How To Outrage Your Characters

A recent posting from the charming and inspiring DelanceyPlace.com, contained a quote from a book by Robert Wright called The Moral Animal. Here, Wright discusses the work of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and mentions two aspects of the way human beings approach arguments which are interesting for screenwriters. Here’s the first:

The reason the generic human arguing style feels so effortless is that, by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. Robert Trivers has written about the periodic disputes ... that are often part of a close relationship, whether a friendship or a marriage. The argument, he notes, 'may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information appear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to show themselves.'

Does this sound familiar? It should! Your characters should all have this sense of being a coiled spring, ready to jump. An emotional jack-in-the-box. They should be, “… living in a powder keg and giving off sparks,” to quote a famous old hit song. There’s nothing like a fierce, emotional altercation, apparently about something entirely trivial, to illustrate the meaning of the word subtext.

Remember that phrase, “landscapes of information.” It’s a wonderful way to describe the inner world of your characters. The invisible source of their motivation and their emotional reactions to events around them. It’s the unique accumulation of upbringing, class, education, and so on, mixed with the specific backstory to the relationship or situation we’re seeing the character in.

Just to drive the point home for yourself, imagine the opposite: Your character is involved in a dispute which is about nothing other than the specific issue at hand, say, a speeding ticket.

....................Officer
.............You drove too fast.

....................Driver
.............Are you sure about that?

....................Officer
.............Yup.

....................Driver
.............Shucks, I’m awful sorry.

....................Officer
.............Here’s the fine.

....................Driver
.............Thank you, Officer.

Not dramatically very interesting, right? But what if the dispute about the speeding ticket triggers the driver’s broader frustration with the government, with himself, with his wife (how’s he going to explain yet another ticket?) and so on. Not to mention the police officer’s sudden shift in attitude when the offender, driving an expensive car, turns out to be “one of those rich, arrogant douchebags.”

Hey presto, you have two strangers with an entire repertoire of preconceived ideas about each other, with intensely emotional opinions about the situation they’re in, outraged, going head to head within a beat or two. All because of this landscape of information which lies dormant all the time, ready to be activated by the slightest stimulus.

Coming soon to this blog: the second aspect Robert Wright discusses in the excerpt …