Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

N.K. JEMISIN: We instinctively feel more connection

with a person who we see going through this process of trying

to decide who they want to be and then making that decision

and then going forward.

We like to root for an underdog.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When you're trying to create a new story,

or when you're trying to create the-- the plot of a story,

you've probably heard people refer

to a typical three-part plot arc.

That's just basically a beginning, a middle,

and an end.

You start off with the character in a basic state.

You carry the characters through a period of rising action.

You hit a climax.

Usually that's where there's a big fight or something that

happens.

Then there's a period of falling action,

and then maybe you have a coda or a resolution thereafter.

And a typical character arc follows a similar format.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A character plot arc can take both

the internal and external form.

We're going to talk first about the externally-driven character

arc.

Now, that also comes in three stages, a beginning, a middle,

and an end.

What I use as terminology for this

is the character's first in a steady state.

It can be a kind of complacent state,

where they feel comfortable, are just

going about their daily lives, their day-to-day commute,

whatever.

Then there's an inciting incident,

something that impacts them on a-- on a huge level.

Inciting incidents can take a lot of different forms,

and not all readers are going to be interested in all inciting

incidents.

This is why when you do see an externally-driven character

arc, usually it's kind of important to spend

some time establishing that this character is

interesting and worth following, worth caring about.

So it's a good idea with an externally-driven character arc

to actually start in that steady state with the character,

because then you have time to explore the person's character,

make them someone that the audience will empathize with,

and then when this terrible thing happens,

then we care what happens to them.

There are all sorts of disaster movies out there.

There's so many disaster movies that it's actually

hard to care when a character ends up in, you know,

aliens attacking or whatever.

But if we've had some time to get to know the character,

get to like the character, then we can move forward.

In the movie "Independence Day," we spend a good bit of time

with the protagonist, Will Smith.

There are several protagonists in that movie,

but the most time that the camera kind of focuses in on

is showing us his life, his partner, his relationships,

his adoptive son.

And then the inciting incident happens in a moment

that we can completely empathize with.

He's gotten up.

He's going to the bathroom.

He's just going about his regular day.

We see in every way that he is an every man,

and then we feel that kind of--

the-- the visceral, scary, disturbing moment

when he realizes that his entire world has changed forever.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In order to talk about a-- a typical, internally-driven

character arc, once again, I'm going

to refer to psychological theory.

There are several theories out there

about how particular kinds of identities develop.

And the most typical identity development theory models

have certain stages to them.

And people progress through these stages

over the course of their lives many times,

sometimes repeatedly.

They can regress at some certain points.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

They can go through these stages and then have to pause

and kind of reconsider how they resolved them the first time

and then resolve them again a different way.

So don't feel like these stages are in any way rigid

or-- or constricting.

But a typical identity development theory--

and identity development models originated

with Black racial identity development,

so this gives you a kind of an idea of what

we're working with--

begin with a sort of steady state of complacency,

where you're comfortable with the way that life has been.

You have not had any reasons to question what's going on.

Things are safe.

Things are-- they seem "normal" to you.

And this usually changes when you have

something called an encounter.

Now, with racial identity development theory,

typically that's a person of color's first experience

with racism.

For a white person, it can be their first encounter

with racism too, noticing someone else

going through that.

But in-- regardless of the identity development model,

it's a traumatic moment, where the person is running

into something that tells them that the world is not

as normal and safe as they once thought it was.

This can cause a-- a period of kind of groping and flailing

to try and figure out what the heck is going on,

or a-- a feeling of just generally not being happy,

which we call disintegration.

And during the disintegration phase, in a lot of cases,

you'll--

you'll hear people questioning their existing identity,

wondering why their identity is somehow unpleasant,

or why this bad thing happened.

For a lot of Black children, for example, at this stage,

they will question, why was I born Black.

And I'm sure many of you have heard of the experiments where

Black children would see dolls, like little toy

dolls of different races, and would invariably

choose the white doll, because they

identify with the white doll and don't want to identify

with the Black doll.

That's an example of disintegration,

and it does typically happen quite

young in-- in some people.

Reintegration, though, is when you

start to absorb ideas about what this identity should be

from sources around yourself.

That can come from parents.

That can come from pop culture or media.

It can come from books.

And in reintegration, the person begins to try and find

a-- a sense of self that feels more positive

or at least reassuring.

It may not necessarily be a positive identity.

They could latch on to a stereotype.

They could latch on to something really negative

about themselves and decide to run with that.

But it's something that gives them

a sense of power and control.

And in the final stage, which is resolution, you--

you run into people who are, basically,

at a point, again, of--

of steady state, of comfort, of feeling stable.

They may not necessarily be in a good place,

but they feel stable again, and they

feel able to deal with future encounters

if they do have that moment.

So I decided to use a variation of this identity development

model, where a character who is in a steady state basically

encounters something that forces them

to rebuild who they are as a person

and decide on a new path for themselves.

This is the basis of the internally-driven character

arc.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

A state of complacency is just simply

a state of maybe not being aware that your identity is

meaningful.

You know, for-- for a great many white people,

they go through their lives not thinking of themselves

as white, or not thinking of themselves as racial at all,

or racialized at all.

And, you know, having that moment where they're suddenly

confronted with the idea that you're white,

and this means something-- not necessarily anything negative,

just means something--

it can be a moment of kind of shock and--

and sort of discomfort for some people.

Identity development models exist

for queer people who go through their lives

maybe thinking of themselves as straight and then

suddenly have the moment where they suddenly realize,

oh, maybe I'm not.

[LAUGHS] Or it can happen with disabled people,

often at the point--

the encounter point is often when they become disabled,

or when they begin to realize that their disability marks

them as different from other people.

In general, the state of complacency

is the state that we expect most people to be in.

So you don't necessarily need to explain complacency.

Most people are expected to just kind of go

through life sort of blithely, not aware of racism

or other forms of bigotry, or just being treated badly

by other people.

Most people expect that at most points in their life,

they're going to be treated okay.

But the-- the moment of suddenly realizing somebody

doesn't like you, or society doesn't accommodate you

because of who and what you are, can be a real shock.

And it's-- you know, for the purposes of storytelling,

it can be a very dramatic moment.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We instinctively feel more connection

with a person who we see going through this process of trying

to decide who they want to be and then making that decision

and then going forward, and, if necessary,

taking up arms [LAUGHS] to-- to make that happen.

Because, you know, we-- we like to root for an underdog.

And a person who is at war with themselves

or unhappy with themselves in some ways is an underdog.

We want people happy.

We want to see people make themselves better and--

and stronger.

To refer back to the Mad Max model,

Furiosa is past complacency and encounter.

It's very likely that the period of the apocalypse,

whenever that was, was her encounter moment.

We don't know whether she was born after the apocalypse

or-- or what, but, you know, kind of coming up in the world,

realizing that her status as a woman

puts her in a-- a dangerous position.

That life as a woman in the post-apocalyptic world

can be terrible, and she's adapted to it,

but we see she's not happy.

In our first-- her-- our first scenes with her,

she just seems miserable.

Definitely not in a state of happy complacency.

And she begins the process of reintegration

over the course of the film.

She first decides that she wants to rescue the other women

around her and take them to the place where she remembers

last being happy, the place where she was last complacent.

But once she gets there and realizes

that that place has effectively been destroyed,

and her only choice is to go back and reform the place

that she came from, reform Immortan Joe's

community, that's her moment of reintegration.

She has formed a new identity around,

yeah, okay, the post-apocalyptic world is terrible for women.

We're going to change that.

We're going to make it better.

And then we see her resolution throughout the course

of the film, at the end of the film.

That's a great character arc, and it's only

like the last two stages of that identity development model.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We have to acknowledge the fact that there

are certain characters in our society

who have a much harder time establishing empathy

with the audience, and that's largely

because the audience has not been introduced

to certain kinds of characters.

This is an issue of the center and the margins again.

Our society gives lots of opportunities for readers,

consumers, viewers, to empathize with cishet white guys,

with able-bodied people, with young, attractive people--

and when we say attractive, we mean conventionally attractive,

thin, you know, sexy, whatever you want to call that.

And our society does not provide a lot of opportunities

to empathize with other kinds of people.

For example, we see lots of characters

who are overweight depicted as villains or comic relief.

They're not necessarily the people

who you want to see as the hero, powering through things,

because that's not what we've been seeing a lot of.

We don't read a lot of that, and so we're not used to it.

And-- and there is a sort of preprogrammed response

as-- as a result of that, where when

the audience sees a character who is overweight,

they feel primed to laugh at that character

or primed to suspect that character of villainy

or something.

And so it can be difficult to establish

that this character has stakes that are worth caring about.

But it's important for us to do this,

because without actually showing more

of these characters in empathetic moments, then we--

we find it harder to empathize with these people in real life.

All right.

So now I'm going to read a passage from the beginning

of "The City We Became."

"I paint the city.

Back when I was in school, there was an artist

who came in on Fridays to give us free lessons in perspective

and lighting and other shit that white people go to art school

to learn.

Except this guy had done that, and he was Black.

I'd never seen a Black artist before.

For a minute, I thought maybe I could be one too.

I can be, sometimes, deep in the night,

on a rooftop in Chinatown, with a spray can

for each hand and a bucket of drywall

paint that somebody left outside after doing up their living

room in lilac, I move in, scuttling, crab-like swirls.

The drywall stuff I can't use too much of.

It'll start flaking off after a couple of rains.

Spray paint's better for everything,

but I like the contrast of the two textures, liquid black

on rough lilac, red edging the black.

I'm painting a hole.

It's like a throat that doesn't start

with a mouth or end in lungs.

A thing that breathes and swallows endlessly,

never filling.

No one will see it except people in planes angling

toward Laguardia from the Southwest, a few tourists who

take helicopter tours and NYPD aerial surveillance.

I don't care what they see.

It's not for them."

This is a kid whose identities are only

slightly overlapping with mine.

I am not a queer homeless kid.

I'm not a teenager anymore.

[LAUGHS] I-- well, he's actually in his early 20s,

but I think at the time that I wrote this,

I never really explained his age.

But you know, I'm not young anymore.

I'm not an artist who does exterior or outdoor stuff.

I don't use spray paint.

I don't know what [LAUGHS] living room paint really

feels like, [LAUGHS] because I haven't

tried using it on a rooftop.

So, you know, in a lot of ways, I'm

appropriating the identity of someone that

is very different from myself.

And in a lot of ways, this is a person

who is more marginalized than myself.

And so I had to do a lot of things

to try and make sure that I was speaking accurately

with his voice, if I did.

I have a number of experiences in working with populations

of young people from this background,

so I at least have spoken to people who--

who speak like this and who have these concerns

and who have these experiences.

I'm not using any particular person or a real-life person,

so I'm trying not to appropriate real people here.

But I am speaking in a voice that possibly could be

told better by another person.

The story in "The City We Became"

is not about him being a Black, queer, homeless person.

That's background material.

And I feel like all writers have an obligation

to write people from different backgrounds into their stories,

because that's what we see in real life.

This is a story that is meant to be true to the New York

that I live in.

And the New York that I live in is

full of people who aren't very much like me,

so I'm going to write about those people,

and I want to write about them respectfully and accurately,

in a way that kind of feels true to their voice.

But I'm not going to tell their specific stories,

their identity-specific stories.

And so, you know, this isn't about him

being a homeless person.

At the end of the story, he's not suddenly

going to get the ability to live in--

in a fancy, nice place on his own power and on his own dime.

He's not suddenly going to get whisked off to art school

on a scholarship.

[LAUGHS] That's not what this is about.

So, you know, it's possible to write

about people who are not yourself,

write people who are the other, and--

and not steal their voices and not

steal their story arcs or the pieces that

are fundamental to that--

that identity, while also still giving them a place

that they deserve, that they should have,

in any description of humanity.