The one who got the whipped cream in the kisser

After reading this chapter I became a more aware viewer of the lesser important characters in movies and I learned that Foster is right. Yesterday, my dad was watching the over-dramatized and Hollywood-enhanced movie, "Into the Storm". This movie shows the journey of a camera crew chasing a violent and dangerous series of tornadoes. One of the crew members, Jacob, was not fully on board with the mission, but the two other main actors convinced him to continue with the project. The next scene shows Jacob getting to close to the overwhelming, flaming tornado for the shot and all of a sudden he is swooped up and never seen again. As Foster explains, the script writer included this so the main characters can grow, learn and develop. But poor Jacob, he was sweet and innocent character that just stood a little to close to the heroes.

In this chapter, Foster changes topics, and he explains to us that "characters are not people". We cannot think they are real ordinary people that you would see strolling down the street. They are creations of the authors imagination, that are then adjusted and filtered through ours (the reader) to form our own personal image and ideal of this character. Foster tells us its okay to care for the characters because we created them, with the author's help of course.

Every time I finish a television series I'm left with sadness and not because there aren't anymore episodes, but because I am going to miss the characters that I have enhanced through my imagination. When you invest time into characters, you add your own thoughts to what your idea is of what the character does when it is not specified. We are "reshaping characters", so we can make sense of them.

Foster switches gears and again focuses on the heroes' friends. He references to the classic "pie in face" bit. Someone is aiming the pie at the youthful naive hero, but he ducks and hits the wealthy woman standing behind him. I go so excited when I read this because I automatically could reference this to one of my favorite movies- "Singin' in the Rain"! They are all at the after party and Don is giving Kathy a hard time at the afterparty so she aims a pie at Don's face. He quickly reacts and ducks leaving Lina with a "whip cream in the kisser".

When I was reading this chapter I all of a sudden felt bad for all the characters, besides the hero. Foster assured me that they had small parts and smaller significance for a reason. He made four good points that include focus, where reader's attention needs to be directed towards, labor, to much work to develop each character to that extent, purpose, too much detail would confuse the purpose of each character and length, all that detail would turn a novel into the length of the Bible. My favorite explanation that Foster gave was that, "its nonsense with a purpose". Even though it seems unfair that the lesser roles get the shorter straw, its always purposeful.