Interlude · 11:00pm Oct 8th, 2015
Invisible Ink
Conflict of Interest: Interlude
Just a quick drive-by post as I’ve been out all day today:
One thing I mentioned yesterday was that the intensity of a conflict was not necessarily tied to any objective assessment of importance – everything is relative. One facet of this that is a concept I know purely from my research into brain development is the relationship between the intensity of an emotion and a person’s willpower or self control.
Most people never have a reason to think about just how powerful their emotions are and whether other people experience them in quite the same way. In fact, it’s largely pointless to, because you’ll just never know for sure, and it probably wouldn’t be of much practical use if you did. But when writing characters, it can sometimes offer a little more depth to an otherwise shallow personality. The idea is thus:
Rather that thinking about emotions in terms an abstract scale, say 0–10, you can think of it more as a ratio of intensity vs control. I’ll keep the sciency stuff to a minimum and just say that in general, like the usual comparison to muscles, the brain grows stronger the more it is used, and that includes emotional output and emotional resistance. The more a person has been subjected to anxiety, the more intense that person feels anxiety (increased signal strength). The more often a person exercises willpower to resist the effects of an emotion, the stronger that person’s willpower is (increased signal suppression). Thus, you can build a quick-and-dirty model with some depth just by thinking of their emotions on two axis rather than one.
The big question is this: does a person with low anxiety and low willpower experience their anxieties the same way as a person with high anxiety and high willpower?
Again, there is no way to know for sure, but since experience of life is a handy thing for writing, try asking some people you know. It can be quite an enlightening experience, even (sometimes especially) if they’ve never even considered it before. I know I’ve had times when my exposure to very high long-term anxieties makes smaller fears that paralyse supposedly ‘normal’ people (if such a thing even exists) trivial for me to overcome. Of course, other things paralyse me that those ‘normal’ people can’t even grasp being an issue. I hope that seeing the interaction as a relationship rather than a mere number may help you to strengthen your understanding of your own characters.
Remember: without fear, no-one can be brave.
-Scott ‘Inquisitor’ Mence
This comes up today because I spent the afternoon with my Dad, who’s stuck at home recovering from an operation to remove his prostate cancer. He was telling me how fuzzy his mind was and how difficult it was to concentrate on things, and I had to resist the urge to point out that he might finally understand that the last decade of my life has been like. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the right to have a good whinge when they’re feeling crappy, though – especially after dodging cancer for the second time in his life – but I feel like that’s a conversation that needs to happen someday.
Good to know your dad's okay, at least. :O
I don't think they do, actually. You see, this willpower you're speaking of is something to keep their behaviour in check, so they don't act on their increased emotional signals in a way that would be 'out of norm'. I don't think that this has anything to do with the perceived anxiety, though. There may be a stage at which a person is numbed to anxiety by high levels of anxious emotions over a long timespan, but I would attest that to a different mechanism. That's just a hypothesis, though, I'm by no means a professional in that field.