A Quote by Karan Mahajan
I tend to see my characters from inside and outside at once; this is a technique I use to retain a slight distance. It means my characters can act in unexpected ways on two axes: physical and mental. It isn't just, 'I thought this and then I did this,' which is the technique of the modern psychological novel.
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Fundamentally, there are only two ways of coordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary cooperation of individuals - the technique of the marketplace.
Sahasrara is your awareness. When it is enlightened, you get into the technique of the Divine. Now there are two techniques - the technique of the Divine and the technique that you follow. You cannot act as Divine but you can use the Divine power and maneuver it.
When writers are self-conscious about themselves as writers they often keep a great distance from their characters, sounding as if they were writing encyclopedia entries instead of stories. Their hesitancy about physical and psychological intimacy can be a barrier to vital fiction. Conversely, a narration that makes readers hear the characters' heavy breathing and smell their emotional anguish diminishes distance. Readers feel so close to the characters that, for those magical moments, they become those characters.
I don't like the strictly objective viewpoint [in which all of the characters' actions are described in the third person, but we never hear what any of them are thinking.] Which is much more of a cinematic technique. Something written in third person objective is what the camera sees. Because unless you're doing a voiceover, which is tremendously clumsy, you can't hear the ideas of characters. For that, we depend on subtle clues that the directors put in and that the actors supply. I can actually write, "'Yes you can trust me,' he lied." [But it's better to get inside the characters' heads.]
When I did these psychological characters like the drug addicts, the ones who were rejected and dejected, I started to feel a sort of melancholia which was very unnatural for me to have at a teenage. Then I avoided those characters.
Focusing totally on technique, you lose the essence and power of simplicity... The other extreme is just as bad; you see it in a lot of Modern works, where the concept is more important than the technique, resulting in very poor craftsmanship.
Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.
I try to show good technique - boxing technique, wrestling technique, jiu jitsu technique.
Totalitarianism extends to whatever touches it...psychological technique, as it operates in the army or in a great industrial plant, entails a direct action on the family. It involves a psychological adaptation of family life to military or industrial methods, supervision of family life, and training family life for military or industrial service. Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern. Technique, which is destroying all other civilizations, is more than a simple mechanism: it's a whole civilization in itself.
But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel ... it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.
No technique is possible when men are free. Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being.
There are times that you have a plot in your head, but then you find that the characters don't want to do that. When you're looking at the story from the outside, you can create whatever twists and turns you want. But when you're writing, you're inside the characters' heads, and you see that they may be motivated to do something different.
I am sincerely trying now to create a dance technique based entirely upon corrective exercises, created with a knowledge of human anatomy; a technique which will correct physical faults and prepare a dancer for any type of dancing he may wish to follow; a technique having all the basic movements which govern the actions of the body; combined with a knowledge of the origin of movement and a sense of artistic design.
I tend to be drawn to characters who are not rule followers, who behave in unexpected and unusual ways.
I'm portraying out characters, I'm portraying femme characters, characters that are really outside of the box. I never thought I would get that opportunity to portray those characters at all, much less have a career that I have.
I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.
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