person does not fight or avoid the schema they believe the schema is true, they feel the pain directly. They are passive and choose partners that caused the schema to form in the first place (the evil sidekick is born).

This has been a long post but I hope that you have gained some new insight into creating your villains and why they are the way they are. Can you imagine the maladaptive schema your villain has what coping style does he/she use?

I have added a new page called the trampoline analogy. It is an analogy of how I view raising children. Check it out and let me know what you think. 

Schema’s and traits part 1

There is this idea called a schema. Schema makes up what we think and what we feel about the world around us and ourselves. It is like a filing cabinet with lots of different folders in it. When we were kids we only had a few folders with a few files in this cabinet. One day we are crawling around and we encounter a four legged furry thing which our mom/dad calls a dog. So we store that away in one of our folders and continue crawling. Within a few days we encounter another four legged furry thing and we say, “Dog.” Mom/dad say, “no, cat.” Now at this point our schema is being attacked or confronted. We think it is a dog but people we trust and love say it is a cat. Because we trust them we call the folder, where the dog was, animal and add a new sheet of information called cat.

So we add folders, and files to folders as we grow older. Each time our schema is challenged we either create a new file for the information or we change and add to old information. There is much more to this of course but this is schema in a nutshell (a very small nutshell). When we get older the more files and folders we have, which have been reinforced by experiences, good or bad. This means it is harder for us to change the schemas, they become more static. Remember the case above about the dog and cat think what happens to people who were given false or damaging information from people they loved.

When writing about our characters we can touch on these schemas. Schemas build personality traits that can be extreme but generally are not. Some stable temperamental traits that have been shown to remain stable over time are: Labile-nonreactive, Dysthimic-optimistic, anxious-calm, obsessive-distractible, passive-aggressive, irritable-cheerful, and shy-sociable. These all lie on a continuum meaning that labile – nonreactive is not one or the other it can be closer to nonreactive but still labile in certain situations. This is a lot of information but if you can place your characters on the continuum of these 7 traits you will better understand him/her. Make a scale from 1-10 and place each word on either end then mark where your character is on each scale.

Anyone dare put their own rating scale up? 

How to think about change in our own lives, others and our characters.

So I wasn’t sure what to write about until I read a post from http://lisa-laura.blogspot.com/2011/04/on-writing.html. Then I started thinking about change, (You’ll learn that change is one of my big thoughts) what can change and how do we write change. So….

There is this thing called the “fundamental attribution error” it is an error that we make when trying to figure out why a person does something. Think about someone cutting you off in traffic, how do you describe that person, what are the first things that come to your mind. Studies have found that generally we overweight attributes that are stable (race, age, sex, things that don’t change personality) and underweight attributes that do change (pregnant wife in the car, texting on cell phone, sick, things that can be changed.)

One of the big things that we overweight is personality. Personality for the most part does not change and yet, how often do we try to change our own personality or someone else’s. A movie that has many different types of change is Lord of The Rings. Study the difference between how Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry (spelling may be wrong sorry about that) change. Their personality, race, sex all stay the same yet their behaviors change drastically. At the end Pippin and Merry are still goofs but they take on more responsibility. Sam is still the “mother hen” but he has a lot more confidence. Frodo who has changed the most is still Frodo but has a much greater weight on him.

The way people change is most often slow and hardly noticed, like the hobbits. Other times we have drastic changes like in the case of Gandalf going from the Grey wizard to the white. Look at the people you have known the longest. How do they change? Have you noticed the changes?  This is how our characters need to change as well. They should change over time except for in extreme instances. The changes will be perceivable but only slightly. At the end of the book readers should recognize the change but while reading, it should almost be imperceptible. Once again back to Frodo think about how he changed, it was not unnatural and rushed but slow and steady.

How do you write change in your books? Do you think personality can change? Share with the rest of us so we can all learn together J

Functional analysis and functional assessment part 1:

So, in class yesterday we were discussing functional assessment and analysis. This is a very interesting thing because it is going beyond the topographic view of things. Topographic view is looking at the things everyone can see. For example look at the room you are in and describing it. There may even be a clear container that has liquid in it but if looking at it from a topographic point of view you really don’t know what the liquid is that is in it. You can make assumptions but you don’t really know (unless of course you put the liquid in it, but that is beside the point).  

When doing a functional assessment it is taking into account all of the things that cause the problem. What causes the character to blow his nose: because he is allergic to something, he has a cold, he just bumped it.

Functional analysis is going from learning who the person is to manipulating the person’s environment to see how that person reacts in the given situation. We purposefully change things in their environment to get them to react a certain way or see how they react.

When trying to create a believable character we need to go beyond what they look like and what they think to the point where we understand how they will react in certain situations. Four things to know about human behavior: is understandable and predictable (if we have all the information), is malleable and can be shaped, occurs within a context and not a vacuum, is learned (can be taught) and can be manipulated.

How well do we need to know our characters to write a good novel? 

Staying Motivated

Today’s post will be a little different because I want to look at the writer. I think that it is important, as writers, to keep ourselves healthy and motivated. One of the things that I find myself doing is expecting more than what I’m getting (the million dollar book deal, 10,000 followers and stuff like that J) and so I become unmotivated. You know what I’m talking about: the rejection letters, the critiques, all that fun and very important stuff.

The things that keep me motivated though are things like my critique group. I go to a critique group and a motivating group. My wife has been a great support in helping me stay motivated. All of you who read and post on my blog keep my hopes up. These things are very important but when it comes down to it, the thing that we all need to learn is self-motivation. We need to find ways to give ourselves confidence and to build ourselves up. The way I find to do this is by writing consistently so that I remember how fun it is to write. I also re-read my work and allow myself to just enjoy it, without looking for mistakes.

The following is something my eight year old son wrote to me,

            Dear, Joshua Hoyt

I loved your book Dad. I hope you make more books. Your book was so awesome.

                                                                        Love your son

                                                                                    Thomas

Now if that doesn’t motivate me nothing will (:

What motivates you in your endeavors? What are your thoughts?

How do our Protagonists resist the effects of PTSD?

Protagonists are an interesting group of people. They generally have some superhuman ability and are thrown into some horrible situations. This makes me think of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). PTSD is an interesting thing that happens to some people but not to others. The question is, since we are talking about protagonists, why do some people not get PTSD.

When I got into a car accident a couple of years ago I was deathly afraid to drive for fear of getting into another accident. I had run into the back of another person when they had stopped suddenly. My brakes were especially squishy that day and so I was unable to stop in time. I felt like I had little control over the situation. Discussing PTSD with my supervisor we both came up with one of the factors, probably the largest part, control. If a person feels like they have control over a situation they are much less likely to have PTSD following the situation. The key word is feel. Think about soldiers who go into combat situations and are on high alert for extended time. The majority of them come home relatively okay. But me in my car crash feared driving. (I can drive just fine and it wasn’t true PTSD just an example BTW).

SO this brings us back to our Protagonist who gets shot at, thrown into dungeons, faces aliens and dragons, is raped, sees loved ones killed before them and many other horrible situations. What makes our protagonist special? Why is she/he able to withstand these situations with little to no adverse effect? One of my favorite protagonists is Frodo from Lord of The Rings. Talk about change and the effect the war had on him. In the end he was not the same, he had to leave because there was no possible way he could overcome the effects of PTSD in his world.

The person that creeps you out but you don’t know why.

There is an odd thing that happens when we get around certain types of people. The hair on the back of our neck stands up, our gut tenses or any a number of other things happens. One of my supervisors talks about when he gets around bi polar people his heart speeds up. One of my teacher explains that when she gets around anti-social personalities it makes her feel yucky. It doesn’t always have to be the extremes but when a person starts to act like someone we have had a bad experience with we initially dislike them or when someone acts and looks like someone we have had good experiences with we like them.

So what makes a good villain? It’s the character that creeps us out or makes us feel yucky inside. It’s the character that makes us feel like we have been to a used car dealer and we know we are getting ripped off. These feelings come because of past experiences that we have had with certain types of people and we recognize it because of simple body movements or their words are off just a tiny bit. We feel like something is off with them but can’t quite tell what it is.

The challenge is getting the reader to feel this way even though they can’t see the person. We need to produce characters that are so real that the reader can see, touch, smell, and feel them. We need to make something just a little bit off about the character and be consistent in using it. It needs to be the subconscious that makes the reader uneasy so that it hits her/him at the core.

Tell me about certain times you have been creeped out by a person but don’t know why until later.