Write the character diary in diary format.
Begin each entry with a date and a time. More than one entry
per day may be added to the diary. Our character diary will run
in its own time frame. Days can pass in minutes, and weeks in
an hour.
Write in first-person/present-tense to keep
material emotionally intimate. Third-person/past-tense in the
manner of most written fiction puts a safe psychological
distance between the reader and the protagonist. In ordinary
fiction, we watch someone else do their thing. First-person
puts us in the driver’s seat and is not always a comfortable or
a preferred seat. If we do not like a protagonist, we do not
want to be forced to be that person even if we'd still like to
read about them.
But we want to identify with our diary
character. The reactive mind won’t know the difference and
doesn’t care, which is why we can, as an example, bring
ourselves to tears imagining an abused and suffering puppy
without a real puppy or its abuser anywhere in sight. The
reactive mind is information processing, albeit enormously
sophisticated and highly specialized, but highly associative and
largely oblivious to time frames, or events in real space. Only
the focus of conscious presence has access to all levels of
thought processes, can differentiate between reality and
fantasy, and take note of the relevance of time frames.
As long as our character is in motion, it
will acquire a life of its own. Our emotionally reactive mind
harbors and can access a complex spectrum of personalities based
upon its experience with human behavior. It can synthesize
unending social scenarios based upon that information. If our
fictional events run short on story action and our character
begins to philosophize too much, we throw in a monkey wrench, an
attack by a bear breaking through a window, anything to keep our
character emotionally reactive and moving in psychological time
and space.
Fear sets it in motion and keeps it
moving. When trapped in the arena of the imagination where no
resolution is possible, a fantasy gains intensity and an almost
independent existence in its unending search for a way
out. Therefore, our character diary is doing our dirty work for
us in our endeavor to uproot negative elements of our own
personality. We, after all, are its only resource.
We consciously create our own personal
reality during the course of a lifetime, but our reactive mind
can create an entire world in an instant. Start with a single
imagined item, say a hot sun in a desert sky. Reactive processes
will steer that desert sun through a chain of associations, a
sky, the desert itself, and things in the desert, living and
inanimate. And those associations will have meaning,
significance and value and evoke emotional reactions.
Where’s the sun? High in the sky? Low in the
sky? Is the scene one of dusk or sunrise? Perhaps it’s evening
and a moon’s out instead.
Okay, now we point out the nearest rock in
the desert scene and describe its shape. What lies beneath the
rock should we lift it?
Someone is approaching from the
distance. From which direction? Male or female? What do they
want? Are they welcomed? Do they bring what we need, or fear? If
they threaten us, will we fight, flee, or play dead?
Fantasies of this nature generate a level of
complexity easily rivaling the sensorium of waking reality,
although only in lucid dreams and other special and non ordinary
states of consciousness would we encounter that degree of
resolution. Regardless, if we ask questions about our fantasy
scenarios, answers pop effortlessly into our consciousness, as
if we are remembering something that actually happened. Our
character diary will write itself in this manner.
Resolving the challenges of life are a matter
of asking the right questions. Curiosity, our hunger for
knowledge about the next step in life we will take, is our
awareness that we have nowhere to go in life but forward. The
future is unknown and the unknown harbors constant danger, but
from whence, do we suppose, did we ourselves emerge to begin
with?
