character

BETTER KNOW YOUR CHARACTER(S)

Posted on by vlaw759

Knowing things about one’s character(s)—even things that never make it onto the page—will keep those imaginary people in character, consistent, well-rounded, and flexible so that new plot twists and turns don’t leave the reader feeling like an entirely new person has been introduced.

They also help in making sure every character is not just a copy of the author, with the same political views, personal preferences, and general outlook on life. Indeed, there are profile pages that have questions about everything from birthdate/astrological sign, to medical conditions, to education, to family of origin, etc. . . 

Which Brings Us to COVID-19

A worldwide pandemic is definitely an unexpected turn (unless your character is a historical tracking epidemiologist)! And rich with complexities. For the sake of better knowing your character(s), consider what the current pandemic would reveal. Remember that traits revealed by current events can be applied by authors to characters dealing with any historical, fantastical, futuristic, or imaginary setting.

Masks

This isn’t as singular as it first seems.  What is your character’s attitude/ behavior regarding masks? And why? Here are several possible choices. The Why is up to you!

  • Refuses categorically
  • Complies reluctantly
  • Will wear only when visiting nursing homes or vulnerable family
  • Embraces masks a good thing
  • Sees masks as just another opportunity to accessorize

What do your character’s masks look like? What quality or grade? Would your character confront someone about wearing/not wearing a mask?

Social Distancing 

Easy or difficult for your character?

  • Ignores physical distance
  • Meticulously maintains a 6’ distance
  • Social distances in public places only
  • Feels safe being closer when outdoors
  • Hugs and kisses family
Hand Cleaning
  • Pays no particular attention, i.e., washes when hands feel/look dirty
  • Cleans hands when entering or leaving a building 
  • Sets up a hand washing/sanitizing schedule, e.g., every hour
  • Preference for soap and water or sanitizer?
Safer at Home
  • Does not leave residence at all; everything is distance communication and delivery
  • Goes out only for medical reasons and food
  • Travels locally in own vehicle 
  • Travels locally in someone else’s vehicle, just driver and character in back seat passenger side
  • Comfortable traveling by taxi, bus, train, or plane with appropriate precautions
  • Travel whenever and wherever, damn the consequences
Alone or Together
  • Does your character live alone? Is that a good thing or bad?
  • Does your character alone get lonely?
  • Does your character living with others experience increased tension and conflict? With partner and/or children.
  • What if your character’s friend/loved one dies?
  • How would your character handle home schooling?
    • (If s/he has no children, consider a distance learning tutor or a character educating him/herself via online resources.) 
Crowds
  • Avoids them like the plague (pun intended)
  • Braves them only for a “good cause” such as civil rights demonstration
  • Would go to a family reunion
  • Would address a crowded room for work reasons
  • Happy to party down
Work 
  • Would your character be able to work from home?
  • Is your character an essential worker?
  • Could/would your character be furloughed?
  • Is your character a business owner, responsible for others?
  • Would your character’s workplace be shut down?
  • Would money/loss of income be a problem for your character?

With But Not of COVID-19

Name Changing 

Would your character have a singular or varied response, depending on what’s being renamed? Consider the timing and speed of public opinion shift in the setting: immediately renaming provinces, shops, schools, and cities per government mandate during China’s Cultural Revolution versus the gradual shift of the capital of Kazakhstan from Astana to Nur-Sultan.

  • Rename schools, named for Confederate “heroes”
    • e.g., Stonewall Jackson Middle School, Washington and Lee University
  • Rename roadways, bridges, etc.
    • e.g., Lee-Davis Highway
  • Rename Washington Redskins team
  • Rename towns/cities
Public Memorials, Symbols 

Confederate flag, paintings, statues displayed on public property.

  • Leave them alone. It’s history.
  • Leave them, but provide context.
  • Remove them to Civil War battlefields or museums.
  • Remove and destroy.

Bottom line for writers: Remember that you are describing your character(s), not yourself. The “why” is important. Did you learn anything about your character(s)?

BURIED ALIVE

Posted on by vlaw759
 
Fear of being buried alive is called taphephobia.  Also known as live burial, premature burial, and vivisepulture, it’s been around forever—and is with us still!  Those buried alive often die of asphyxiation, dehydration, starvation, or hypothermia.  If fresh air is available, the buried person can last days.

 

This guy seems pretty happy about the situation.

Fear of being buried alive reached a peak in 19th century England.  More than 120 books in at least five languages were written about it, as well as methods to distinguish life from death.  (See below.)

 

Harry Clarke’s illustration for Premature Burial by Edgar Allen Poe

A Fine Literary Tradition
 
Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” The Fall of the House of Usher, and Berenice.  More recently, Stephen King’s 1987 novel Misery includes Paul Sheldon’s Misery’s Return, a book within a book.

Farinata and Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti in Level 6 of the Inferno, painted by Suloni Robertson

Dante’s Inferno references several classes of sinners punished with some form of eternal burial:

  • The Sullen in Level 5 are kept just below the waters of the River Styx, forever near drowning.
  • The Heretics in Level 6 are trapped in flaming tombs.
  • Murderers in Level 7 are covered by a river of boiling blood.
  • In Level 8 (where all types of fraud are punished)
    • Flatterers are encased in human excrement.
    • Simonists are buried head-first while flames burn their feet.
    • Fraudulent Counselors are encased in flames.
  • The Treacherous in Level 9 are buried in ice of varying levels depending on their sin.
Accidental or Unintentional Burial
 

It’s easier to handle if you bring a buddy along.

Reports of being buried alive date back to the fourteenth century.  In spite of hype and hysteria, as late as the 1890s patients have been documented as being declared dead and accidentally sent to a morgue or encased in a steel box, only to “come back to life” when the coffin is dropped, the grave is opened by grave robbers, or embalming  or dissection has begun.

 

“Life preserving coffin in doubtful cases of actual dead,” a safety-coffin model by Christian Eisenbrandt

During centuries when embalming wasn’t common practice, coffins were mostly for the rich, and rapid burial was the norm especially during major pestilences such as cholera, bubonic plague, and smallpox.  In these cases, rapid burial was an attempt to curb the spread of the disease.

 

The Great Plague by Rita Greer

Several medical conditions can contribute to the presumption of death: catalepsy, coma, and hypothermia.

 

How to Know When Someone Is Really Dead

 

Snoring is a pretty good sign. (This is actually the Fourpence Coffin flophouse, the first homeless shelter in London.)

Jan Bondeson, author of Buried Alive, identified methods of verifying death used by 18th and 19th century physicians.  (Personal reaction: shudder!)  The methods were any acts the physician thought would rouse the unconscious patient, virtually all imaginatively painful.
  • Soles of the feet sliced with razors
  • Needles jammed under toenails
  • Bugle fanfares and “hideous Shrieks and excessive Noises”
  • Red hot poke up the rectum
  • Application of nipple pincers
  • A bagpipe type invention to administer tobacco enemas
  • Boiling Spanish wax poured on patients’ foreheads and warm urine poured into the mouth
  • A crawling insect inserted into patient’s ear
  • A sharp pencil up the presumed cadaver’s nose
  • Tongue pulling (manual or mechanical) for at least three hours

 

The traditional Irish wake was (and is) an occasion for family and friends to celebrate the life of the deceased while watching the body for signs of movement.

Most agreed that the most reliable way to be sure someone was dead was to keep an eye on the body for a while.  To that end, waiting at least 72 hours from apparent death to burial was mandated.  In the mid-1800s, Munich had ten “waiting mortuaries” where bodies were stored awaiting putrefaction.  Each body was rigged to bells to summon an attendant should the corpse come back to life.

 

Waiting morgues, like this one in Paris, were often left open to the public for macabre entertainment

We presume that modern science has surpassed this sort of mistake, defining death as brain death.  Even so, earthquakes and other natural disasters often result in people being accidentally buried alive.

 

Victims of the 2018 tsunami in Nepal were not so fortunate.

But Wait: Sometimes People Are Buried Alive on Purpose!

From the Museum of Torture in Venice

Sometimes live burial is a method of execution.  Documented cases exist for China, German tribes, Persia, Rome, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Russia, Netherlands, Ukraine, and Brazil.

Confucian scholars were buried alive while their books were burned in 3rd century BCE

Interestingly, most of the laws demanding live burial as a form of execution were for crimes committed by women.  Men convicted of comparable crimes were more likely to be beheaded.

 

Vestal Virgins were sealed in caves for breaking their vow of chastity, as shown in this painting by Pietro Saja

When death was not enough, often a spike was driven through the body of the person executed by live burial, perhaps as a way to prevent the person from becoming an avenging, undead Wiedergänger.

 

In some parts of the world, live burial is still practiced as a means of execution.  Often, the victim is buried upright with only their head above ground.  In these cases, death is very slow and painful, often the result of dehydration or wounds caused by animal scavengers.

 

And sometimes live burials are another horrific act of war.

Codice Casanatense, a Portugese artist, recorded this scene of a Hindu widow being sent alive to her husband’s grave.

Very rarely people willingly arrange to be buried alive, for any number of reasons.  Sometimes it is to demonstrate their ability to survive it.  The Indian government has made voluntary live burials illegal because the people who try it so often die.  In 2010, a Russian man was buried to try to overcome his fear of death, but was crushed to death by the weight of the earth over him.

Four “lucky” contest winners

There are even performances in which people have an opportunity to be buried alive for fifteen or twenty minutes.  As a publicity stunt for the opening of the 2010 film Buried, a lottery was held for a few fans to have a very unique viewing experience.  Four winners were blindfolded, driven to the middle of nowhere, and buried alive in special coffins equips with screens on which they could watch the film.  (A 2003 episode of “Mythbusters” demonstrated that, even if a person buried alive was able to break out of a coffin, they would be crushed or asphyxiated by the resulting dirt fall.)

There is now a monument to Mick Meaney on Kilburne Street.

Irish barman Mick Meaney remained buried under Kilburne Street in London for 61 days in 1968, mostly to win a bet.  Tubes to the surface allowed air and food to reach him in his temporary, underground prison.

Parents are often unwillingly volunteered for vivisepulture on the beach.

Bottom line for writers: consider a character being buried alive—or being threatened with it—as a way to up the tension. 
 
Live burial isn’t the only attention-worthy aspect of dead bodies.  For more, check out books such as these.

Shoe Story

Posted on by vlaw759

University of Kansas researchers found that by looking at photos of the shoes people wore most often, their subjects could accurately tell a person’s age, sex, income, and political affiliation. But they could also accurately assign certain personality traits—e.g., people in practical comfortable shoes are perceived as more laid back and relaxed—and they are. Those with masculine shoes are more uptight. People with plain shoes that look new are more likely to be anxious and insecure.

 

Overall, researcher Omri Gillath found that by examining the style, cost, color, and condition of the shoes, participants were able to predict about 90% of the owner’s personal characteristics. 

 

  • Expensive shoes belong to high earners.
  • Flashy and colorful footwear belonged to extroverts.
  • Shoes that were not new but were spotless belonged to conscientious types.
  • Practical and functional shoes belonged to agreeable people.
  • Ankle boots reflected more aggressive personalities.
  • Uncomfortable looking shoes (surprisingly) were worn by calm personalities.
  • Brand new and well-kept shoes were worn by people with attachment anxiety (perhaps worry a lot about what others may think of them).
  • Shabbier and less expensive shoes marked liberal thinkers.
  • Boring looking shoes were worn by people who found it hard to form relationships BUT study participants couldn’t get that relationship.

What A Woman’s Shoes Say About How She’s Feeling

These are perceptions of current footwear, not what is worn most often.

 

  • Tall riding boots = Up for anything. Boots are a staple shoe when it comes to cold-weather fashion.
  • Ankle Boots = Sleek and fashion-conscious.
  • Ballet Flats = Cute.
  • Casual Sneakers = Lazy, yet productive.

  • Black Pumps = Sexy.
  • Wedges = Fun.
  • Peep-toes = Flirty.
  • Flat Sandals = Happy.

What a Man’s Shoes Say About Him

Again, these are perceptions, traits others attribute to the wearer, not validated by corresponding personality tests.
 
  • Suede ankle boots = masculine but not aggressive, detail-oriented
  • Driving mocs = knows style, a little high-maintenance
  • Black dress shoes = pulled together, high self-respect
  • Rainbow flip-flops = laid-back, doesn’t succumb to societal expectations
  • Timberlands = not-so-rough guy trying to look tough
  • Sperry boat shoes = traditionalist, follows dad’s footsteps, wears what he wore every summer growing up
[Source: eBay]
  • Merrells = his mom is still shopping for him
  • Air Jordans = serious sneakerhead, maybe too self-absorbed?
  • Lace-up oxfords = solid, responsible, means business
  • Retro Nikes = subtle but looking cool and trendy
  • Sandals with socks = lazy, looks silly, simply not acceptable
  • Vibram FiveFingers = marches to his own drummer
[Source: REI Co-op]
Usefulness to writers: (1) choose habitual footwear to reflect your character’s character; and (2) have your character choose footwear to create a particular impression.