What Makes People Change?
I've been thinking about the moment in every story when the hero makes either a life-altering decision, or has a life-altering realization, or both. The epiphany that allows the hero to change, or motivates them to remain steadfast against the temptation to surrender.
Again and again, I find myself dissatisfied with these moments in the stories I tell (and elsewhere). Again and again, I find myself working and reworking and reworking this moment. And I've been thinking, I've been realizing: the more real I am able to make the characters, the more alive, the more difficult it becomes to believe that they'd change, or have a realization that strong, all in a fictionalized, focused moment. Perhaps I do not believe that people have these realizations. Perhaps I too often doubt that people make these hard choices while the time is still ripe.
Yet, I refuse to be that cynical. It does not sit well with me, and not only because it would trap my work in art houses, at best, and I want to reach a wide range of people, not just intellectuals and movie buffs. I want to believe that people can, and do, make these decisions, do have these realizations, can have these moments where they take charge of fate. I want to believe that I have them myself, and may have another someday. I want to believe that I am here because of such moments. But they are so hard to recognize, so hard to dramatize -- without falling back on formula, without simply fullfilling accepted plot expectations.
I beleive my mind will be focused on these moments for some time. Perhaps from now on. They are the atoms. It is obvious. It is no revelation. All must come from them. I feel it. I feel it like a thorn in my mind. A nagging problem to be solved. A place to find another piece of myself as a storyteller and a person. What is my answer to the question: "What Makes People Change?"
What will make people change? What will motivate people question their reality and answer their dreams, or question their dreams and answer to reality? Where do these realizations come from? Where does the bravery to change come from? How can those small moments be condensed, focused, and dramatized into a single, powerful movement? A moment with a hero, an inspiration. A moment with a real person, doing the extraordinary? How do I believe that happens?
I don't have the answer. But having seized on the question is exciting.
Again and again, I find myself dissatisfied with these moments in the stories I tell (and elsewhere). Again and again, I find myself working and reworking and reworking this moment. And I've been thinking, I've been realizing: the more real I am able to make the characters, the more alive, the more difficult it becomes to believe that they'd change, or have a realization that strong, all in a fictionalized, focused moment. Perhaps I do not believe that people have these realizations. Perhaps I too often doubt that people make these hard choices while the time is still ripe.
Yet, I refuse to be that cynical. It does not sit well with me, and not only because it would trap my work in art houses, at best, and I want to reach a wide range of people, not just intellectuals and movie buffs. I want to believe that people can, and do, make these decisions, do have these realizations, can have these moments where they take charge of fate. I want to believe that I have them myself, and may have another someday. I want to believe that I am here because of such moments. But they are so hard to recognize, so hard to dramatize -- without falling back on formula, without simply fullfilling accepted plot expectations.
I beleive my mind will be focused on these moments for some time. Perhaps from now on. They are the atoms. It is obvious. It is no revelation. All must come from them. I feel it. I feel it like a thorn in my mind. A nagging problem to be solved. A place to find another piece of myself as a storyteller and a person. What is my answer to the question: "What Makes People Change?"
What will make people change? What will motivate people question their reality and answer their dreams, or question their dreams and answer to reality? Where do these realizations come from? Where does the bravery to change come from? How can those small moments be condensed, focused, and dramatized into a single, powerful movement? A moment with a hero, an inspiration. A moment with a real person, doing the extraordinary? How do I believe that happens?
I don't have the answer. But having seized on the question is exciting.
In my experience, most people change only when the current reality has become utterly unlivable. Major life changes, or epiphanies, usually arise from some form of desperation. People, like most organisms, usually live in the ways that are easiest and simplest--or what they THINK is easiest.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's when they realize, "Oh my God, I was completely mistaken, the way I've been living is NOT the easiest, I see now that there's maybe another way--maybe, possibly, I could live differently..."
So first life becomes unlivable in its current incarnation, and then there's a seed of doubt introduced, an inkling that maybe things could be different. How that inkling of doubt is introduced, I don't know, but it must be akin to that primeval flash of lightning that ignited earth's first amino acids to tango and form life. Luck or serendipity or God. Something.
But also, not to get all art-house on you, but it IS true that most decisions happen slowly, in pieces, over time. There's usually not a flash of lightning, but a slow incandescence.
And then often you might make a choice to change, and think it's grand, but then you have to take the actions to actually put that into practice--and those actions become the decision, and they're HARD. Way harder than just going "OH! I'm going to change! Just like that!"
Did I see you on the 405 South yesterday, just south of the Sepulveda Pass? It looked very much like you.
I fully agree (except I wasn't on the 405, to my knowledge). But that's the issue. Most people don't make decisions until it's too late (they're already destroyed), or make them very, very, very slowly (the very definition of un-dramatically). I know that's true of me *most* of the time. Only death, or a similar devastating loss, seems to motivate sudden alteration or realization. And I'm not usually telling a story with death or murder in the ballpark.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the reality remains that art cannot *be* real life, it can only be a representation of it. A symbol standing for it, just as the word apple is not an apple. In life, that action of change is a slow process. In drama, it must be condensed. A single act must represent, must stand in for, the long process of decisions. It doesn't imply that those decisions will not be necessary, but by selecting this one particular decision, the result of those further enforcing decisions must be implied.
Also, inspiring stories are those of heroes, and heroes define themselves by being able to see these things, and being able to act on them decisively. They tell us that we, too, can overcome.
The question that I'm enjoying asking, and don't yet have an answer to, is how do *I* personally make this focused, condensed representation, how do I make it satisfying to me?
Well. Hmm.
ReplyDeleteI have had a few epiphanies in my life. Most happened while I was young--I think the ground is more fertile when you're younger. You're more open to it.
Usually they followed after much morose introspection on a particular problem, but they weren't the RESULT of said introspection--it was just like that lightningbolt again, an inductive leap, an OH MY GOD! DUH! THE ANSWER'S BEEN HERE ALL ALONG! moment.
One happened on the top of a mountain in Tuscany, when I'd climbed to the top of an abandoned citadel in the sheeting rain. I'd gone after graduating from college. Extreme situations like that, I think, can induce that lightningbolt moment. (Luckily, I was not actually hit by lightning.)