Intersections and chance meetings

[marycrawford]

ltlj said interesting things in email about familiar characters migrating from one story into another, and how they can easily change into brand-new characters by acquiring a new world to live in and new problems to solve.



Then I happened to read papersky's entries about writing 'Mansfield Park' as a space opera, which is not as strange as it sounds when you consider that she has just finished a comedy of manners where all the characters are dragons.

papersky talks about how the act of telling the story changes it, and that to her dismay, she now feels sympathy for Mrs. Norris, that horrible grasping petty-minded harridan. (The latter description being mine, you understand, since I still can't stand the woman.)

I'm not even sure I can explain why all this feels like a revelation. I mean, I've read "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and even "Bridget Jones' Diary", so I ought to know that characters can be transplanted and made over, and that writers have been happily borrowing storylines from each other since the dawn of time. But I still feel as though a new door has opened up into the world of Story, and the vistas behind it are wider and stranger than I imagined.

I think I realized all of a sudden that if Mansfield Park as a space opera is possible (and given who's writing it, I'm not in doubt) then anything is possible. And worth trying.

Comments

[ltlj.livejournal.com]

I think this has a lot to do with how you look at character. I tend to think that environment and the circumstances we live in tend to shape us. Like if I grew up in 17th century Europe, or a modern day hut in Ethiopia, I'd be a completely different person, with different goals, different pressures, different skills.

You also see people who don't look at character that way and who see it as immutable. They seem to see all characters as stereotypes and think that the main character must have a heart of gold and be a hero because he is the main character, even though he's really an anti-hero and kills people in cold blood, etc, and they'll come up with fairly bizarre justifications for his behavior. They don't seem to get subtle points of characterization (or big obvious points of characterization) that conflict with the standardized image in their head that they had before they even picked up the story. But there's just not much you can do about them as a writer, except ignore them or you'll go crazy.

I think I wandered off your point a bit, but yeah Mansfield Park has a solid plot and I can see it translating (and transforming) to fit just about any environment.