Blogging and Talking to Strangers

Looking through my blog posts, I noticed a common theme; my posts are all related to analyzing specific characters, usually taking note of how they interact with a specific other character. When we read Richard II, I was concerned with analyzing Bolingbroke as a character based on how he discusses and acts towards his enemy, King Richard II. Measure For Measure, I posted about Claudio’s cowardice in the face of unjust rule, and in my post about the Merchant of Venice, I made note of Shylock’s obsession with money, and compared him to Antonio in that sense.

What this shows me about my own writing style and my own thought process is that I’m very interested by individual thought. In the “real world,” I have an odd interest in talking to strangers who I’ll never see again. In these conversations, where both parties are aware that you’ll never have an awkward encounter afterwards, people are much more willing to open up. From this, you can get a great understanding of the inner workings of a total stranger’s mind. Just by analyzing their dialect, the emotions they show and the stories they tell, you may not come to know the person, but you can get a fairly accurate understanding of who they are as a person. Part of the interest I take in this also revolves around the fact that you will never truly know the person past a conversation; there will always be some mystery left to their “character.” In my Merchant of Venice post, I alluded to this: Antonio’s a remarkable character simply because we don’t know all too much about him.” This interest in strangers’ stories carries over to literature for me pretty logically, as it’s a one-way look at the stories of a few characters. Clearly, the story doesn’t hold anything back for fear of embarrassment, and any good story is typically about a pivotal moment in a character’s life, or some traumatic incident.

For Measure For Measure, I was mostly interested in Claudio’s reaction to becoming aware that he would be executed; a traumatic incident that tells volumes about his personality. My post shows how I’ve always had an interest in how normal people react to catastrophic situations: “Anyone can say that they would never trade their honor for their life, but when it really comes down to an axe to your head or however it was done in the old days, honor goes out the window and it’s understandable that Claudio panics. It’s been said that you see the essence of a man just before he dies, so if this is how Claudio will be remembered, what does that say about his character”

One of the biggest struggles an author faces is the creation of compelling characters, but in my own writings, and the writings of hundreds of successful authors throughout history, this problem is overcome by creating realistic, mostly unremarkable characters that are put into extraordinary situations, usually great tragedy. Blogging on these Shakespearean plays allows me to react to the individual characters in each story as they all go through one great tragedy or another. Part of the reason Shakespeare’s characters have so much depth to them are because of the great lengths that he has gone through to put them through literary Hell, and having the opportunity to respond to the story in an open-ended form is an excellent way to organize any thoughts I have about the characters.