Fiona Quinn
If Your
Character is a Monkey,
He’s Going to
Act Like a Monkey
Last
Saturday night, I attended the annual cotillion dinner for eighth graders.
Every year I have a standing gig teaching a three-hour tutorial dinner on how not to eat like a monkey. Here in
southern USA, cotillion in a social rite of passage. It’s an opportunity for young ladies and
gentlemen in middle school to learn social graces – how to ask a lady for a
dance, how to escort her onto the floor, and how to shuffle around in such a way
that it might be construed as dancing. And after I get through with them, they
also know it is improper to eat with one’s feet or to swing from the
chandeliers.
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Back
in the day, when I went to a ladies’ finishing school - yes, I know, jaw dropping
- I danced with many a gangling boy who spent all of his concentration on what
the hell his body was doing and none of his attention on me, his graceful dance
partner. Sigh. I spent my dancing time watching the boys like microbes on a
petri dish, developing some of my boy-theories (of which I have many). One of
my theories leads me to state that within a few seconds of dancing, I can guess
what sport a man has played the most. Seriously.
Our
bodies do what our muscle memories feel comfortable doing. Given a lack of
dance classes to teach a new set of feel-good moves, a body under stress will
drop to its lowest common denominator. You
played baseball? You’ll roll your hip towards your dance partner, put your
hands together like you’re swinging a bat (2x), and then twist to the other
side and repeat. If basketball was your game, you’ll square off and be light on
the balls of your feet with bent knees and some shoulder pops. Martial artists
will keep their hands in fists and do a series of arm blocks and low kicks. And
wrestlers? Don’t even get me started.
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When
I met my husband, it was on a dance floor.
He was the kind of guy who liked to live life on the edge, and he
thought I was pretty edgy and probably high on acid. But that’s a different
story for another day. Let’s just say I was burning through some stress. So
here he comes inviting himself into my dance space to dance with me. Fine.
First thing I did was check out his moves to determine his sport, and I have to
say the man had me flummoxed. His feet were parallel and stationary, his hands
in light fists in front of him, body swaying from the knees to the melody.
Yeah, that one took me a while. Finally, it dawned on me. I leaned in, “So
you’re a skier?”
He
looked at me dumbfounded. “How did you know?”
I
tapped the side of my head. “I’m a mind reader. I’ve read your whole story. In
fact, I know everything there is to know about you.”
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He
stopped dancing and blushed. That was pretty cute. I wondered what I could
possibly have read in his mind that would turn him that shade of pink. Then he
grabbed me up, spun me around, and dropped me into a dip. “Well,” he said,
“whatever you read in there you must have liked ‘cause you’re still dancing
with me.” It was a cocky as hell answer.
Coupling that with his lopsided one-dimpled grin, along with his Texas
drawl meant that it wasn’t a surprise that I gave the man my phone number. The
rest is history.
By
now you’re wondering just what this article is all about; it’s all about muscle
memory. I told the kids at the cotillion dinner that my approach to etiquette
had to do with my interest in self-defence (yes, most of our standard polite
moves are all about staying alive) and an interest in behaviour. I explained
that it is imperative that they work to build good etiquette into their muscle
memory for several scientific reasons.
1.
In times of stress – when someone most
wants to impress the love of their life, get the job, or just feel comfortable
in a social situation – anxiety will cause the blood from the head to go to the
feet and hands to prepare for flight or fight. That’s right; no blood in the
head means very little thinking is going on.
2.
You never know when you will be
confronted with that time of stress when you just need your body to function
correctly, darn it! And it takes 21 days to form a habit. So if that dinner is
tomorrow, you’re out of luck.
3.
Just because you’ve seen it and you
cognitively know the rules doesn’t mean you can do it. My daughter is a
nationally ranked Irish dancer. I have sat through hundreds and hundreds of
hours of dance classes, rehearsals, and performances. I couldn’t jig my way out
of a box if my life depended on it. The body takes time and repetition to move
the information from short-term to long-term memory. And until that move is made, your muscles
will want to revert to the path of least resistance, that is what it already
knows and is comfortable with.
4.
Lies are hard to maintain. A mind that is busy remembering all of the
details of the lies it just told (as in new body movements that are not part of
the body’s normal repertoire) is a busy mind indeed. And it shows. The face
becomes plastic, affects a disingenuous smile, and sticks there. Your character
will give other body “tells,” that inform the person on the receiving end of
this display that there is something not right going on and on a subconscious
level the recipient of the lie-behaviours begins to feel that, “Hey, this guy
isn’t trust worthy.”
As
a writer, why do you need to understand this? Well, your character does certain
things with his or her body. And
that’s what that body knows how to
do. If you set up a fight and the hero
has never fought before, he’s going to fight BADLY. He’s going to throw wild
hay-maker punches; he’s going to kick with a floppy foot and probably break his
toes. If your heroine has never held a gun before, she is not going to get it
on target. She’s not. She won’t jump out of her bedroom window and scale the
side of the building along the window sills and jump and roll to safety.
Because – no matter how many times she’s seen it on TV - jumping and rolling is
a skillset. An instructed, practiced, and executed again and again and again
skillset.
If
you want to write your characters right, and make them truly believable. Think
about the lives they’ve lead up until that point. Think about what their bodies
know how to do and what they do not know how to do. Remember what the mind can
conceive does not mean their bodies are able to achieve. Unless you send them
to training - and remember that 21-day thing – it takes time to build muscle
memory.
Best
of luck as you plot along. You’ll find helpful “how to write it right” articles
on my blog site www.ThrillWriting.blogspot.com My website is www.FionaQuinnBooks.com and on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest you’ll find me at Fiona Quinn Books.
Cheers!
Bio:
Canadian born, Fiona Quinn is now rooted in the Old Dominion
outside of D.C. with her husband and four children. There, she homeschools,
pops chocolates, devours books, and taps continuously on her laptop. She is a
contributor to Virginia Is for Mysteries, the
author of the Amazon bestseller 'Mine', and 'Chaos Is Come Again', and is the creative force
behind the popular blog ThrillWriting. This
spring she will be launching her Lynx Series with
Book One, 'Weakest Lynx', a Kindle Scout book,
Thank you, Fiona, for a brilliant article. I fully endorse all the points she made about the importance of getting the details right in fictional novels. If you write, or are just curious, I would strongly recommend you check out her blog - there's some amazing stuff there you won't find anywhere else!
Eric @ www.ericjgates.com
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