stellaluna

Oh, look. Stellaluna is avoiding her story.

Although if I'm writing character-related thinky posts instead, that still counts as working on it, right? Sort of. In a roundabout, stretching-the-point kinda way.



Or, to be more specific, why writing from Mac's POV is hard; although he's a difficult character at all times, I find him somewhat easier to tackle when he's being viewed through someone else's eyes.

It's for all the obvious and usual reasons: he's a very internal person, with a strong tendency to keep almost everything to himself; he doesn't demonstrate emotion or, as I've suspected for a long time, even like to admit to himself that he has emotions. Not any emotion that would make him vulnerable, anyway. Emotions like anger at perps or professional pride he can handle. Anything that would suggest he has a soft underbelly is something that needs to be pushed away as quickly as possible, because it's dangerous, because vulnerability is weakness. Showing people your vulnerability also shows them how to hurt you.

Because he doesn't express himself easily or willingly, and because even inside his head he's very constrained in what he will and won't allow himself to think about, and very cautious about the ways in which he's willing to express himself, it becomes tricky to write from his POV. Because he does have emotions, even if they're usually well-buried. How do you express the emotion when he is so internal, and when he's frequently not aware, himself, of what he's feeling? How do you get past the external masks of Cop and Soldier and Boss to show the person underneath?

He also can't be an automaton, or so stiffly formal that he reads like a visitor from another century, or like a textbook or a field manual (although sometimes he can sound like that when he's in speechmaking mode). He's still a man living in New York City in the 21st century, and although he's not a libertine, he's also not a priss, or naive. Mac's been to war; he's killed people. And he now works in law enforcement in a densely-populated major city. He's well aware of the world and its seamy underside. So how do you show that person, and show those emotions, while still staying true to the extremely reserved man he is -- and, furthermore, how do you avoid tipping the balance the other way?

Honestly, I still don't entirely know. I've been writing in this fandom for a little over a year (!), and I still feel like I don't have much of a clue. I can do it, and in looking at my own stories, I think I've been able to find ways to get at that personality and those emotions, but every single time it feels like I'm groping my way in a dark room, fumbling for a light switch. With Mac -- and I think this holds true for all characters, really, but it strikes me as especially important for someone like him -- writing from his POV becomes as much, or more, about what he doesn't say as what he does say. What is he avoiding dealing with or talking about, and why is he doing that dance of avoidance?

I've used the metaphor of negative space more than once in my stories (most recently in "A Game of You"), and I think it's a useful one for purposes of character. Negative space is about what's not there, and by looking at what isn't, we should, in theory, be able to shed a light on what is there. The things that are missing, that are now gone or have never been there, illuminate what does exist. So what Mac doesn't say tells us as much about him as what he does say; the words he rejects are as important as the words he chooses.

The same is true of his actions: what he doesn't do, or won't do, means as much as what he does do. Notice how often he'll reframe personal conversations in professional terms, how comfortable he is congratulating Danny for being put on the promotion grid in "Outside Man," and how he's very capable, in "Crime & Misdemeanor," at ripping Danny a new one for doing an end run around instructions in order to keep working on a case. He's similarly perfectly capable of picking a fight with Stella over professional methods in "Officer Blue."

When it comes to the personal, though, he shuts down. Note in "Officer Blue" how much less comfortable he is reconciling with her at the end of the episode, and how, although he means every word of his apology, he's only able to say the words with great difficulty. Even more importantly, notice how he phrases that apology in terms of the professional, though it's something that's very clearly personal to him: he's only able to tell Stella how much he cares for her, and how much she means to him, by telling her that she's "a fine CSI" and that he "wouldn't do this job without [her]."

He similarly flails when talking to Danny in "Tanglewood" about the need to belong and the issue of joining, or not joining, the gang. Danny is seeking a personal conversation, and Mac seems to try to do that, but quickly falls back on his standard speech about how he joined the Marines because he wanted to serve his country, and how Danny is a smart guy because he didn't get himself involved with Tanglewood -- something Mac states very quickly and very definitively, without really giving Danny a chance to explain otherwise.

The conversation is also notable and, I think, telling, for something I've talked about before: the fact that Mac gives two different reasons for wanting to join the Corps, and seems unaware, willfully or otherwise, that they are two different reasons. Hell, I'll just quote what I said when I wrote about this in my posts about the S1 DVDs, because it sums up what I'm talking about here:

[Mac] says that he understands the need to belong to something (which goes along with what he tells the mother of the murdered boy early on), then follows that up by saying that he would have done anything to join the Marines, and gives his reason as *wanting to serve his country*.

It's not that I doubt Mac's motivation there, and certainly both things can be true, but what he doesn't seem to connect is that joining the Marines *because he wants to belong to something* and joining the Marines *because he wants to serve his country* are *not the same thing*. They're both valid reasons, they can both be true, and they can be complementary motivations. But they're not the same thing, not for a second.

So the big challenge for me when writing Mac is trying to figure out both what he's not saying and why he's not saying it. And because he is so internal, so reserved, this can often be vastly more difficult to suss out than it is for someone like Stella or Danny. Neither of them are an open book, either, but they're both much more expressive -- and much more vivid in the ways they express themselves -- than Mac will ever be.

Once I've figured out what's really going on in his head and what he's feeling, the trick is then figuring out how to show that while still keeping him believably reserved -- without, as I mentioned earlier, then tipping the balance the other way and making him much too formal or uptight. He shouldn't ever be Weepy Emo Boy -- none of them should be, actually -- but he also can't sound like a forensics textbook.

I have no easy answers for how to either achieve or maintain that balance.



I also woke up this morning with most of the story arc of the upcoming fifth installment of the "Light From a Dead Star" series in my head. I have no idea why, or where it came from, but I accept it as the gift that it is.