#ig whatever

this is different than characters who are merely multifaceted.  highlighting all the different ways people can be is common even in stylized adventure novels.  you’ll see the gruff old dude who is unexpectedly soft and sweet around young kids.  you’ll see the face that the kind mother shows to everyone else versus the face she shows to the protagonist, and see how they differ.  stuff like that.

but a thing i keep circling around lately is how the reasons we have for making any particular choice, or doing anything at all, are—muddy, messy, the sensation of a hundred thousand streams coming together all at once.  the plot “alice cheats on bob with carol because she’s pissed at bob” is straightforward & readily digestible.  but what about “alice cheats on bob with carol because she’s pissed, but she’s not even pissed about anything in particular, it’s just that the grocery store was out of milk and her kid’s been colicky lately and Debbie down the street is being a bitch again and so bob’s fuckery is in some way a convenient excuse for her own fuckery, and also she saw an advertisement today that made her feel old so this has a shade of Desperate Reclaiming Of Lost Youth, and also she never really ~experimented~ as much as she wanted to before getting married so there’s a touch of maybe-repressed-gay-feelings there, which of course she herself is not even allowing herself to realize, and also there’s the matter of the kitchen remodel”...?

like, that’s tedious.  it lacks style; it lacks focus.  the conventional wisdom is that, if your reader can’t understand why Alice is doing shit, they’re going to lose interest.  but damn, even Alice doesn’t even know why she’s doing shit.  does that mean she’s not worth exploring?