Relating to Characters

Yesterday, during office hours I asked David how to say words as a character if you're not sure you can believe with the same convictions as the character. I asked this in regards to the cobbler in Dwayne's story who showed great faith in the midst of all types of economic uncertainty. His level of certainty that everything was going to be all right is kind of the opposite about how I feel sometimes when faced with a trial. I know how I should be reacting, of course, more like the cobbler in the story. But how then do you be a believable cobbler?

Well, first I believe David referred back to what Bil Lepp was referring to last week when he described having a character speak the lines and you're not speaking the lines. Let the character be brave or bold even if you might not feel the same way. Dr. Sobol sometimes refers to "the world of story" if children ask him if a story is true or not. He might say in reply, "Well, in the world of story, this is true." In the world of story, the cobbler is brave. So in being the teller of that story, one would have to be brave as the cobbler is brave.

Also, David mentioned, in difficult times we can try to think of stories together of times other characters met with adversity, ogres, or other trials and found a way out of their troubles. I found that really helpful to think about things that way. The next time there's some kind of trial we face, we can think of a character in a story that has gone through a similar trial and try to remember what they did, or how they resolved the problem. That might not be the literal answer to the problem, but sometimes I think it's calming just to hear someone tell a story of a situation similar to something you're going through and to hear that they all lived happily ever after.

Sorry if I mis-spoke any of your advice, David! Please feel free to correct anything I said. But I really enjoyed getting to meet with David for the office hours! It was a really insightful time.

On this same topic if anyone is interested, Doug Lipman covers this a bit on page 86: "What if a Story Didn't Happen to Me?" It's not directly related to my question but out of the books it was the closest related advice that I could find. It discusses remembering the story, imagining the story, and outlining the story among other advice in the second paragraph on the topic.

Thanks David for providing office hours where we had the chance to meet with you! That was very helpful!