text:
Controlling Affective Experience Interpersonally
Address on receiving the Cooley-Mead Award
from the Social Psychology Section of the
American Sociological Association
San Francisco, August, 1998
David R. Heise
An edited version is published in
Social Psychology Quarterly, 62 (1999): 4-16.
I was on a sabbatical leave some years ago, had just completed visiting scholars at the University of Illinois, and was off to visit my mother in the middle of Missouri. That's a long lonely drive for someone still in the role of a gregarious professional, so I responded positively when I saw a young man hitchhiking at the entrance to the expressway. I stopped, he got in my car, and he told me he was on his way to a town fifty miles down the road. I was glad to have a diversion for an hour of my long trip.
I told him about myself and asked him what he was doing in Champaign-Urbana. Matter-of-factly he said, "I was in a mental hospital, and they just released me. I'm going home now."
Spending an hour alone on a highway with a fellow straight out of a mental hospital made me apprehensive—an emotional response ratifying the American stereotypes of a mental patient and mental illness. I thought of stopping and dropping him off, but his potential response scared me. Anyhow the option was unacceptable because there is a logical order in "giving a lift" that cannot be breached comfortably.
Thinking that I'm a social psychologist with a professional orientation toward mental patients, I rapidly shaped an experience that confirmed the meaning of my passenger and the meaning of myself. I stepped hard on the gas pedal to reduce our time together, and I asked him what kinds of problems he was having.
"I think people are talking about me," he said. "And I think people control my thoughts. When people touch their faces or scratch themselves, they're controlling what I think."
Gripping the steering wheel tightly, hoping desperately that my beard would not itch, I asked him more questions about his problems and his background.
It turned out that he accepted his thoughts as delusions, although a bit reluctantly. On the personal side, he described himself as passive and unassertive in social relations.
I had asked all the questions I could think of, and still there were 25 miles to go. Again my self identities came to the fore to shape a next experience. Being both a social psychologist and a professor, I decided to profess some social psychology in order to fill the time.
"I have a theory," I told him, "that explains why you have those thoughts. The way you describe yourself, you're a person who believes you're powerless and submissive with others?" He agreed cautiously.
"Well, we all want real life to confirm what we believe. People talking about you and controlling your thinking means you're powerless and submissive, so that's the kind of thing you want to happen. The trouble is, people seem to be doing other things most of the time. So you figured out those signals that show that people are controlling you even when they act like they're doing something else. That's a clever solution. Now you've got them controlling you all you want."
My passenger stared out at the highway with a thoughtful demeanor.
"In fact," I continued, "your problem should get worse when you feel too important. Say you have to stand up and talk; or you do a job and the result is perfect. That's when you most need things to happen that make you feel helpless again. So that may be when you most notice people touching their faces and scratching themselves, controlling your thoughts."
I paused and asked, "What do you think of my theory?"
After a moment of quiet thought he nodded and said, "Makes more sense than what the doctors told me."
Clever fellow – he understood and appreciated affect control theory! No longer could I think of him in the stereotype of mental patient. He was acting more like a student, and I actually was encouraging him to continue with school by the time he left my car.
Affect Control Theory
Sociologist Loren Demerath (1993) would say I enjoy telling this anecdote because it exercises my personal understandings. The story indeed does exercise my understandings of affect control theory (Heise, 1979; Smith-Lovin and Heise, 1988; MacKinnon, 1994) in a number of ways.
Affect control theory's general framework draws on identity theory, as established by George McCall and Jerry Simmons (1966), Sheldon Stryker and Richard Serpe (1994; Stryker, 1968), and Peter Burke and Judy Tully (1977). According to identity theory, we engage people in the context of specific identities, like driver, hitch-hiker, social psychologist, and mental patient. Furthermore, according to affect control theory, we expect lived experience to confirm our sentiments about how good or bad, how powerful or powerless, how lively or quiet such people are supposed to be.
When, for example, I recognized myself as a social psychologist and my car passenger as a mental patient, I needed to come up with an action that would best confirm those identities. The act of analyzing him was near perfect, being in the behavioral repertoire of a psychologist, appropriate for a patient, and producing impressions of each person that were close to the culturally-given sentiments for the two identities. A psychologist is supposed to be somewhat good, potent, and reserved; a patient is supposed to be evaluatively neutral, but quite powerless and quiet. A psychologist's act of analyzing the patient reproduces those feelings well.
Emotions emerge partly from the identities of the people involved. For example, I felt anxiety when I viewed my car passenger as a mental patient, but I felt congenial after I had turned him into a student. Since emotions are intricately tied to the identities that we hold, emotions reveal those identities both to ourselves and to others—an insight secured for us by the research of Arlie Hochschild (1983) and Shirley Staske (1996), among others. Emotions also arise from actions. Positive actions with valued others produce pleasant emotional states like calmness, pride, or happiness. Wicked actions involving valued others produce unpleasant emotions like anger, fear, shame, or joylessness.
Events that disconfirm sentiments seem unlikely. For example, as soon as I realized I had picked up a mental patient and perhaps put myself at risk, I had a sense of strangeness – "This can't be happening!" An event that causes a little disconfirmation seems odd; an event that creates greater disconfirmation seems extraordinary or uncanny. A happening that wrecks havoc with important sentiments seems impossible even when we acknowledge that it has happened.
Disconfirmations of sentiments that are minor but persistently in the same direction tune-up our sentiments to better fit impressions being produced in actual experiences (Burke and Cast, 1997). Cecilia Ridgeway and her colleagues (e.g., Ridgeway and Blackwell, 1997; Ridgeway et al, 1998) are showing how small adjustments of this sort create and maintain a culturally-shared meaning system. For example, repeated encounters with males who exercise power based on their special resources pressure us gradually to develop a feeling that males are potent, and this sentiment helps us make sense of our interactions with males.
Larger disconfirmations of sentiments create a sense of strangeness and constitute meaning breakdowns that have to be repaired. Strangeness might be repaired behaviorally by creating new events that transform distorted impressions of ourselves or others back to normal. Another kind of repair is to provide new identities that fit the observed actions so that happenings no longer seem so strange. We can change a person's identity through attributions of mood, of personality traits, or of status characteristics. We also can label a person with a new situational identity, as when I switched from seeing my hitch-hiker as a mental patient to seeing him as a student.
Huge disconfirmations of sentiments cause us to go even further in our mental maneuvers. For example, most of us have developed or will develop a conviction that an afterworld exists where a loved one who just died is not really dead. Thereby we acknowledge that a death that seems affectively impossible is true, but only in one possible world.
In summary, affect control theory is concerned with all the things we do and feel as we keep our experiences in line with our sentiments.
Now I want to consider how affect control theory touches contemporary research topics in sociological social psychology. I consider a variety of topics – control systems; status, power, and agency; culture; sex; self; event structures. The only overarching theme in these topics is that all are areas of recent research activity.
Control Systems
First, let me touch on control systems.
We humans actively control deviations from our preferred states. Whenever we determine that our actual paths are deviating in some sense from our ideal paths, we work in order to get ourselves back on target. Thus the theory of control systems is a fertile source of insights into human social relations.
Crowd researcher Clark McPhail instigated one of the most striking simulations in sociology – a computer program that has each separate individual trying to control his or her spatial relationships with others in a group – keeping some distance from everyone but staying close to leaders. The output is a dynamic graphical display that shows movement, milling, and structural emergence in crowds (McPhail, Powers, and Tucker, 1992). You can watch a group of individuals swarm behind a leader and form a circle around the leader when the leader stops.
Peter Burke (1997) developed another computer simulation in which each individual in an exchange network uses payments to control time commitments. A person decides on how much to offer another person so as to spend some preferred amount of time in network exchanges and so as to get a particular exchange accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. Actors operating this way in a computer simulation end up with payment outcomes that are very similar to those of real actors in laboratory experiments. Burke's ingenious formulation of exchange as a process controlling commitment provides new insight into how people use time and how they commit themselves to organizations.
Miller McPherson and Thomas Rotolo (1996) analyzed voluntary organizations, using a model in which individuals control the extent of their associations, with the ideal number of associations varying by a person's socioeconomic position. In this case the focus is on how organizational compositions change as people control their commitments in the face of demands from multiple organizations. McPherson and Rotolo found that an organization's membership slides up or down the social scale depending on which people currently are least burdened by associations relative to their desired levels. For example, were the middle class to suffer an organizational drought, working class organizations would begin expanding their membership upward to fill the vacuum. The McPherson-Rotolo model shows how inter-organizational competitions emerge from individual people controlling their commitments.
Affect control theory is another example of a control theory application in social psychology. A person's definition of the situation provides a self identity and an identity for other, and those identifications set sentiments that should be reflected in experiences. The person builds events to push experiences in a direction that affirms the sentiments associated with situational identities. If something happens to deflect experiences away from identity confirmation, then a person builds corrective events to get social interaction back on track. Second-order control of meaning arises in social interaction in the occasional circumstance where experiences cannot be made to fit the current definition of the situation. In that case a person redefines the situation in terms of some set of identities that is confirmed by the experiences, so that experiences reflect meanings as usual.
Status, Power, Agency
Much of the complexity of interpersonal behavior comes from people trying to control experiences along multiple dimensions of social relations. I turn now to the main dimensions of interpersonal control: status, power, and agency.
T. David Kemper and Randall Collins (1990) offer two bases for interpersonal stratification of people: status and power. By status they mean others' voluntary compliance with your desires – the extent to which others are pleasing you because they want to. People accord status to you when they value what you are and what you do (Kemper, 1972). So a person seeking status can work to fit others' values, or join a group where people appreciate the person's specialities. For example, knowing a lot about mushrooms is irrelevant in most social situations, but Gary Alan Fine (1996) found that such knowledge was a basis of status in a mushrooming club. Your status increases as more people esteem you, and you become a sociometric star. Esteem from numerous others corresponds to popularity in informal peer groups. Morris Zelditch and Henry Walker (1984) suggested that it translates to legitimacy in formal organizations, and Rebecca Ford and Cathryn Johnson (1998) found empirically that esteem from one's superordinates does enhance one's authority.
Power arises from others' calculated compliance with your wishes – the extent to which people cater to you in order to get what you can give them. As Joseph Whitmeyer (1994) noted, power fades if the resource that you dispense loses value. Power involves setting up a contingency in which your behavior controls others' behavior as others try "to increase outcomes they value positively and to decrease outcomes they value negatively," to use the words of Linda Molm (1994: 164). Acquiring valued resources is an obvious way to acquire power, but so is going among dependent others who need what you already have. For example, Spencer Cahill and Robin Eggleston (1994) point out that one acquires power merely by being a walker when amongst wheelchair users. Power relationships link together in exchange networks and markets. Tallman, Leik, Gray, and Stafford (1993) in one recent article and Edward Lawler and Jeongkoo Yoon (1996) in another article note that people in exchange networks have a backward-looking understanding of the payoffs associated with their actions in terms of reinforcement histories, whereas rational choice in a market situation involves prospective estimation of outcomes. Michael Macy (1995) examined strategies that people use to transform recent experiences into rational decisions for the immediate future.
A third kind of stratification relates to social participation in small groups, as studied long ago by Robert Freed Bales (1950), or recently by James Balkwell (1995). This dimension of interpersonal stratification can be called Agency. Agency is indicated by the predominance of your contribution in a group – the extent to which others let you promote your values and agenda by dominating conversation and mutual action. An agency hierarchy is a structural characteristic of a group that is not easy to change: for instance, John Manzo (1996) found that requiring participation at the beginning of a jury deliberation distributes agency for a while, but agency stratification emerges as usual after the requirement for equal participation is dropped. Expectation states theory developed by Joeseph Berger and his colleagues (Berger, Cohen, and Zelditch, 1966) postulates that people with attributes conferring some kind of privilege are accorded agency when a group is struggling to find a leader for a task and information on individual productivity is lacking. Jan Stets found such a phenomenon in discussions among married couples (1997: 199); she reported that "Men, older people, the more highly educated, and those high in occupational status are more likely to give their opinion, and giving one's opinion is the most frequently occurring task behavior in these discussions."
Agency is a social product, not merely an aspect of personality. For one thing, people concede more time to a person who knows how to accomplish a group task (Berger and Conner, 1969). Ethnomethodological research has clarified that agency also grows as others are less attracted to their own opportunities for activity in the situation. For example, Douglas Maynard (1996: 128) found that deliverers of bad news "may provide cues and lead-ins that allow recipients to guess at what's coming, and thereby participate in the construction of a new world." This approach to delivering bad news allows recipients to exercise agency, which is a good thing in itself, and it also allows the bearers of bad news to escape being the agents of unpleasant events. Philip Manning and George Ray (1993) found that shy people pass up opportunities to participate and talk about themselves, granting agency to others, though these same people do seek agency when the conversation turns to topics they value.
The status, the power, or the agency that group members give to one person limits what they can give to others. Christina Randall and Charles Mueller (1995) found that those who receive less are dissatisfied. So the emergence of privilege for some fosters competition and conflict from others.
This is true with regard to status stratification. Patricia and Peter Adler (1995) describe status conflicts occurring among ten to thirteen year old children in which the children employ vicious and deceitful behavior as they vie for popularity and deflate the aspirations of others. Michael Lovaglia and Jeffery Houser (1996) see such a process as self-controlling, with the integrative emotional dispositions of the favored compensating for the disintegrative emotional dispositions of the disfavored. However, the unrelieved negative emotions of chronic scapegoats could sap the scapegoats' commitment to peers, leaving embittered social outcastes as the crushed rubble of status battles. Another kind of status competition pits co-workers against family members. Matthews, Conger, and Wickrama (1996) showed that family relationships become more hostile and unsupportive when co-workers are winning this competition.
Competitions for power can take the form of fragmentation in exchange networks: as Noah Friedkin (1995) observed, the power of privileged people in an exchange network declines as less powerful members of the network begin exchanging with each other. Toshio Yamagishi and Karen Cook (1993) found that people are attracted to exchanges with specific individuals, and John Skvoretz and Michael Lovaglia (1995) found that people prefer to exchange in particular with those who choose them back for further exchanges. Lawler and Yoon (19: 89) found that positive emotions produced by successful exchanges become a "relation specific asset" that keeps the actors committed to the relationship. So, people sacrifice some optimality in exchanges for trust, and for confidence in a sure thing, and in a broader context this draws power away from the privileged. The empowered also may fight each other directly. Laura Miller (1997) describes an instance of Army men using gossip, slow-downs, and low-level sabotage to undermine the rising power of military women.
People also compete for agency. Gene Lerner (1996) describes a subtle form of agency competition in which a co-conversationalist completes another's speech act, and in the process steals the other's agency by converting the other's emerging action into something that was not intended. Conversational interruptions, as studied for example by Lynn Smith-Lovin and Charles Brody (1989), are a more direct way of competing for agency.
These three dimensions of interpersonal stratification – status, power, and agency – correspond to the three dimensions of affect – Evaluation, Potency, and Activity – which were established as universals of human response by psychologist Charles Osgood's cross-cultural research (Osgood, May, and Miron, 1975). A person with high status is felt to be likeable, good, nice. A person who has high exchange-dependency power is viewed as more powerful, strong, and dominant according to research by Samuel Bacharach and Ed Lawler (1973) and more recently by Rebecca Ford and Cathryn Johnson (1998). A person with high agency talks a lot in group discussions and dominates interpersonal space by eye contacts and gestures, and thus seems noisy, energetic, and lively. Thus a person's position on the three dimensions of interpersonal stratification transform into sentiments on the three dimensions of affective meaning that are central in affect control theory.
I turn now to how culture, sex, and self contribute to stability and change in social relations. First, consider culture.
Popular views of public opinion in America presume divergent and constantly shifting sentiments regarding almost everything as a result of mass media coverage. In fact, though, social psychological research continues to find that the mass media are conservative in every sense of the word and therefore unlikely to instigate change. For example, John McCarthy, Clark McPhail, and Jackie Smith (1996) revealed that only the most massive protest demonstrations are likely to get mass media coverage, so only ideas that already are familiar get aired. And Thomas Ford (1997) showed that television sitcoms are perpetuating invidious traditional stereotypes that are far from funny in their impacts on minorities.
Survey research shows that most American sentiments are not divergent or shifting. A recent issue of The Social Change Report edited by Theodore Caplow (1997) reported that most attitudes assessed in the General Social Survey have remained stable over a 20 year period - even for controversial topics like abortion. Attitudes that were skewed in positive or negative directions 20 years ago almost always are skewed the same way today. Sentiments attached to concepts are part of culture, and, as Carmi Schooler (1994) has noted, culture is the most stable aspect of human affairs.
Though differences and changes in sentiments are few, some do exist. Shalom Schwartz and his colleagues (Schwartz and Huismans, 1995; Prince-Gibson and Schwartz, 1998; see also Wilson, 1973) find two underlying dimensions in evaluation variations. One dimension contrasts valuing self-enhancement with valuing self-transcendence, while the other dimension contrasts valuing change with valuing security and tradition.
The fact that most cultural sentiments are stable and largely homogeneous within a society means that most respondents report much the same thing when asked about their sentiments, so their reports actually are largely redundant. In fact, anthropologists who analyzed this issue mathematically (Romney, Weller, and Batchelder, 1986) concluded that the contours of subjective culture can be defined with near-certainty by tapping the views of just a half dozen good informants. Affect control theory research uses this principle in acquiring dictionaries of affective meanings to represent culture. Ratings of each identity, behavior, setting, or attribute are acquired from just 50 or 60 respondents.
Much recent research focuses on sex, and I turn to that topic next.
Sociological research often finds that females and males think alike despite their different chromosones. For example, in a report of a large social survey Umberson, Chen, House, Hopkins, and Slaten (1996 : 855) wrote, "We find that men and women are similar in their psychological reactions to the nature and quality of their relationships." Barbara Meeker and Gregory Elliott (1996) found no differences in how female and male supervisors responded to deviance in mixed-sex work groups. Affect control theory research has revealed that males and females arrive at impressions of actors in essentially the same complex way (Smith-Lovin and Heise, 1998; Smith, Matsuno, and Umino, 1994). Moreover, Cathryn Johnson (1993; 1994) has shown that formal leadership roles can wipe away male or female styles of behavior; Walker, Ilardi, Mcmahon, and Fennell (1996) found this, too.
Males and females think alike even to the extent of agreeing that we should think differently about males and females. For example, Willie Jasso and Murray Webster (1997) found that both males and females thought males should earn more than females in 1970s Baltimore; and Griffith, Sell, and Parker (1993) found that both males and females view high performing males as more deserving of reward than high performing females. Martha Foschi (1996) found that both males and females demanded more of females than of males in order to perceive the other as the better performer. Melissa Milkie, Robin Simon, and Brian Powell (1997) found boys and girls pretty much agreed in appreciating mothers for cleaning, cooking, driving, and emotional support, while fathers were appreciated for recreational offerings.
Lori Britt and I (1992) studied how people develop impressions of others involved in self-directed behaviors. We found that males and females process such events in the same way, but they use different principles for thinking about females and males. Everyone applies evaluative consistency more when considering females. For example, it is worse for a valued female to harm herself than for a male to do so, even if the male is valued just as much and engages in exactly the same action. In effect this means that we expect women to be more moral than men.
Or so it is in North America. Recent affect control theory research in Japan by Herm Smith and his Japanese colleagues (Smith, Matsuno, and Ike, 1998) finds differences in how the sexes think about attributions! In Japan, males as opposed to females are more concerned with evaluative consistency in attributions and with matching goodness and weakness. In effect, Japanese males are more concerned with morality than are Japanese females. Given only the Japan research, we might decide that the male chromosome carries a disposition to think morally. However, in the context of the extensive U.S. research showing no differences between male and female thinking, we are better off concluding that Japanese males are being socialized to give more attention to morality, while Japanese females are being taught otherwise. Meanwhile, North American males and females are being socialized to think alike, even though both are being conditioned to expect more morality from females than from males.
Some recent sociological social psychological research focuses on the self, and I turn to that topic now.
A self is the epitome of individuality. For example, a positively valued self protects one from debilitating aspects of a sociocultural system, like an unfair division of labor in one's primary relationship, according to research by Monica Longmore and Alfred Demaris (1997).
Yet the self also has a pronounced sociocultural component. Michael Ichiyama (1993) showed that self evaluations are responsive to the evaluations of others in a peer group, making self-esteem a social product in just the way connoted by the notion of a looking-glass self (Cooley, 1902). Some studies suggest a cultural component to the sense of one's own potency, as well. Mirowsky, Ross, and Van Willigen (1996) found that most Americans believe that they are responsible for their own achievements and they attribute internal control to their fellow Americans, too. Meanwhile Saad Al-Zahrani and Stan Kaplowitz (1993) found that Americans on the whole are more internal in their accounts than are Saudis.
Studies in the affect control tradition offer a similar picture. We have asked thousands of people to rate "I, myself" and the results are nearly as convergent as for any other cultural concept. Most people rate themselves as good, fairly powerful, and lively.
Where does all this convergence come from? In the first place it appears to be transmitted intergenerationally. Toby Parcel and Elizabeth Menaghan (1993) found that mothers who esteem themselves and have a sense of mastery raise children with relatively few behavior problems, possibly because the children also have a positive sense of self. Robert Roberts and Vern Bengtson (1993; 1996) found that parental affection in adolescence generates esteem for self, and that self-esteem often lasts for decades. Second, self sentiments are regenerated day by day from successful personal performances. Peter Callero (1994) has pointed out that we each assemble the content of self from culturally defined roles, so that the person we are trying to be very likely fits our personal competences. Donald Reitzes and Elizabeth Mutran (1994) found that being a competent worker and a confident, social spouse are the kinds of ratings that predict high self esteem.
Third, we are embedded in social systems that structurally constrain our views of self. This is illustrated by individual effects of the transition from socialist to capitalist societies in East Europe, as studied by of Melvin Kohn and his co-workers (Kohn, Slomczynski, Janicka, Khmelko, Mach, Paniotto, Zaborowski, Gutierrez, and Heyman, 1997). They made use of an idea offered by Tim Owens (1993): that positive and negative self esteem items vary independently enough to warrant postulating self-deprecation and self-confidence components of the self. In socialist Poland, managers were more self deprecating than workers. In transforming Poland, managers are less self deprecating than workers, following the capitalist pattern we know in the USA and Japan. Evidently the self concepts of managers and workers are related to the predicaments that confront them in socialist and capitalist societies. As Jacek Szmatka and David Willer (1995) note, the socialist manager has to pay all workers regardless of output which puts the manager in an unrewarding position; on the other hand, a capitalist has exclusive firing-hiring relations with surplus labor and therefore it is the laborers who are in the unrewarding position.
Event structure is the last social psychological topic that I will discuss.
We humans design behaviors to control our feelings, but more is required to achieve logical sequences of social interaction. For instance, if you run a simulation of social interaction based on affect control theory, you sometimes find one person greeting another in the middle of an interaction, even though a greeting logically can occur only at the beginning of an encounter. Thus we know from research with affect control theory that affective factors bound acceptable behavior, but cognitive factors complete the determination of what is happening at a given moment.
As Judith Howard (1994) noted, cognitive matters in social interactions receive attention from symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists, and cognitive scientists in sociology, such as Tom Fararo and John Skvoretz (1984), and Kathleen Carley (1986).
My own contribution is event structure analysis, which focuses on the logical structuring of interpersonal happenings. The basic idea is that accomplishing an action has prerequisites and consequences, and organizing these linkages systematically defines a script or grammar describing how a certain kind of happening is accomplished. William Corsaro and I (1990) specified the logical structure of a game in which children approach and flee a monster, and showed that a generalized logical structure applies in both U.S. and Italian cultures. Larry Griffin (1993) applied event structure analysis in studies of historical processes, and in the process he elaborated the theoretical foundations of the approach. Donna Eder and Janet Enke (1991) showed that a logical structure among pro and con remarks about an absent person underlies the process of adolescent gossiping.
In the 1990s Alex Durig and I (1997) took this perspective a step further and developed a frame for describing any particular event in terms of eight facets: agent, action, object, instrument, alignment, setting, product, and beneficiary. One benefit was a better understanding of why events have prerequisites. If an event produces an object, instrument, setting, or actor for a later event, then the later event cannot occur until the preliminary event happens. Another benefit was an understanding of how collaborative productions get routinized in social organizations to the point that others can use those social interactional sequences as a means to accomplish some outcome.
We coined the term macroaction to refer to the situation where a person uses a social organization as an instrument of individual behavior. Buying dinner for a friend is a simple example of a macroaction. You place the order with a waitperson, which sets as many as a half-dozen employees of a restaurant into organized activity, producing the meal that you give your friend. Macroactions are important in social psychology because they create large-scale societal phenomena as a by-product of social interactions among individuals. As a personal action, a macroaction is interpretable from the perspective of interactionist theories. Meanwhile the organized collective activity that is instigated by macroactions can be viewed from the perspective of organizational or community or societal theories.
There ends my quick look at some current research in sociological social psychology, and at the ways that affect control theory relates to the endeavors. I wish to take one final minute, though, to express gratitude to those who made important contributions to the development of affect control theory.
The earliest encouragement came from Mae Gordon and Herman Smith after my first public presentation of the theory at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1971. Bruce Biddle offered encouragement after reading my 1973 draft of a book manuscript on the theory.
Lynn Smith-Lovin joined the research program in the mid-1970s. She helped me obtain and manage an NIMH grant that deepened the empirical basis of the theory and that supported a first generation of graduate students working on the theory. About the same time, Neil MacKinnon used a sabbatical leave to learn affect control theory and prepare himself for his full-scale reproduction of the research program in Canada. Later, Herman Smith wrote a textbook that discussed the theory (1987), and he then replicated the core research in Japan (Smith et al, 1994; Smith et al, 1998). Andreas Schneider replicated some of the work in Germany (1997). Dawn Robinson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Olga Tsoudis (1994) applied affect control theory to studies of courtroom situations. Linda Francis (1997) applied the theory in her ethnographic study of support groups, and Amy Kroska (1997) used the theory in understanding family divisions of labor. James and Beverly Wiggins published a textbook on sociological social psychology that gives considerable attention to affect control theory (1994).
I am grateful to all of these people, and many others, who have helped me better understand and explain affect control in social relationships.
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MIAMI — Entries are now being accepted for the Northeastern Oklahoma A&M Athletic Department golf scramble on Friday, July 7, at Peoria Ridge Golf Course.
Registration is at 8 a.m. and play begins at 9 a.m.
Cost is $100 per person for golf, cart, box lunch and burgers and hot dogs following play.
There will be lots of prizes, according to NEO athletic director Dale Patterson.
"This is one of our major fund raiser for the year," he said. "If you can come play or help as a sponsor or donate a prize, it would be greatly appreciated.
Contact Patterson at 918-540-6990 for information on sponsorships or the event.
All proceeds go to the NEO Athletic Department.

subset: commoncrawl


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Open verdict in death of Cheltenham College pupil
A coroner has expressed concern at the way a prestigious public school cares for pupils in crisis following the case of a boy who died after taking an acne drug that has been blamed for causingdepression.
The parents of 16-year-old Jack Bowlby, who was found with a ligature around his neck, also criticised Cheltenham College for the way it acted after the teenager expressed "very dark thoughts".
Jack, the nephew of former champion racehorse trainer and novelist Jenny Pitman, was discovered dead in his room at the school in Gloucestershire, where he was a boarder, in October last year.
The inquest in Cheltenham heard that he was prescribed Roaccutane in December 2011 by consultant dermatologist James Milne. He was originally told to take two tablets – a dose of 40mg – a day and this was upped to three pills in January 2012. Within days Jack was complaining of having "very dark thoughts", the inquest was told. Staff at Cheltenham College did not consult Milne but reduced the dose to one tablet.
According to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), which regulates medicines in the UK, users of Roaccutane – also known as isotretinoin – have reported depression, aggravation of existing depression, aggressive tendencies, anxiety, and changes in mood, though it stresses such reports are rare. It says suicide attempts and suicide have been reported very rarely (in one in every 10,000 patients or fewer).
When Jack returned to school in September after the summer break, he told a matron he had not been taking the medication but wanted to start it again. He took his first pill on 11 October. At around 7am the next day, boarders in his college house discovered his body in his bedroom.
Milne told the inquest he had stressed the importance of being contacted if any side effects developed. But he said he was not told that Jack had spoken of dark thoughts, adding: "It is quite disturbing. I was unaware. If I had been informed that he had dark or suicidal thoughts I would have wanted to stop the drug immediately and for him to see a psychiatrist."
The inquest heard that Jack had argued with his parents in September 2012, two weeks before his death – something that was "out of character". His final text to his mother had read: "That's you and me finished." The evening before he was found dead he had been researching suicide notes online – though he did not leave one.
Tom Osbourne, deputy assistant coroner for Gloucestershire, recorded an open verdict, saying there was "insufficient evidence" to prove what caused Jack's death. "It may have been an accident, it may have been suicide, it may have been Roaccutane. There is insufficient evidence."


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Benedicta sit
Exodus 3:1-6; Psalm 93; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-16
- Introit: Blessed be the Holy Trinity and undivided Unity: we will give glory to Him, because He hath shown His mercy to us. -- (Ps. 8. 2). O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful is Thy name in all the earth!
God's Love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:5)
So isn't it comforting that one we call the Son of God urges us not to worry? "Do not be afraid," he says. "Do not be anxious...even the hairs on your head are counted...you are worth more than a sparrow, and God even watches over them!" (Matt. 10:29-31) So it would appear that even when we are not thinking about God, God is busy thinking about us, even counting the hairs on our heads! Granted, as time goes by it takes God less and less time to do that! The point being, that maybe all we need to know about God is that God loves us enough to be watching over us all the time.
Which is why Ignatian Spirituality teaches us that we come from love, we return to love, and love is all around. If we know that, really know that deep down inside ourselves, such knowledge forms the core of our belovedness: knowing that it is God who loves us first; that it is God who calls us Beloved; that it is God who is well pleased with us. Jesus knows this from the moment of his own baptism. And in our own baptism we are incorporated into His Body, the church.
That this is true is a great and sacred mystery. Nevertheless, from the very beginning of the church, from the very beginning of the writings of the Hebrew people, perhaps from the very beginning of time itself, people have made every effort to know and be able to describe this great and sacred mystery of God's love for us.
Which is what really brings us to this day we call Trinity Sunday. For Christians, knowing God as Abba or Father is to know God as Jesus knows God. And to know God as the Son is to know God as Peter and Paul and Barnabas, and Mary and Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, all know God. And to know God as Spirit is to know God as all the disciples on Pentecost experienced God, and as people of all faiths have known God throughout all time: God as holy breath, spirit, and wind. God as the wind that comes from we know not where and carries us to we know not where until we return home to the heart of God's mysterious love.
Abba, Son and Spirit God are all aspects of God's Being -- capital B! This is what our Creed tries to say. Sometimes we experience the one and only God as Abba, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit.
It comes from the language of the theatre. And we might do well to remember that the great theologians who tried to describe our experiences of God in the Creed borrowed their language from the theatre arts: dramatis personae. The language of theology is always, in the end, a borrowed language, not some original set of ideas. Because all language, all life, and all the created universe, reflect different and various aspects of God's Being and God's Love. So just as one actor can wear three masks and thus be listed as three personae in the playbill, so it is with God.
It can be said with tremendous certainty that God cannot be limited to these three personae represented by these three masks, but these are the three that we know, as Christians, are reliable in every dimension of our lives. Thus we say, "We believe...." These are three aspects of God's Being that we all believe. We are making a community statement more than a personal statement. We are describing, in summary form, the One in whom Christians put their trust.
Knowing Abba, Son, and Spirit we know we need not be afraid. It is in knowing the Love of Abba, Son, and Spirit that we can begin to think about God at all. And by changing one letter of the word think, all our thinking inevitably leads us to thank God as well: to thank God for life as God's own beloved. Such thankfulness, or eucharistia, also teaches us not to be afraid.
All our life can then become one great thanksgiving and expression of our Love for God, Abba, Son, and Spirit. And so our lives sing over and over again:
Abba I adore you/Lay my life before you/How I love you
Jesus I adore you/Lay my life before you/How I love you
Spirit I adore you/Lay my life before you/How I love you
God's Love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:5)
The Rev. Kirk Alan Kubicek is rector of St. Peter's Church in Ellicott City, Maryland, a parish in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. He also travels throughout the church leading stewardship events for parishes, dioceses, clergy conferences, and diocesan conventions.


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A Press Release screaming "Pioneering effort alters 'food vs. fuel' debate, supports American energy independence with revolutionary platform that harnesses microorganisms, sunlight, CO2" caught my undivided attention. Here are my candid views on it.
Sapphire Energy have proclaimed that they have produced renewable 91 octane gasoline that conforms to ASTM certification, made from a breakthrough process that produces crude oil directly from sunlight, CO2 and photosynthetic microorganisms, beginning with algae. CEO and co-founder Jason Pyle says: "Our goal is to produce a renewable fuel without the downsides of current biofuel approaches. Sapphire Energy was founded on the belief that the only way to cure our dependence on foreign oil and end our flirtation with ethanol and biodiesel is through radical new thinking and a commitment to new technologies."
The company highlights the potential of algae as a source of renewable gasoline and more importantly it avoids the food vs. fuel debate by touting CO2, sun, water and non – arable land as its requirement. The resulting yield of oil per acre is higher than any other food / fuel crop. The company also highlights that its process is highly scalable.
The company's website describes the revolutionary process where photosynthetic microorganisms are used to produce a renewable, high-value replacement for fossil fuel petroleum. The requirements are sunlight, CO2 and non-potable water – and can be produced at massive scale on non-arable land. Final products will have the same chemical composition as gasoline and will be completely compatible with the existing refining, distribution and fleet infrastructure.
Source: Sapphire Energy


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e x
Tuesday, 30 August 2011
Monday, 29 August 2011
"What are faeces?" "Baby Mice." "Aww!"
Yesterday I ordered some killer galaxy print leggings that I have had my eye on for a while. As I am still in love with Christopher Kane's galaxy collection no matter howold it gets, I thought these were the perfect purchase and if I was feeling matchy-matchy I could wear it with my galaxy vest... JK (I think...). They probably won't arrive soon as they are from an Australian brand called Black Milk but I am sure they are worth the wait!
I watched Donnie Darko last night, hence the title, and since the last time I watched it I was probably 4 I couldn't remember a thing, but I am obsessed with it now. I have decided it is my new favourite film of all time (along with Harold & Maude, Marie Antoinette and some that I can't think of now, naturally). Why can boys my age not be like Donnie Darko? Not just because he is played by the astoundingly good looking and awesome Jake Gyllenhaal, but the actual character. Maybe I should start hanging out in the Psych wards and find some weird boys who obey 6 foot bunny rabbits, burn down houses and flood schools. Note to self - add this to New Years resolution list.
Yet another example of how I have the World's weirdest taste for a 14 year old girl.
Before I go, I will just tell you that I am getting my hair dyed tomorrow at Bleach in Topshop! Not telling you any more details, but I will most definitely be posting pictures as soon as I can.
e x
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
My Shorts!
So so so excited right now, my friends sent me a picture from their holiday in Mexico and they are wearing the shorts I customized for them! Can't contain my happiness right now, excuse my awful explanation of how excited I am!!!! Yayayayayayyayyyyyyyy!!!!
e x
Dinner in San Francisco
Last night my family and my Santa Cruz family went to San Francisco for dinner and met up with Nick, Lina and their 2 sons that we met through Duffy and have seen a few times in New York. They are lovely people and have my dream jobs! Nick is a photographer and Lina has worked at Vogue, Teen Vogue, Nylon and Barney's New York. I think I have made my point! So as Lina knows I am in love with fashion and creativity, and she knows I have this blog and my Lookbook page, she told me about her new job at Lula. If you didn't already know, Lula is my all time favourite magazine in the entire universe. Back to the story; Lula always has contributers for each issue from various different groups, not all necessarily professionals from the fashion business, and she told me that I could be a part of making the next issue! Yeah, I was pretty ecstatic and I still am so excited! Whatever the job entails I am definitely up for it!
Today is my last full day in Santa Cruz which literally makes me want to cry, but London is calling and frankly I would like to block their number.
e x
Thursday, 18 August 2011
Hello everyone. Sorry about the lack of posting, I am having the best time in Santa Cruz at the moment so I am going to fill you in with everything when I am having a major case of jet lag when I am back in London and have nothing to do! Hang on until then, but here are a couple pictures from my new cardigan from Opening Ceremony in L.A and this rad feather clip from the Rose Bowl flea market.
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Update From LA
Having a lovely time in California, obvs. Unfortunately my camera is being vexsome and refusing to transfer photos onto my computer. This makes my life harder as I am unable post pictures from this trip on my blog and lookbook, but the moment it decides to cooperate I will be in like flynn. Until that tremendous moment occurs I will give you an update of what I have been up to and try to find some pictures of recent purchases!
Day 1 - good ole' sweaty workout, swim in the pool, breakfast at the Urth Caffe, look around Opening Ceremony, chill by the pool, dinner at Cafe Stella.
Day 2 - good ole' sweaty workout, swim in the pool (we are a structured family, even when jet lagged (cough freaks cough), breakfast at Swingers, look around Fred Segal and The Grove, chill by the pool and out for dinner at Cecconi's later.
That is what I call a good holiday! To top it off, I have seen Ryan Murphy (creator of Glee!), Eddie Izzard and Chris O'Dowd (the Irish one from The IT Crowd and Bridesmaids). Verdict: I love LA.
Harakuku Lovers head phones from Fred Segal.
These phenomenally cool bracelets from Fred Segal by Bracedlets. They are made from braces!
That's all for now folks! Laters.
e x
Friday, 12 August 2011
Polaroid by the Pool
Chateau Sweet Chateau
Back at the beloved Chateau Marmont. It's like I never left. All I can say for now is that we are not in our usual Bungalow 4, but 1. Although this would usually anger me, I think I can live with the 3 floor, 3 bedroom poolside HOUSE instead. Stay tuned...
e x
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
The Mozza
Last night my Dad took my friend Izzy and me to the Morrissey concert at the London Palladium. My parents are devoted Morrissey fans so I have grown up listening to the genius work of the Mozza my entire life. The Smiths were one the finest bands out there, and Morrissey? He is simply sensational. His lyrics are pure poetry and depict his emotions that are relatable to everyday life as I stated in my English essay last year, a persuasive piece of writing about why every teenager should listen to The Smiths. As a performer he is definitely one of the best I have seen, and like a fine wine, he gets better with age. He disperses shrewd whimsical comments that leave you wanting more of his judgements and opinions of any situation. He has something to say about everything. Last night a fervent fan shouted "Is it the end?" and the Mozza replied, "The end of what? Of life? Of my career? This isn't a career, it's just persistence". I rest my case.
Before he came on stage a series of different videos, including an interview with Lou Reed, the legendary bang Sparks performing a song, a clip from a dated episode of Coronation Street and many more. One included a man with strikingly large sideburns and a dashing brown suit, dancing like the embarrassing uncle at a wedding after one too many pints, singing a song about a beautiful woman. He resembled Ron Burgundy from Anchorman and I can imagine that my Grandma probably thought he was a 'hunk' at the time. Not only were these videos comical and very enjoyable, but they were clearly all Morrissey's inspiration.
Despite not knowing all of his newer songs, that did not make the concert any less engaging and I loved every moment. Even though my eyes were fixed on the Mozza for 99% of the time, there were multiple people launching themselves from the front row onto the stage which was beyond entertaining. Security carried them off back stage but the best part was that Morrissey carried on singing and wouldn't flinch, but every time he just stretched his hand out to them as they were embarrassingly carried off by the scruff of their shirts and the top of their trousers, just like naughty boys being separated by their parents after a fist fight about who gets to play with the toy truck. My last note on the topic is that there are definitely going to be some major
ecchymosis, cough technical word for bruising cough, in the morning.
Overall, it was one of the best nights and I will treasure the memory of Morrissey performing live for the rest of my life.
e x
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
DIY Damsel
My latest obsession is customizing denim shorts, similar to the 'Runwaydreamz' shorts I got a little while back. The dye. The studs. The frayed edges. What's not to love? Anyways, just wanted to show you a picture of a pair of vintage shorts that I am customizing at the moment and if anyone who reads this (not you, Dad) wants me to customize a pair of their denim shorts then just send me a message on Facebook, Twitter or Blogspot and I will get back to you!
e x
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
Letter to Blogspot
Dear Blogspot,
We both know this would happen some time. It's been going on for a while and we both have to face it. Now is the time. I'm in love with Lookbook. Don't get me wrong, we can still be friends, showing everyone who reads (cough 2 people, one of them being my dad cough) about my holidays and events I go to, still using that charming whit of mine, but my outfits will be shown on my Lookbook account. Do not fret, my outfits posted on Lookbook will be shown on the left hand side of my blog, too. Please understand.
Love from,
Erin (a.k.a erin-style)
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If you've been missing Ashley Greene since the latest Cullen family drama stopped playing in theaters, here's a chance to catch up with the actress while you wait for "Breaking Dawn" on DVD: She's gracing the cover of Lucky magazine's March issue and sharing a little insight on where she'll land next once the "Twilight" train stops running for good.
After working for years to get a big break, landing the role of Alice Cullen catapulted Ashley from relative obscurity to the Hollywood big leagues—a shift that she's very aware of when she talks about how her career aspirations have changed.
"Basically I went from dying to get a gig, to dying to get the gig everyone wants," she said. "So now I'm in this realm with a lot of highly respected actresses, which is an amazing place to be, but also kind of terrifying."
And the one thing she won't do is squander her opportunity at stardom with silly distractions. Or, in other words, her love life is officially on hold for the foreseeable future.
"I'm so laser-focused on my career, because when you're dealt these cards, if you don't kind of run with it, then you're an idiot," she explained. "You gotta take advantage of what you've been given."
But while she's essentially a household name these days, the actress is also still learning as she goes—particularly when it comes to holding her own at A-list events, one of which went from style dream to slapstick nightmare in a matter of seconds:
"I wore a dress with boning that was zipped so tight it bruised my rib cage," she said. "It made this beautiful tiny-waist silhouette with a kind of Old Hollywood glamour, but I could barely walk. To accept the award, I basically had be to carried up the stairs. And then I had to go to the bathroom, but when I got there I realized I couldn't unzip the dress and I couldn't pull it up. And I was already in the stall, which is the worst because then everything's ready to go! Oh and also my feet were numb because I was wearing these ridiculously high Brian Atwood heels that were beautiful but—it was just the most painful experience ever! I had to wait through the rest of the ceremony and then rush home afterward."
And if you're looking to learn an important lesson from Ashley's misfortune, she's got it ready and waiting: "So you should always make sure you can go to the bathroom before you go out."
That's good advice, y'all. Ashley and our mom can't both be wrong.
How do you like Ashley's fresh look in Lucky? Sound off in the comments and on Twitter!


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I used to write a lot. I actually spent most of my twenties writing more than drawing. When I got back into drawing in 2007 after the long hiatus, the writing took a back seat. The novel I had been working on was forgotten (just as well, it was a crap vampire story that was more derivative than I care to admit).
After all this time, anytime I go to write something I find that my thought process has slowed. I can't just let it flow like I used to. I hit the backspace button too often, and I second-guess myself more than I ever.
I've rusted.
So this blog will be a tool to get that fluency back. Every day (maybe not that often; we'll see how things go) I'll sit down and write about something. It could be anything. Something I'm happy or angry about; something going on in my life, I don't know.But it'll get me at the keyboard a few minutes a day, getting back into writing a little bit at a time.
My ultimate goal is to reach the point where I'm spending time at the drawing board and at the word processor, without that sense of "guilt" I always felt about neglecting one passion or the other.
Time to get back in the game.


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Quitting drink
It's a mad, bad world, as any man who's ever tried to quit drinking or smoking will tell you. Everyone looks at you differently the day you announce your intention to turn over a good, new leaf. Friends check your temperature, ask you if you're having a hangover, and offer you cigarettes and coffee with worried looks on their faces. Some enquire whether you plan to become a monk. Your sex life will run dry, they tell you, so you just as well might.
An air of gloom pervades your entire social life.
Your descent into solitary confinement begins soon after. "Hi, we're going out for a drink", colleagues will tell you. So maybe you go and sip orange juice while everyone else has a great time. The only satisfaction you can get out of that is by telling everyone the next day how hilariously silly they drank themselves. It'll go like this: "Ha, ha you were so piss drunk you thought the pot was your ex-boyfriend – and you, you wanted to go up the wall because you thought you're Spiderman!" And then they'll never call you again unless they need a driver.
The professional losses are no less than the personal. Try inviting business contacts over for a tea party. They'll thank you profusely, say how good tea is for health, and erase your number from their phones. There might be a few discreet enquiries about your religious beliefs and sexual orientation, for purely professional reasons of course.
The trauma of all this social rejection can seriously damage the psyche. As a consequence, you could become a drug addict.
Even those of ultra-strong mental construction, who escape such a fate, must come to terms with their newly found free time. Since evenings will always be free, they will have to take up something healthier than television to kill time. Joining some strange cargo cult and spending the evenings prostrating before pictures of the only superhero currently more powerful than Spiderman might be a good idea. I refer to the friendly hood, Taxman, who is reportedly slinging webs even Spidey can't escape.
Women who quit smoke and drink somehow seem to get a better deal. They still get invited everywhere, and get free orange juice and sympathy because they're such good girls. Men, those hypocritical ding-a-lings, suddenly want to take them home to mama after years of trying to just take them home.
There might be some common fringe benefits for born-again teetotalers of both sexes. Lower credit card bills are guaranteed. The money previously spent in bars can now be spent in salad bars. The beer belly could well recede, especially after the distinction between morning and night becomes clear.
Days and nights would obviously seem to stretch longer as well. If, after all the sacrifice and heartache, you still don't live any longer, you'll at least feel like you did.
Having considered all the pros and cons, my plan is to quit drink, but to leave a loophole in the law (Safety valve feature to prevent drug addiction). Even teetotalers are allowed to drink fruit juices. And wine is but a special sort of grape juice, after all, isn't it?
Well, now I know what to say the next time someone asks me to quit drinks. :-)


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included doing some finishing touches on the office and family room. They were almost the way we wanted them, but not quite. I like the final results quite a bit, though the office is still a mess as far as organizing books go! They're here, there and everywhere (and half my books being at work and half at home makes for some frustrating times...the book I am looking for is invariably in the other place!).
Cindi did a lot of moving things around in the open area of the basement too, and now her scrapbooking area is much more usable.
02 February 2013
Today's Projects
Posted by William Weedon at 7:15 PM
1 comment:
- Rev. Richard A. Heinz said...
You say: "the office is still a mess..." I wish I could keep mine as clean as your mess!
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Characters are met in an instance but defined over time. As such, how do you remain true to your character as he or she or it (and you!) encounter the various twists and turns of a story?
Peter Welmerink: Character and plot need to weave about each other and grow together. Both need to develop simultaneously to maintain the readers curiosity, retention and draw to both. Having a great character in a stale plot line, or vice versa, will kill a story for me. You don't need both punching you in the face the whole time vying for your unwavering attention, but there needs to be that give-a-shit factor with both or I, like anyone else, will simply put down the book and move on to something else.
Lance Stahlberg: There's an interesting balancing act that goes on in telling a good story. Readers get invested in characters. Characters are what will drive your story and keep your readers coming back. Character is king. That said, focusing a story entirely on a character runs the risk of getting boring fast. They need to be involved in an interesting plot. Character-driven stories tend to come off as pretentious to me. So you ideally are going for a plot-driven story with a solid, memorable character to follow through events.
So here's the trick, which gets closer to answering your questions here: Characters have to be flexible. They must be solid enough to engage readers, but they have to be adaptable to those twists and turns you want to throw at them without screwing up your narrative. You stay true to them above all else by getting into their heads.
Mark Koch: Character comes first and foremost. They are the life to the setting and what makes a story something other than a beautiful photograph, whatever the medium.
Though, for the characters surrounding the narrator (or those in 3rd person), I pretend that I'm observing my friends (or strangers I've encountered) during those dramatic events in the story. If my mind isn't in the story, or if it is shoved out during the writing, then that's a red-flag for me. If I'm thrust out of the story and am reminded that I'm writing it, that tells me the characters probably wouldn't be reacting this way—and I try again with a different reaction.
Selah Janel: I think it's important to remember where a character starts at, but to also allow room for growth. I've changed considerably over the years, so it's unfair for me to think I can dictate everything blow by blow for a character. If something comes up that I initially didn't plan on for that person, I've learned to embrace it because it'll often make a story better.
Dave Creek: Depending upon the particular problem, you could go in the other direction -- take the story in a new direction based upon who your character has become. That might even lead you down a path you never would have thought of otherwise.
Logan Masterson: The world itself can often provide guidance, too. Especially with genre fiction, antagonists are free to provide all kinds of interference. Then there are geography, weather, and a bazillion other variables at our fingertips. Lastly, there are subplots. Not only do they round out characters, but they can guide them too. Subplots should intertwine with the main plot, and leading a character toward the goal is probably the best way to do that.
What do you do when you face that moment when you must chose between character and advancing the plot, when one seems to be a forced fit onto or into the other?
Percival Constantine: That's simple—you change your plot. This is why I keep my plot outlines somewhat free and loose, so I have freedom to change them if the character changes in ways that I didn't take into account when writing that plot.
Mark Koch: Well defined characters don't have to be so rigid in that definition as to be unbending. Hit something rigid hard enough and you will find that it will dent or crack. Those moments are some of the best moments in character development -- when we see that the characters have depth and more dimension than the sound bite voice over.
H. David Blalock: Okay, I'm going to just put this out there and say this is my opinion and you know what they say about opinions.
Story-telling has gone from simply telling a story to the tale having to be riddled with "relateable" people. Since the advent of soap-opera fiction, readers have changed in their expectations towards identification with the players. Readers want to inhabit the hero (or the villain, depending on the reader's character). However, character development is part of the plot. It shouldn't be a problem to have the character react differently than expected as long as the progressive growth of the character itself is plausible.
Most every story relates a change in a character from one state to another, whether through conflict or epiphany. As such, all characters should act "out of character" at least once as an expression of that growth. The magnitude of that odd behavior should define the level of radical growth the character experiences.
In other words, if a character must act "out of character" to forward the plot (and the writer doesn't want to completely abandon the storyline) then the character must adapt. Plot advancement trumps character action.
Marian Allen: If there's a conflict between what you need the character to do and what the character WOULD do as you've developed her, and you absolutely can't get some other character to do the thing or reshape the plot, then you need to sit down and pretend you're having a heart-to-heart with your character. "Why would you do this thing? It seems so unlike you." Eventually, you come up with a wrinkle in the character that makes the thing INEVITABLY what she would do. Then you make a note of it and go back and iron that wrinkle into the fabric of what came before.
Lance Stahlberg: There is a metaphysical aspect to writing. Instead of just being a puppeteer and making your creations do whatever you want, you have to give them life. You know that you need the plot to move from A to B and somehow get to C. But when your character is confronted with a situation where you need them to go one way, but they refuse because it would go against their nature, the character wins every time.
It's now your job to figure out how to get things back on track. There's a lot you can do to finagle events to move things where you want them to go, but not quite as much when it comes to characters, once they are established.
Selah Janel: I stop and think very carefully about why I'm trying to choose one over the other. For me, they go hand in hand…a character is either reacting to the plot in an authentic way, or the way they act move the plot forward. For me, personally, if I come to a point where I'm in crisis, it's usually because I'm trying to force something to happen and it's either not being translated right by the characters or it's just the wrong thing to happen. On the flip side, I may think up new ideas mid-manuscript and stop to rehaul everything because it's a better idea than what I'd initially planned. I have to be very honest with myself at times – am I writing something that's best for the manuscript for that character, or am I going slightly AU because I'm amused and it's what I want to read? Is there some way to combine the two to preserve what I like but still move things forward and stay true to the character?
A friend of mine once said that "making the character perform an action that runs contrary to his or her character just to move the plot forward is a betrayal of the trust of the reader." Agree or disagree? Why?
And yet at the end of The Mummy 2, when the stone temple is crashing down around them, Anuck Su-Namun gets scared and leaves Imhotep to die?
I call bullshit. The entire story hinged on that relationship, and they threw it away in an effort to make the "heroes" look better. THAT was a betrayal of the characters. I was very, VERY angry with them over that."
Logan Masterson: Characters can sometimes frustrate us, and never moreso than when they refuse to stick to the script. I, for one, am always looking at ways to subtly influence my players to keep them in line, but I'm pretty good at it. Characterization is just natural for me. I pay close attention to each major character's known and unknown motivations. I sometimes do mindmaps of these relationships. Then, I can use other characters to nudge a contrarian in the right direction.
Selah Janel: A little of both. I think yes, you have to be careful to not let your personal interest control the character in a way that the reader is going to find disheartening…..but at the end of the day you are the author. You're the one with the pen. It's your idea. I think it's also slightly dangerous to be writing with the intent of giving people what they want, especially if that's not true to your original (or slightly altered, even) vision. It's just as dangerous to pander as it is to try to force a character to do something that isn't necessarily in their wheelhouse, in my opinion. If the plot needs to move, it needs to move – that may mean stopping and taking extra time to rework the plot, it may mean taking time to rework a character or redefine what that character's actions might be, but I also feel that worrying too much about what readers are going to think is something that will compromise the end product, as well.
Ellie Raine: Again, this depends. If there was a strong reason for the character to go against his usual behavior, then I'm more likely to accept it. But if there is no explanation, I will forever question why a character did something so unexpected and irrational (according to their established personality).
Mark Koch: If you have to force a character forward or into a situation or action contrary to their dictates as they are defined- be true to those dictates regardless. Have them react accordingly. Force them, by means of outside influences or fate, but then keep them honest by expressing anger, or outrage, or sadness, or irritation and defiance. At the very least, give a window to some guilt or shame afterwards depending upon what the plot requires.
If someone walked up to you or me and compelled either of us to do something we would not choose to do- we'd have a predictable reaction. If it was truly contrary, that reaction might even create an opportunity for a new plot point or story of its own. Revenge. Redemption. Regret.
If someone walked up to you or me and compelled either of us to do something we would not choose to do- we'd have a predictable reaction. If it was truly contrary, that reaction might even create an opportunity for a new plot point or story of its own. Revenge. Redemption. Regret.
Percival Constantine: Agree completely. This is why I think it's important to have flexibility in your plot. I was a huge fan of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, yet the series finale was one of the worst endings I'd ever seen in any medium. To the creators' credit, they had a fixed ending in mind, something that doesn't often happen in TV and especially not in sitcoms. But over the course of the show's nine-year run, the characters evolved and that original ending no longer made sense. Yet the creators still insisted on using it and the result was an incoherent mess that betrayed the trust of the viewers.
Jay Wilburn: If the character doesn't fit the action and being forced into committing the action can't be explained by the circumstance or some change in the character, then the story outline is wrong. The course of events needs to be rethought to fit the world and characters you created. It may only be a small adjustment in the end. It might be a different journey than you expected to the same destination. It might be a different story than the one you originally thought you were writing. As you need to be ready to kill your characters, you also need to be ready to kill your original story outline when it has outlived its usefulness.
At what point, if any, does the reader's need supercede that of the storyteller? Is there a time when it becomes more important to move plot forward "come hell or high water"?
I mean, there are ways to get away with a character being forced to act in a way they normally might not want to. Heat of the moment, stress under pressure, an impossible choice with no "right" answer, false perception at odds with what's actually happening. Or maybe a core trait of the character is that they are unpredictable. But there always has to be some way to reconcile what a character does with who they are. Always. At minimum, you have to acknowledge in the narration or inner dialogue that they acted oddly, which you could always explore later. But never ignore it.
Mark Koch: Storytelling gives your character lemons because the plot has to advance? Have them do something with them, be it make lemonade or curse the lemons and grind them under their heel.
Great characters don't appear to be directed in the story, they appear to be reacting to it as it unfolds. Give them choices that are true to who they are- even if they don't get choices in the outcome they can always choose their inward or outward reaction.
Great characters don't appear to be directed in the story, they appear to be reacting to it as it unfolds. Give them choices that are true to who they are- even if they don't get choices in the outcome they can always choose their inward or outward reaction.
Percival Constantine: Never. Characters can change and grow over time so they shouldn't be stagnant, but at the same time that change has to be visible. A character who was once a paragon of virtue and honesty in chapter one can't suddenly be a lying, back-stabbing bastard in chapter ten without any reason for that change. If you get to a point where you have to move the plot in a way that is contrary to your character, then you need to change the plot or go back and see where you went wrong with that character's development.
Selah Janel: I worry about moving plot forward on a schedule more with shorts or anthology calls than I do individual projects. That being said, I do think you have to keep a balance in pacing the plot and everything else. That being said, there's no reason why they shouldn't work together. Plot needs character and character needs plot. It really also comes down to show don't tell –- this is where you need to figure out ways to showcase your characterizations as quickly or succinctly as possible to keep the story rolling while still being true to your cast.


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Wednesday, 23 January 2013
Dye another day
So it started with this, I carded some of the Ryeland and pulled off a roving, by far my favourite way to remove carded fibre from the drum carder as it happens.
From there I soaked the roving and dotted it with the silk paints I was dubious about....:(
I deliberately left spaces just to see how far capillary action would take the dye/paint answer is not that far really. It may travel on silk but on my roving it didn't move a lot with out some additional squishing.
Now this is where I think I chicken out in the dying process. I dont know how long I dare or need to steam the wool? my failure could be a result of just not being brave enough to leave it long enough.
The final (still wet) result was after considerable rinsing and getting out lots and lots and lots of untaken dye .
The magenta was not too bad..blue umm passable, but green and yellow were really rather a waste of time.
so there we are maybe I will dye another day and maybe I wont.
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