McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Mind control to further plot?

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arianne:
Been working on a fantasy where the main character is something like, uh, Butters in the Dresden files. Don't want to spoil Butters for people who haven't read about him yet, but let's just say that if a vampire threatened my main character, he would take off running in the opposite direction and never come back.

As you might have guessed, it's not easy to further plot or generate conflict with a main character whose sole action is to avoid conflict.

Thankfully, there exists in my universe a guy who has the ability to remotely control people's minds.

My question is, what does everyone think about using said mind control to further the protagonist's motivation, and by association, the story. Is it bad to use mind control  as a plot device until such time as the protagonist realizes that he actually possesses backbone when pushed to the wall?

Quantus:
Probably depends on how heavy handed you are with the Mind Control.  If it just puppets him so that his body is moving and his mind is along for the ride, it will seem a pretty big violation from the MC's perspective, and would probably require a lot of internal monologue to make interesting.  It would trivialize and victimize your MC to one degree or another, because he is essentially a meat-suit for someone else.  So why do we care about him or his Choices, when they never seem to matter?

If, on the other hand, it is more like using illusions to make him think he has no other choice, or no place to run, that would be more interesting to me because it is still the MC who is making the Choice, and it would become more like a Con for a good cause.  Then the MC could still find some clever ways out of the situation and do some legitimately brave things;  it would be more about showing him that he can be brave, by backing him into an imaginary corner.

All of that depends on the Mindbender character, and what he is after?  How does his Mind Control work?



0.02

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: arianne on May 10, 2012, 12:08:14 PM ---As you might have guessed, it's not easy to further plot or generate conflict with a main character whose sole action is to avoid conflict.

--- End quote ---

The central character in the Thing I Should Be Working On really hates being involved in anything resembling a plot or adventures and very much wants it all to go away and leave him in peace, so I have some sympathy for your position, and it's possible my experience there might be of some use, so fwiw:

The basic way round that difficulty I picked was a variant on the Hitchcock "running man" plot.  My protagonist finds himself in a situation where he is, without knowledge or consent, suddenly important to some people; he doesn't really know who they are, why he is important to them or what their motivations are, and the obvious first guesses at those answers fairly rapidly show themselves to be wrong.  Meanwhile different bunches of people are variously chasing him, shooting at him, and framing him for crimes he did not commit, all to try to get him to do something, but he does not know what, and are interpreting his actions as part of a complex plot based on the assumption he has information he doesn't; and there are factions whose interests are served by other factions being distracted by all this running around.

The thing that most needs, sfaict, is for there not to be reliable competent authorities to whom the character can immediately turn to have the problem solved.  (My character's expectation is very much that there should be, but this turns out not to be the case.) 

As for using mind control, the question that raises for me is; why is this person in particular the one who gets controlled ? I can see any number of ways to make a good story out of that (the first one to come to mind is; villain controls protagonist to do something criminal, then disappears, leaving protagonist hunted by police for a thing protagonist did without intent).  Quantus makes a good point that that could read as a severe violation (me being me, I am immediately seized with the desire to assemble a social context and set of moral assumptions where it isn't, but that's just worldbuilding-brain talking) but if it is one, that might serve as motivation for the character becoming more proactive later.

I should note that I don't actually understand how people mentally correlate "this character's choices are significant and matter" with "this is a character worth caring about and reading about"; from my perspective we live in a world where most of any random individual's day-to-day choices have relatively little significant effect, so for the same to be true of a fictional character just makes them more plausible.  (This is coming from a perspective of having OCD such that I frequently run up against people talking about choices or thinking choices exist where from inside my head they just obviously don't.)

LizW65:

--- Quote ---As you might have guessed, it's not easy to further plot or generate conflict with a main character whose sole action is to avoid conflict.
--- End quote ---
Two excellent examples of this are Bilbo Baggins and Rincewind from the Discworld series, both of whom want nothing more than to stay home and never have adventures, but somehow get sucked into them anyway.  Rincewind, in particular, never grows a backbone, and running away ends up only getting him involved even deeper in the plot.  I suppose the mind control thing could work if done very carefully; otherwise it could come off as a rather clumsy plot device.  Personally, I would try to avoid it if at all possible and work on getting the character into situations where (s)he is (a) forced to take action or die, or (b) where cowardice actually works in the protagonist's favor.

Quantus:

--- Quote from: the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh on May 10, 2012, 02:37:31 PM ---I should note that I don't actually understand how people mentally correlate "this character's choices are significant and matter" with "this is a character worth caring about and reading about"; from my perspective we live in a world where most of any random individual's day-to-day choices have relatively little significant effect, so for the same to be true of a fictional character just makes them more plausible.  (This is coming from a perspective of having OCD such that I frequently run up against people talking about choices or thinking choices exist where from inside my head they just obviously don't.)

--- End quote ---
Theres probably some pop psychology about the inner desire to believe one person's choices (and by extension our own) DO matter, and DO make a difference, to cope with our own fundamental lack of control.   But the truth is that we spend half the book, at least by the Scene-Segue structure many authors generally (JB included), reading about how a particular person (or small group) reacts and feels and interprets the events that are occurring.  If those characters are not significant and dont matter, then why would I care what they think or feel or see? Why arent I, the reader,  following somebody more important instead of listening to some nobody philosophize about things that now seem inevitable? 

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