In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Moon card to guide their discussion. They discuss what mirror characters are and how you can utilize them in your writing to improve your story.
Question of the week: How do you develop mirror characters? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends and welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is Thursday, August 4th as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my co-host…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: Good morning, JP. How has your writing week been?
JP: Good. It’s
Crys: You sound so excited to get back to a good week.
JP: My writing week has been good. I put a schedule together because I have two projects going on at once, editing the project with Abe and then the Publish in Six project. And so what I’ve been doing is every other day I focus on one of them and I have a goal for that day to complete. And so far it has been working out really well.
I was able to draft 5,000 words towards the Publish in Six project and get almost, I think I’m on like chapter nine of the book three draft, which is good. So far, so good. No complaints here. It’s nice switching between the two, cuz then I can let the other one kind of percolate in the back of my mind and then worry about it the next day. So I would say it’s good.
I’m also playing with publishing the short stories that I had with the like world building events and using AI generated covers for those. And that has been really fun to play with and use like a template and then put it into my drawing apps and correct it and fix it around and make it prettier. So that’s what I’ve been doing. How has your writing week been?
Crys: It’s been okay. So the kiddo finally went back to school yesterday after being a sickie all week. And I had a really good writing day. One of my goals has been to get back up to 2000 words consistently each writing day. And writing days are basically any day that the kid is in school. Generally, every month has about 20 of those. Some have less, some have 21. So that would get me back to about 40,000 words a month, which was my average before burnout. So I think that’s a consistent level, but yesterday was the first day that I actually wrote words. So was very exciting. And I am wondering if I’m also gonna have to do similar to your doing in switching days on projects cause I’ve been to do work on both projects in a day, which I have been able to in the past, I don’t know if my brain’s able to do that right now. yesterday was the romance that I need to finish up. I think the writing day that I managed before that was only on the fantasy. I may have to do similar, but hopefully the romance will get done in a very timely manner. It’s release date is the 1st of October, and are only 40,000 words total, so it should be good without
JP: Yeah.
Crys: That’s the important part.
JP: That’s the key, without stress.
Crys: Yes. So for this week the tarot card guiding our question is The Moon. Would you mind describing The Moon for us, JP?
JP: Yeah. So The Moon upright keywords are illusion, fear, anxiety, subconscious, and intuition. Reversed, it is the release of fear, repressed emotion, and inner confusion. So moon card shows a full moon in the night sky, no surprise there, positioned between two large towers.
So moon in a lot of culty things is like the symbol of intuition, dreams and consciousness. Its light is dim in comparison to the sun, so it only slightly illuminates like the path to a higher consciousness winding between these two towers on the tarot card. And then in the imagery, there’s also like a small pool, which represents the subconscious mind. And then various animals that represent just different aspects of our mind.
So this is very much a card that– let’s see, it’s two cards after the tower, which would’ve been the like dark night of the soul. And so this is really digging into that like, what is the self, what is the true thing that I can trust in?
Crys: And the question that this prompted: What are mirror characters and how do I use them? And there’s two ways to approach this. There’s the Brian McDonald way, which is he refers to them as clones, where the character throughout the story really holds a mirror up to the sides of the main character that are subconscious and brings them to light.
Then, especially in romance, the mirror character and the mirror moment is right around the dark night of the soul, something like right after I think, the best friend, the sidekick, the mirror, stands up to the the main character forces them to see what they really want out of the relationship in romance. If they actually want the relationship, what they need to give up, whatever it is, they mirror back to the character what they actually need reach a satisfying ending for that story.
But the clone characters, the mirror characters in McDonald speak, we talk about them more. and I’m curious how you use them.
JP: So the stories I have, they’re always like two friends or like sidekicks. And they usually represent different aspects of the main character, but turned up a notch. So like in the story with Abe, our main character has a really strong brute-ish character who is just the one that would do things more by force. And then they have another character that would do things more by like contemplation and thinking things through. Both of those are aspects of the main character. Those are just general aspects of you either do things by force or you think it through. And so they can really play off of each other and allow this main character to make decisions based off of do I go this direction or this way? So that’s how I play with mirror characters, is I look at ways to turn it up a notch. That’s the easiest, is the brute versus the like mental or like the smart one.
I think in the Publish in Six one I have, it’s more like the external versus internal or introverted versus extroverted. Whereas my main character is pretty much like ambivert. And then I have this one very extroverted high need for emotional connection and high need for this sort of approval of the external world. And then this other character who is more reserved and more introverted doesn’t need that approval and actually shys away from it. And then we have this main character who’s trying to find their place.
And it’s interesting, I’m thinking it through as I’m talking, and I realize that the story is all about finding your place. And so these two characters were almost created without me even thinking about it because they mirror two strong aspects of how people find their place in the world.
Crys: I think one of the strongest uses of the mirroring aspect is when you use it to enhance your villain, or you use your villain to enhance your hero. And I don’t know why this is the example that popped into my head, but Little Mermaid and Ursula. So Ariel and Ursula. Ariel has a bit of a selfish streak. She’s the baby of the family. She wants to do what she wants to do. And she goes against her dad’s wishes to do so. Um, so there’s this streak of selfishness. Ursula is that to the max where she doesn’t care about anyone or anything at all So there’s this streak of selfishness.
Ursula is that to the max, where she doesn’t care about anyone or anything at all. Ariel tries to like keep it on the DL, like not affect anybody. She’s just like, if it’s just affected me, and Flounder, then why should anybody else care?
But Ursula is like that taken to the max. I don’t care if it affects anybody else, I’m gonna do what I want. And I think that’s one of the best ways to create really good villain hero combinations is using them as mirrors for each other.
JP: Definitely. I also really love all of the TikToks that talk about how Ursula isn’t really a villain, but we won’t go into that.
Crys: I don’t think I’ve seen any of those TikToks. I need to get on that side of TikTok.
JP: I love it just because it’s really about owning yourself, and she’s a shapeshifter, but yet she looks the way that she looks because she doesn’t care. And then what she does is she shape shifts Ariel to be what she wants to be, but without a voice, to be like you really need the voice because the voice is how you express yourself in the world. It’s not how you look. Anyways.
Crys: Next time on Write Away: Deep dive into Ursula. I love Ursula.
Yeah, and I’m trying to think in my fiction. So in a way in a romance story, the main characters are a bit of mirrors to each other cuz the way that you write a romance story is you write two puzzle pieces that need need to shave off some edges to fit together because they both have wounds that the other can help heal. Um not always written healthily, sometimes it’s like, this person will fix you. But we’re not here to necessarily about writing healthy stories, we’re talking about writing stories. And so the other one tends to be strong in the thing that they’re weak in and vice versa.
And with my fantasy, nothing is clear in my mind, particularly about mirror characters yet cause I have a lot of ideas of how things are gonna play out, but the one I’m working on right now, I’m writing into the dark for the most part. So I don’t know exactly who is going to pop up and in. And that’s okay cuz mirror characters happen subconsciously if you’re writing, if you’re pantsing, like that’s normal.
One of the tools you can use if you are pantsing or writing into the dark or whatever you wanna call it, is to look at your story and revision and say, okay, who has different aspects of my main character that I can highlight to strengthen the journey my main character is on?
JP: Yeah, definitely. That’s why I really like the use of theme because I think that it can really draw out those characters. And I was talking with Publish in Six, like I had my theme, which almost subconsciously gave me those characters. And even the villain who would be the poor reflection of someone finding their place, but they almost find their place and rudely establish it. They’re not adjusting or adapting to the environment, but they’re forcing the environment to adapt to them. So they’re like the poor reflection of how to find your place. And that piece, talking through it, that was all part of the theme, finding these pieces of how people can interact with that theme in different aspects.
And it’s almost the same for The Dark Pond, the work that I’m doing with Abe, where the main character is basically looking for their own inner strength, their own drive to fight and to understand. And so that’s do we use brute force? Do we use intelligence? But then you have this other character who is just cruel and evil and all of these other aspects that they found their own strength by hurting others. Whereas this main character is searching for their own inner strength without the need to harm anyone.
Crys: Yeah, I don’t remember what movie it it was. is another Brian McDonald example where he was talking about clone characters, and the movie theme was, If you’re not busy living, then you’re dying It’s a movie I wanna watch just because of how I described it , but doesn’t help that I don’t remember the name. but, very early on, you see a character who dies because they were not embracing life, they were just letting life happen to them, and life happened to be really crappy.
And I think the main character is like in jail, just getting outta jail, and having to figure out how to live with purpose. And so you see multiple characters throughout that story, either losing way, like literally dying, metaphorically dying in that they’re just living and existing, but not thriving. And he uses those clone characters, those mirror characters, whoever the writer was, to show all of the possible paths that support the theme, the hypothesis of the movie.
JP: Yeah, I was also thinking about this show I’ve been watching recently that I’m trying to make you watch, Crys. Motherland.
Crys: I haven’t watched that one. I downloaded The Magicians.
JP: It’s okay. Motherland is less painful, but I still love both, love both a lot. But I’ve been watching Motherland, so I’m gonna talk about it.
Basically, it’s this like witches are real. They, since Salem, have worked with the US government and like they have this whole witch academy, blah, blah, blah. But there are like three main characters, and they all come from different aspects of the world. So one is like weird, outcast kind of character. One is a character who didn’t have to join the military, but chose to forge her own path. And then one is top tier, comes from a family of well known witches and blah, blah, blah.
And it’s really fun to see how they’ve developed because one gets more weird. One, as they’re forging their own path, they forge it even deeper than — I’m trying to like not spoil anything — but they forge it even deeper than just joining the military. It’s like they’re finding their own self, their own truth.
And then the most interesting one to me right now is the character who comes from this like expectation or this hierarchy, and they have almost nothing special about them. And they have to reconcile with the fact that other people are better than them and that their name doesn’t carry the weight or the power, it’s actually one’s self. And so it’s almost having to put up these reflections or these mirrors of these other characters, this character who is an outcast, who is so weird with what she can do. And it’s like, oh, why can’t I do that? Or this character who’s forging her own path and who is learning things and is getting better at what she does, and being like why can’t I be like that? And having to be like, I have to erase everything that brought me here and I need to find my own like truth.
And I just really enjoy seeing these characters develop. And I think that it’s because not only are they three main characters with three very different paths that they’re taking, but they’re almost like mirrors to each other in different ways. And I really enjoy that.
Crys: Excellent. So now we all have to go watch Motherland.
JP: Yes, that was my plug. Please watch Motherland. It’s wonderful.
Crys: My question for our listeners this week… should we ask folks? I don’t know.
JP: How do you develop mirror characters? How do you approach really drawing out what you wanna tell with your main character through side characters and through villains and through mentors? How do you do that?
Crys: Excellent. We’re about to go record our Patreon episode, which is focused on business. And this week we’re talking about how to analyze a “failure” and deal with the emotions that come with it. If you would like access to that episode and many more, you can come over to patreon.com/writeawaypodcast.
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