Creation Freaky

(1)
The first novel I wrote was called in move. It followed four guys through their last year at school. I came up with the personalities of these main characters when I was still in school, scribbling them down in the margins of my schoolwork – I still have all those notes, and the final versions who turned up on the page many years later are essentially the same characters.
(The creative process I actually used was to lift key character traits from friends and acquaintancs, and mix them up. I wanted the characters to remind me of people I knew, but to be different enough that the stolen personalities wouldn’t be obvious. What happened was, as soon as the writing started the characters became entirely themselves. Still, I can point to any defining personality feature on each of the main characters and tell you who in my school was the model for it.)
(2)
I came back to in move relatively recently, and figured out some deeper parts of the structure (my ignorance of which had been hampering the story in previous arrangements). I plotted the four characters on a diagram. They were differentiated in two ways. They had either trait A or trait B, and also either trait X or trait Y, so the characters were AX, AY, BX and BY. I can’t remember what names I used for the traits right now. (I think confidence vs insecurity was one pair, and control vs no control was the other, at least at one stage of thinking about it.)
(3)
Now. A few nights ago I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars again. I’d previously got two-thirds through it, and was enjoying it rather a lot, but decided against taking it on the plane when I left NZ in 2002. I figured I’d finish it in three hours and then have a big chunk of paperback taking up space in my bag. So now in 2006 I picked it up again. I decided to re-read Part 4 and see how my memory jogged. I chose Part 4 because it’s really short.
Part 4 is about the first psychologist on Mars, coming apart at the seams as he provides support to the first Mars colonists. He tracks the colonists on two axes, introvert-extrovert and labile-stabile (basically, labile means moody and changeable, whereas stabile means of a constant mood). He cross-references these two axes and discovers he’s recreated the Greek model of four temparaments – sanguine is extravert/stabile, phlegmatic is introvert/stabile, melancholic is introvert/labile, and choleric is extravert/labile.
The text has a diagram. When I saw it, I reacted with shock, because I recognised it. It matched my in move diagram.
Which is when I realised my four characters fit the model pretty much exactly. When I was scribbling notes at age 16 I had, unwittingly, created archetypal examples of the four temperaments. (Scott – choleric. Richard – sanguine. Adam – melancholic. Dennis – phlegmatic.)
(4)
Then it gets a little freaky.
Way back when I wrote the second draft of the book I wanted to play with the symbolism a bit. Following instinct, I related each character to one of the four alchemical elements, earth, air, fire and water. Pure instinct. I just knew which one fitted which element.
Well, turns out I got them right. Choleric goes with fire, sanguine with air, melancholic with earth, and phlegmatic with water.
That kinda blew me away. Typing this now, it’s still blowing me away. Me, now: away, blown. It’s incredible how deep these symbols go inside our heads.
Think on it for a second: these patterns and structures used to conceive of the world in operation thousands of years ago in a very different culture, they come bubbling up out of the subconscious of a pretty ordinary Kiwi kid in the now. There’s no real mystery to it, but there is amazement in what it says about us, about our minds and our cultures and how they all work. There is wonder. I think it’s wonderful.