B.C. Friday

For a long time, I've written under the name B.C. Friday.

My mom (I think it was my mom) asked me about my pseudonym once.  She asked me why I used it.  I'm pretty sure my answer at the time was weak and probably full of "I don't know"s.  I've given it thought since then and come up with a few basic reasons.

I noticed early on that the most impressive and influential writers tended to use a form of their name involving initials and a legitimate name.  C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien.  I had others at one point, but these were the big ones for me at the time.  I'm more than a little superstitious, so I figured it couldn't hurt to emulate them.  However, this isn't really a reason for why to use a pseudonym as much as a reason for why I chose the one I did.

The next reason was probably more likely the original reason why I started using it:  I'm a sucker for dramatics.

I always loved theater.  I loved becoming someone else.  To me, by using a different name when I wrote meant temporarily becoming a different person.  Since it's not so much a name as a code, it adds a distinct air of mystery to this new character I would get to portray.  It's not for nothing that I was called "Drama Queen" by a group of girls for a week this summer.

However, it would be really easy to argue that using a pseudonym doesn't properly give me credit for my work.  This makes sense, but interestingly leads me into the main reason why I continue to use this pseudonym.

I was having a conversation with someone earlier about story telling.  We started by talking about the differences and similarities between writing a story and telling a story.  We agreed that story telling required an ability to react to your audience and adapt your story accordingly and that writing required an ability to stay focused on the story long enough to get it on paper.

Personally, I've never been good at story telling.  I can't sit down and weave a story in an instant and quickly craft it into a performance worth listening to.  I certainly can't adapt and change my stories once they're on a course.

I think the reason I can't tell stories is because I can't come up with stories.

Don't get me wrong.  I can write stories all day long if I really want to.  However, my firm belief is that I have never once come up with a good story.  That's not my gift.  I can't sit here and give you a sequence of events off the top of my head and them both make sense and be interesting.  Furthermore, if I could, I know I wouldn't be able to convert them into words that would be worth reading.

My gift is characters.  I can meet a character and in an instant give you their entire backstory.  If you asked me about almost any event in the life of any one of my characters, I could probably tell you about it.  I like to believe that my characters are separate and individual entities with lives of their own, but I would like to point out that at the beginning of this paragraph, I used the word "meet", not "make".

The truth of the matter is, I don't really think you can "make" a good character.  A truly great and believable character, is either raised, met, or a combination of the two.  I can't honestly tell you which most authors use.

Raising a character means taking a character from a particular point and weaving the world around them so that they grow into the character you want them to be.  As I mentioned earlier, I'm not very good at creating stories, so this doesn't really work for me.  Meeting a character involves encountering a character at a particular point in their life and then learning their backstory.

I usually meet my characters.  I will be going along in a story and suddenly run into a point where a character must be, and, conveniently, a character will be there.  I can almost guarantee you when a story needs a character, there will be one there.  The hard part is getting to know them.  I can't tell you how I do that, but I do.  Typically, when I write a story, I have a starting point.  Usually it's a particular moment in a particular character's life.  As this protagonist encounters other characters, I meet and get to know them.  I typically just let these characters lose and follow them around.

I've now finally circled around to my point.

One of the main reasons I continue to use a pseudonym when I write is the fact that I don't feel like I have much more right to the story than you.  The only reason I would even begin to convince myself I do is because I met the characters before you.  I believe that before me, the credit for my stories should go to God and the characters.  They're the ones who made the stories.  They're the ones who presented themselves to me when I needed them.  I just wrote the thing down.

Thus, B.C. Friday, for me, represents so much more than just me.  It's my subtle way of taking the credit out of my hands.  B.C. Friday is the culmination of every character that got even the briefest of cameos in one of my stories, God's generous blessing to me of a glimpse into these characters' lives, and finally, little me, translating it all into a form you people can actually read.

I'll admit, while this last reason sounds really good, I honestly started using a pseudonym because I'm a superstitious drama queen.  However, that doesn't change the fact that this post ex facto reasoning is the reason I continue to use a pseudonym.  I tried to quit using it, and it just felt wrong.

I felt like a traitor.

So, out of gratitude to God for giving me the opportunity to glance into someone else's life if only for a moment, and in honor of every person who ended up in a life interesting enough for me to enjoy, I will continue to write under the name B.C. Friday.

It's the least I can do.

Monophobia and Other Plagues

I just watched the movie, "He's Just Not That Into You".  Not a bad movie.  Incredibly cheesy but with some interesting thoughts buried in it.  If I had a female around right now, I would ask her many questions thanks to this movie.  I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow.

The main question is very simple:  Do girls really think like that!?!  Seriously.  I thought I overthink things.  That question is really beside the point right now (though it does go perfectly with my "girls are crazy" theory).  The bigger, more interesting, thing was slightly more subtly embedded and fits beautifully into one of the biggest theories currently running around my head:  People are terrified of being alone!

I occurred to me in the movie when a girl got rejected by a guy and then stormed out triumphantly declaring that he wasn't the winner because he would always be alone.  I almost died laughing at her elegant combination of projecting and hypocrisy.

Think about what she was actually saying.  She was first of all implying that he was actually the loser because he would end up alone.  To clear things up, the guy was perfectly happy up until this point.  She wasn't happy throughout the movie until the last like five minutes.  He was obviously not afraid of ending up alone.  She obviously was.  The implications of her comment suggested he shared this fear.  Seemed like your standard case of projecting to me.

Let's take a slightly deeper look, though.  She was accusing him of claiming superiority by claiming superiority.  I'm doing an awful job of explaining all this, but if you watched that scene with all this in mind, it would make more sense.  In fact, why don't you do that.  This scene pretty much sums up everything I'm talking about with this movie:

That Scene I'm Talking About

The way she talks, you would think that the only thing that matters in life is finding someone.  Like that's the only way to be happy.  Yes, you could argue that I'm taking too much from this one little section, but that scene was pretty true to the entire movie.  The girls all acted like the only way they could be happy was if they fell in love and got married.  THIS is what I'm really talking about.

People are convinced that the only way to become happy is to find one magical person who redefines your whole existence and becomes you're reason for leaving.  This is even worse on girls.  They're taught from early on that their entire existence depends on whether or not they get married.  It goes all the way back to Disney princesses:

It's kinda sad really.  The "Beauty and the Beast" one is particularly troubling.  Did you ever notice that the geeky guy often ends up with at least a cute girl?  What about the geeky girl?  Unless there's a geeky guy, her ending up with someone is usually played for laughs.  How sad is that?

I'm working on a clever word for this sickness that has gripped society, but nothing I've thought of seems to do it justice.  For now, I'm just going with, "That right there . . . that's what's wrong with America."

I don't, however, think that movies are the cause of this fear as much as they are symptoms.  So the bigger question is, why are people so afraid of ending up alone?  I read a statistic once that that was the most common fear amongst single people.  What is it about being alone that is so terrifying to people?  Kelly Clarkson recently came out with a song that says, "Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone."  Why don't more people realize this?

If I told most people that I spent both my Friday and Saturday night this weekend in my dorm alone, I would get at the very least a couple of sympathetic looks.  Trust me, I've tested this.  I might also possibly get a couple "Ah, I'm sorry." one or two "That sucks." and possibly an "Are you antisocial or something?"  What I most likely would not get is an "Oh, that sounds like fun!"

But it is to me!  I am just as entertained staying home alone doing various incarnations of nothing as I am going out with a bunch of people.  I don't get lonely very easily.  In fact, I usually feel the most lonely in large groups of people.  Yet, for some reason, people seem to think that it's weird to have fun alone.  If you enjoy having alone time you're "antisocial".  I'm not always antisocial, but gorramit I need time to myself!

I can't say what the cause of the fear of being alone is.  I think at this point it's simply passed on from one poor unfortunate lonely soul to the next.  Some would argue that it's evolution telling us that we're more likely to survive as a pack than as individuals.  Whatever it is, it's a problem.

It's a problem, because it's been known to get to me, too.  Me and my antisocial self are occasionally struck with a paralyzing fear that I'm going to end up alone.  Then I go off away from people and the fear goes away.  Weird.

In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", one of the characters speculates that humans participate in small talk because if they stop talking, their brains start working.  Maybe that's why we're afraid of being alone.  We're actually afraid of finding out who we are.  We're afraid that if we meet ourselves, we won't like us.

I am officially issuing a challenge:  Spend an entire day away from other people.  Be antisocial for a day.  You can be as extreme about this as you want from not even seeing another person to not talking to people to just not spending time with people.  The goal is to meet yourself.  Go out with yourself for a while and see if it's a compatible match.  (What d'ya know? An appropriate song!)

You might be surprised what you find.