On the Bias
by Cindy Layton
On the occasion when I use my treadmill I plug in some earbuds and ramp up a quick paced playlist to keep me from thinking about the other places I want to be. During a recent foray into fitness, my iPod battery went dead. Since it would be at least a few minutes before it was charged enough to play anything, and because I had already started to warm up, I grudgingly continued on without any music. Instead of craving the distraction of the beat, I became engrossed in listening to my thoughts. I never turned the music on, even when the iPod was charged. The time went quickly, even without, or perhaps because I didn’t have, the distraction of music. In any event, I experienced the treadmill in a different way which caused me to question my belief that music was an essential tool for surviving morning exercise.
I once had a professor who landed a movie deal for his character-based novel. Through the semester he was immersed in the Hollywood awards season because, quite happily, the A-list actor who played his deeply flawed main character was collecting award after award from the movie industry.
This professor subscribed to the theory that character was infinitely more important than plot. That idea ran counter to my experience.
My approach to writing was to attack it via the structure. Being a linear thinker and viewer of most earth-based experiences through the lens of a continuum, i.e., left to right, cold to hot, low to high, etc., writing has always presented itself as a process of getting from one point to another. Action built upon action.
Instead of rejecting the premise that character reigns supreme in this hierarchy I filed it away in the brain-corner marked “consider.”
But why bother figuring out which is higher on the pole? Most writers will quickly judge that both are essential to the product. Whether they’re equally important, or whether character is more or less revered, who cares?
It isn’t important to make that judgement. But because I deemed structure and plot as being the foundation for my writing, it became apparent that my own characters were less fully developed. My bias exposed the weakness in my writing. My characters were reliant on plot to carry them through the story. Any of the qualities that might have made them likeable or not, any quirks and mannerisms that may have given a reader insight into why they acted, were never fully realized within the carefully constructed story-line. The critique comments of that time revealed that readers were searching for a way to connect to the people they encountered on the page. Revision required a new outlook on what was important to make the writing successful. Like walking on a treadmill without music.
Writers, do you come at your writing with a bias? How do you deal with it? Let us know here at Acts of Revision.
