Such an eye-opening essay. As a matter of fact, I have watched your video on Heroes and Heroism as well, and found it to be very enlightening. However, I do wanna disagree with you on a point mentioned in this essay (and no, I won't say that morality is an emotional matter, because it's NOT). And that point is: there's nothing wrong with creating a character who shares, in one way or another, certain characteristics or preferences of the writer. Of course, this isn't a rule, either, because every writer out there should just write the type of character he truly wants to write. Although I will agree that it's not a very good idea to have a self-insert character (and by that I mean a character who is 100% percent the author), I don't see the harm in giving our characters some traits and preferences that we personally love. For instance, I'm a girl who loves books, so maybe at some point in my writing journey, I will write a character who also loves books. Nothing wrong with that. However, I will also give her flaws, as I'm not a perfect creature, so she-or he- shouldn't be either. At last, I hope I got my point across. If you do wanna discuss this further, please do let me know. And by this, I mean the claim I'm suggesting above. My aim in this comment is not to criticize, but to analyze and understand.
I completely agree. Drawing on oneself for inspiration or even for simple insight (a nurse writes a character who is a nurse because she knows a great deal about that life). There certainly isn't any harm in that. The danger there lies in the fact that many writers:
a) don't realize that writing the character as themselves results in bad writing, so they aren't concerned about it, and
b) even with this knowledge many will find themselves subconsciously imprinting, so to speak, on the resulting character. Then, even if the character is otherwise different from themselves, they will have him (or her) make choices or actions that they would make but that are inconsistent with the character. They will find it difficult -- for reasons they don't see -- to let their character make mistakes, bad decisions, even immoral decisions that they would not make, or to hold opinions that they do not hold. These are all problems that arise from self-insert character writing. The trouble is that it can happen accidentally as well.
You absolutely get your point across! And it's a very good point. My only word of caution to writers who wish to use some aspect of themselves as inspiration for their characters is to constantly guard against that character becoming a self-insert.
Oh, I think I finally get it now. Thank you for the clarification; it cleared up everything for me! And yes, I agree with the cautions that you provided above; inconsistency with our characters is definitely a false way to approach them, self-inserted or otherwise. I myself used to fall down that rabbit hole until I realized, at some point, that something was wrong. That I needed to write these characters as them, and not as me.
That if the character I was writing was, say, an arrogant and intolerable person, then I have to stick to these traits, even if he does undergo some kind of development arc of any kind, I still have to clearly show these traits of his. I can't have him making my decisions, because that simply-let's face it- doesn't make any sense considering the traits I've given him.
All in all, I've found this discussion to be very fruitful, so thank you again for that.
Superb, thank you for taking the time to write this. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed your assessment of the Dahmer miniseries reminds me of my experience watching Netflix’s Narcos. The writers manage to make you feel genuine compassion and sympathy for Pablo Escobar, along with his complicit wife.
Great article—very thought-provoking! FYI, found ya from YT.
I think there are so many variables—the lack of diversity of thought in many writing rooms or writers’ personal bubbles. How many great writers of the past were veterans of wars? And even if you didn't go to war, you lived through an era of conflict and heroism. As Gen X, we were the cynical generation; we learned of many sins and lies of the past—from government, movie stars, and the famous being torn down in scandal—when in the past it would've been swept under the rug. Our parents still often had those rose-colored glasses on. We were the kooky conspiracy-theory generation, who lived long enough to see many of those theories come true. And, unfortunately, we went on to raise absolutely nihilistic children, who are in the driver’s seat of culture and society.
It's hard to write a modern-day Superman when you're anticipating bodies of dead hookers to be found at his Fortress of Solitude. Many people now live in that morally grey world, and the anti-hero is chicken soup for the jaded soul. To sum it up: men love being the outlaw, and women love a bad boy.
The irony—if I've used it correctly—is that now writing a heroic, morally sound character is the new outlaw, and keeping one's virtue in a world of cynical grey is now a compelling story.
I think you are “nail on head” for almost this entire essay. One thing I found a bit disappointing is your lack of identifying what specific “objective morality” the Western world has turned its back on.
The West was built upon and largely rides on the coattails of Christian morality, specifically. Literature produced in a collectively shared Christian morality is what makes a hero “true” in an objective sense, both in terms of what the writer cooks up and what the reader will digest.
You make very clear in your essay that the West has traded in our “objective morality” for what amounts to emotional “pleasure seeking”. This “pleasure seeking” is derived from the absence of a moral base, which itself is derived from the absence of a coherent worldview. This leads to large swaths of the population (writers and readers included) portraying and celebrating characters with misguided viewpoints. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the writers and readers I am referring to, this IS their “objective morality” i.e. whatever they feel is morally justified in the moment. So to them, the characters they are producing and consuming are great! They just seem dull and absent any real heroic qualities to folks like you because your moral foundation is based on Christian principles.
A consistent worldview, a solid moral base, and a distain for pleasure seeking used to be available to us all when the West had a collective Christian heartbeat. Virtues like chastity, bravery, temperance, prudence, etc. were championed and celebrated (uniquely) under the Christian worldview. These virtues are what a great hero should embody. Christian virtues, guided by Christian morality.
I understand if you disagree or are just beating around the bush to appease a wider audience, but I sincerely hope it’s the former. If it’s the latter, I would have to accuse you of practicing the same type of cowardly writing you have recently complained about in one of your YouTube videos.
Regardless, I enjoy the work you are doing, and will pray for your success. Thank you for your contribution and for the entertainment!! I am glad someone is willing to speak up about the general decline of the West, especially how it shines through in our literary works of recent years.
The trouble with starting with Christianity and presenting moral good as if it is based on that, is that it suggests that the definitions presented by Christianity are what determines the goodness in question. But the opposite is what is true: the religion does not dictate the truth, it obeys it. A thing isn't true because it is Christian. It is Christian because it is true.
I typed out a long reply to this, but think it’s better to go short and sweet here. Thanks for the reply, really enjoy your stuff!
While I appreciate with your point, I think it is a bit semantic. Yes Christianity is good because it is true, but the Church given to us by God has the authority to make interpretations on what the truth is, bringing us full circle (Christianity both dictates and obeys).
Don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here. I just see the only opportunity for course correction, regarding us being able to make great moral heroes, in the West reclaiming its Christian identity. I think it’s glaringly obvious.
Thanks again! Hope I didn’t come off too harsh! All the best
Edit: I just also read your essay “Truth Is Eternal” and realize your comment mirrors your thoughts expressed there. And while i sympathize with you, I just don’t think man alone has the capacity to discover the full truth. I think without the authority given by God to the Church, humanity would largely still be “in the lurch”.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself with the rhyme.
This all to say, I think we not only can, but should, say current writers ought to consider “Christian moral truths”, not just “objective moral truths”. You just can’t arrive at all the objective moral truth of the universe by yourself.
Or coming into lower, less unspeakable provinces, is not all Loyalty akin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship.
All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is "sacred" enough withal! The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes.
We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:—the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any! "Gold," Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases.
- Thomas Carlyle; On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History
I think the current slide in culture-wide morality is growing pangs.
We have spent a long time using religion as an easy arbiter for right and wrong. Easy in the sense of someone gave it to us and not many folks examined their values and morality much past what their church leaders gave them or, if they were a bit more industrious, what they read in their scriptures.
As the world has become more interconnected and increasingly secular it's begun to require greater thought about moral values from us as individuals. More secular lives, foreign cultures, previously suppressed subcultures emerging, and the crush of new ideas available from the internet, have all contributed to the rise of moral relativism.
While I think moral relativism is a good approach for most surface-level things it is also a breeding ground and refuge for scumbags who will hide behind its skirt.
It has left us in a state a bit like the stereotypical preacher's kid who grew up hearing about all the sins and decides to take every one of them out for a spin. We had an overly restrictive morality that no longer serves but we haven't yet caught on as a culture that it needed tuning, not tossing.
I think our current cultural and political climate is like that preacher's kid going through it: Finding out gays aren't monsters, but that loving thy neighbor is still very valid; that dancing isn't evil, but deliberately harming others still is.
We'll sort out what matters, and morality will return — not in the old-time religion way some folks would like, but in a new more humanist way that's more inclusive but keeps a solid core of explicit values. We just have a lot of people who need a few more years of doing the wrong thing to understand why doing the right thing actually matters.
But you're right, culture and media are in a continuous feedback loop, and writers are the ones who can most help to change the contents of the loop.
Such an eye-opening essay. As a matter of fact, I have watched your video on Heroes and Heroism as well, and found it to be very enlightening. However, I do wanna disagree with you on a point mentioned in this essay (and no, I won't say that morality is an emotional matter, because it's NOT). And that point is: there's nothing wrong with creating a character who shares, in one way or another, certain characteristics or preferences of the writer. Of course, this isn't a rule, either, because every writer out there should just write the type of character he truly wants to write. Although I will agree that it's not a very good idea to have a self-insert character (and by that I mean a character who is 100% percent the author), I don't see the harm in giving our characters some traits and preferences that we personally love. For instance, I'm a girl who loves books, so maybe at some point in my writing journey, I will write a character who also loves books. Nothing wrong with that. However, I will also give her flaws, as I'm not a perfect creature, so she-or he- shouldn't be either. At last, I hope I got my point across. If you do wanna discuss this further, please do let me know. And by this, I mean the claim I'm suggesting above. My aim in this comment is not to criticize, but to analyze and understand.
Yours Truly,
Lujyn From Egypt
Hello Lujyn!
I completely agree. Drawing on oneself for inspiration or even for simple insight (a nurse writes a character who is a nurse because she knows a great deal about that life). There certainly isn't any harm in that. The danger there lies in the fact that many writers:
a) don't realize that writing the character as themselves results in bad writing, so they aren't concerned about it, and
b) even with this knowledge many will find themselves subconsciously imprinting, so to speak, on the resulting character. Then, even if the character is otherwise different from themselves, they will have him (or her) make choices or actions that they would make but that are inconsistent with the character. They will find it difficult -- for reasons they don't see -- to let their character make mistakes, bad decisions, even immoral decisions that they would not make, or to hold opinions that they do not hold. These are all problems that arise from self-insert character writing. The trouble is that it can happen accidentally as well.
You absolutely get your point across! And it's a very good point. My only word of caution to writers who wish to use some aspect of themselves as inspiration for their characters is to constantly guard against that character becoming a self-insert.
Oh, I think I finally get it now. Thank you for the clarification; it cleared up everything for me! And yes, I agree with the cautions that you provided above; inconsistency with our characters is definitely a false way to approach them, self-inserted or otherwise. I myself used to fall down that rabbit hole until I realized, at some point, that something was wrong. That I needed to write these characters as them, and not as me.
That if the character I was writing was, say, an arrogant and intolerable person, then I have to stick to these traits, even if he does undergo some kind of development arc of any kind, I still have to clearly show these traits of his. I can't have him making my decisions, because that simply-let's face it- doesn't make any sense considering the traits I've given him.
All in all, I've found this discussion to be very fruitful, so thank you again for that.
Sincerely,
Lujyn
Superb, thank you for taking the time to write this. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
I also noticed your assessment of the Dahmer miniseries reminds me of my experience watching Netflix’s Narcos. The writers manage to make you feel genuine compassion and sympathy for Pablo Escobar, along with his complicit wife.
Great article—very thought-provoking! FYI, found ya from YT.
I think there are so many variables—the lack of diversity of thought in many writing rooms or writers’ personal bubbles. How many great writers of the past were veterans of wars? And even if you didn't go to war, you lived through an era of conflict and heroism. As Gen X, we were the cynical generation; we learned of many sins and lies of the past—from government, movie stars, and the famous being torn down in scandal—when in the past it would've been swept under the rug. Our parents still often had those rose-colored glasses on. We were the kooky conspiracy-theory generation, who lived long enough to see many of those theories come true. And, unfortunately, we went on to raise absolutely nihilistic children, who are in the driver’s seat of culture and society.
It's hard to write a modern-day Superman when you're anticipating bodies of dead hookers to be found at his Fortress of Solitude. Many people now live in that morally grey world, and the anti-hero is chicken soup for the jaded soul. To sum it up: men love being the outlaw, and women love a bad boy.
The irony—if I've used it correctly—is that now writing a heroic, morally sound character is the new outlaw, and keeping one's virtue in a world of cynical grey is now a compelling story.
I think you are “nail on head” for almost this entire essay. One thing I found a bit disappointing is your lack of identifying what specific “objective morality” the Western world has turned its back on.
The West was built upon and largely rides on the coattails of Christian morality, specifically. Literature produced in a collectively shared Christian morality is what makes a hero “true” in an objective sense, both in terms of what the writer cooks up and what the reader will digest.
You make very clear in your essay that the West has traded in our “objective morality” for what amounts to emotional “pleasure seeking”. This “pleasure seeking” is derived from the absence of a moral base, which itself is derived from the absence of a coherent worldview. This leads to large swaths of the population (writers and readers included) portraying and celebrating characters with misguided viewpoints. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the writers and readers I am referring to, this IS their “objective morality” i.e. whatever they feel is morally justified in the moment. So to them, the characters they are producing and consuming are great! They just seem dull and absent any real heroic qualities to folks like you because your moral foundation is based on Christian principles.
A consistent worldview, a solid moral base, and a distain for pleasure seeking used to be available to us all when the West had a collective Christian heartbeat. Virtues like chastity, bravery, temperance, prudence, etc. were championed and celebrated (uniquely) under the Christian worldview. These virtues are what a great hero should embody. Christian virtues, guided by Christian morality.
I understand if you disagree or are just beating around the bush to appease a wider audience, but I sincerely hope it’s the former. If it’s the latter, I would have to accuse you of practicing the same type of cowardly writing you have recently complained about in one of your YouTube videos.
Regardless, I enjoy the work you are doing, and will pray for your success. Thank you for your contribution and for the entertainment!! I am glad someone is willing to speak up about the general decline of the West, especially how it shines through in our literary works of recent years.
The trouble with starting with Christianity and presenting moral good as if it is based on that, is that it suggests that the definitions presented by Christianity are what determines the goodness in question. But the opposite is what is true: the religion does not dictate the truth, it obeys it. A thing isn't true because it is Christian. It is Christian because it is true.
I typed out a long reply to this, but think it’s better to go short and sweet here. Thanks for the reply, really enjoy your stuff!
While I appreciate with your point, I think it is a bit semantic. Yes Christianity is good because it is true, but the Church given to us by God has the authority to make interpretations on what the truth is, bringing us full circle (Christianity both dictates and obeys).
Don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here. I just see the only opportunity for course correction, regarding us being able to make great moral heroes, in the West reclaiming its Christian identity. I think it’s glaringly obvious.
Thanks again! Hope I didn’t come off too harsh! All the best
Edit: I just also read your essay “Truth Is Eternal” and realize your comment mirrors your thoughts expressed there. And while i sympathize with you, I just don’t think man alone has the capacity to discover the full truth. I think without the authority given by God to the Church, humanity would largely still be “in the lurch”.
Sorry, couldn’t help myself with the rhyme.
This all to say, I think we not only can, but should, say current writers ought to consider “Christian moral truths”, not just “objective moral truths”. You just can’t arrive at all the objective moral truth of the universe by yourself.
Or coming into lower, less unspeakable provinces, is not all Loyalty akin to religious Faith also? Faith is loyalty to some inspired Teacher, some spiritual Hero. And what therefore is loyalty proper, the life-breath of all society, but an effluence of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly great? Society is founded on Hero-worship.
All dignities of rank, on which human association rests, are what we may call a Heroarchy (Government of Heroes),—or a Hierarchy, for it is "sacred" enough withal! The Duke means Dux, Leader; King is Kon-ning, Kan-ning, Man that knows or cans. Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes.
We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:—the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any! "Gold," Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases.
- Thomas Carlyle; On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History
I think the current slide in culture-wide morality is growing pangs.
We have spent a long time using religion as an easy arbiter for right and wrong. Easy in the sense of someone gave it to us and not many folks examined their values and morality much past what their church leaders gave them or, if they were a bit more industrious, what they read in their scriptures.
As the world has become more interconnected and increasingly secular it's begun to require greater thought about moral values from us as individuals. More secular lives, foreign cultures, previously suppressed subcultures emerging, and the crush of new ideas available from the internet, have all contributed to the rise of moral relativism.
While I think moral relativism is a good approach for most surface-level things it is also a breeding ground and refuge for scumbags who will hide behind its skirt.
It has left us in a state a bit like the stereotypical preacher's kid who grew up hearing about all the sins and decides to take every one of them out for a spin. We had an overly restrictive morality that no longer serves but we haven't yet caught on as a culture that it needed tuning, not tossing.
I think our current cultural and political climate is like that preacher's kid going through it: Finding out gays aren't monsters, but that loving thy neighbor is still very valid; that dancing isn't evil, but deliberately harming others still is.
We'll sort out what matters, and morality will return — not in the old-time religion way some folks would like, but in a new more humanist way that's more inclusive but keeps a solid core of explicit values. We just have a lot of people who need a few more years of doing the wrong thing to understand why doing the right thing actually matters.
But you're right, culture and media are in a continuous feedback loop, and writers are the ones who can most help to change the contents of the loop.