Living as I am in the shadow of Los Angeles, I spend a lot of time in the company of television stars and writers and producers and their outsized egos. And it’s quite the habit for people out here to tell you who you are and where you came from. When everyone lives to be on camera and on stage, everyone is no better than who they seem to be.

Let me tell you who I am.  I grew up in a small town called Sissonville, West Virginia. For years I slept on a bunk bed, suspended from the ceiling, that my stepfather constructed from a sheet of plywood and a few two-by-fours. There was a junkyard behind the house. I used to go out there with a slingshot and shoot at the tentworms that spun sticky webs. The roads were poor. I remember that a big truck came through and paved the broken streets one day. Within a week the pavement flaked and chunked apart into pieces, making the roads mostly undriveable. We were poor.

I made do, with my imagination and with my brothers and sister. I invented and recorded radio shows with my tape recorder. I made up sketches and stories and little plays. I watched reruns of old comedies on one of the three television channels that we received. Eventually I got a cheap computer, a Vic-20. It plugged into the television. I learned how to make games on it.

I remember my father and my mother fighting, before they were divorced. Once she slapped him and I remember Dad on top of her, holding her down.

I remember learning to play baseball. My stepfather taught me. I remember learning to walk in the back woods, and how to avoid sliding down the mountains and hills. I know how to skip rocks and shoot guns and how to blow things up with bottle rockets and bang caps.

I remember my first fight. I wrestled the kid down but didn’t punch him. He left me alone after that. Come to think of it, all the kids who ever threatened me, left me alone after I went after them.

I know how to chop and carry wood, and how to sharpen a pocket knife. I know how to hoe corn and carry tomatoes and dig septic tanks. I know how to catch crawdads by hand without getting pinched. I remember the wooden toys that my grandfather carved for my father to play with.

I have walked in the woods and heard nothing and heard it loudly.

I suppose it struck me today, as I was being lectured about what I was and what I wasn’t, that perhaps I forgot that I am somebody, that I have a colorful and unlikely past.

I know who I have been. And I know where I came from.

And as I am starting to learn, precious few people in this traffic-jam town remember who they have been, or where they came from.

The Doll, by Miro Galvan, has started rehearsals.  This is a little two-person show happening next month at the Little Fish Theater in San Pedro.  My character, Marko, is a forty year-old lonely man who has decided to acquire a live-in love doll as his primary companion.  The show is being directed by the able James Rice and it stars the lovely and talented Analeis Lorig.

Currently I’m wrestling with where my character is coming from.  Based on my first read of the show, nearly everything the character has to say is cynical, self-interested or abusive.  The show seemed quite dark to me.  And this show is apparently supposed to be a comedy.  So if I abused this poor sweet doll on stage the way that Marko sounds in my head, everyone would want to lynch me by the end of the show.  I needed help.

“Take out the cynicism,” Jim informed me.  And so I hit upon the idea of playing every line that Marko says, exactly the opposite from my interpretation of the text.  If the text is bitter, he’s feeling loving; if the text is flighty, he’s calm, and so forth.  Playing Marko this way, is, to say the least, a fun challenge, in the sense of an acting exercise.

Analeis is immensely talented.  It feels good to be challenged to turn in higher quality work.  I can’t merely phone it in, as I have done in lesser shows.  And since this is a little teeny two-person show, the eyes are on me and her the entire time — no down time.

She’s good.  And that is refreshing.  Actors who are good totally raise the level of everyone else.  It is refreshing to be challenged; it is refreshing to be able to use my own ideas.  I feel now that I can’t come in and just wing it — I had better come in with strong opinions and creativity about how to make Marko work.

                              A jail cell somewhere near South
                              Croydon.


                                        SHERLOCK
               I will likely have us out in three minutes if you would all
               stop using all the room's oxygen.


                                        SPOCK
               Unlikely.  Your weapons and ours were confiscated.


                                        SHERLOCK
                                   (indicating his brain)
               I carry my weapon here.


                                        DOCTOR WHO
               Excellent!  You're a telepath!  I need you to visualize the
               TARDIS's control panel.  The red recall lever.


                                        HOUSE
                                   (flatly)
               Narcissistic personality disorder, narcissistic personality
               disorder, Asperger's syndrome.


                                        SPOCK
                                   (to House)
               Are you a doctor?


                                        DOCTOR WHO
               Actually, I'm the Doctor.


                                        HOUSE
               And I'm Sherlock Holmes.


                                        SPOCK
               Fascinating.

In addition to McKee’s and Egri’s books, I have found one other book to be tremendously useful in creating believable, rich characters with strong motivations.

It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition.  Some call it the DSM for short.  The fourth edition is more punchy and more direct, and a lot of diagnosticians prefer the old to the new; but for a writer’s purposes the version doesn’t matter.

Open up this thick book to a random page, and you have a complete and fascinating description of character traits for a random character.  Let’s do that now: “Has deliberately engaged in fire setting with the intention of causing serious damage.”  How cool is that!  That’s a friggin’ one-hour crime drama right there, and the character is already mapped out for you on the page in loving detail.

Let’s go again.  “Preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others.”  What, you can’t see my extra nose?  You can take that character trait and run a hundred different directions with it.

Oh, one more, please!  “Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan.”  In a sentence or two, you’ve established a protagonist and given him a problem that needs solving.  Neat, quick, and punchy.

The DSM works brilliantly as a rogues gallery, or as a source for richer and more complicated characters.  The DSM gives us believable, immediate problems for our characters to solve.

You could write for ten lifetimes and still not run out of story ideas if the DSM were your only source for characters.

Thank you.  Thank you, DSM 5.  I love you.

We’re experiencing a small outbreak of the measles here in California.  As of this writing, it’s only 100 or so cases, but measles are highly contagious.  It’s likely that a bunch more people will get sick.

In 1935, Muzafer Sherif conducted a series of experiments on the autokinetic effect.  If you’re placed in a dark room with only a single point of light at some distance, you will notice that that point of light seems to sway or diverge from its position over time.  Sherif placed individuals and small groups of people in rooms and asked them to tell him how far the light was moving.

Over time, groups of individuals modified their opinions after hearing other’s opinions.  One person says that the light is moving two inches, the other person says it is moving a foot; the first person changes his estimate so that the light is now moving four inches, and the second now changes his estimate accordingly.  The groups reached a group consensus on how far the light was moving.

The kicker, of course, is that the light wasn’t moving at all.  The people in the experiment were adjusting their own stated perceptions based on the opinions of others in the group.  This was one of the earliest experiments in social proofing.  Solomon Asch conducted some similar, fascinating experiments in the 1950s.

In college I took an infamous class called “Thinking about Thinking.”  In one lecture, Robert Nozick talked about a practical joke he played on an expectant mother who was of the crystal therapy set.

He said, “Sloppy thinking tends to congregate.  Where you find one bad idea, you’ll find others.  I was once speaking with this woman who lectured me at length on the healing power of crystal structures.  On a sudden whim, I told her that I was doing research that proved that a child’s personality was determined by the structure of mineral nearest the baby at the moment it was born.  Ergo, you have to make sure the right type of rock is present whenever a baby is born.  The woman didn’t question me.  She listened carefully and told me that the research was fascinating and that I should continue it.  She didn’t tell me, as was the case, that it was an utterly silly idea with no basis in fact.”

Now the Internet of infinite ideas has a dark side.  And it’s a dark side that is historically novel.

The Internet aggregates sloppy thinking.  And it does so at a magnitude impossible before its invention.

Facebook’s recently updated algorithm reinforces content that your friends have already liked.  It doesn’t matter whether the content is correct or not; it only matters whether the content is Liked and Shared.

Facebook is the rule, not the exception.  Regardless of whatever bizarre crackpot notion you might entertain, there are a hundred people on the Internet who have already started an online forum to discuss and support and social proof you in your weird assumptions.

Before the Internet, all your social proof had to come from local friends and family and neighbors.  People within earshot.  And so your chances of getting a diverging variety of proofing opinions was far higher.  But today, with the modern Internet, amateur groupthink replaces scientific consensus, and everyone with an open browser is a self-anointed expert.

Real experts address epidemics very differently than random people on the Internet.  John Snow’s chart suggests that the water supply near Broad Street in London was the source of  an 1854 cholera epidemic.  Jonas Salk’s 1952 polio vaccine was scientifically tested in the Francis field trials before it was made available to all schoolchildren.  And in 1983, Harald zur Hausen described the HPV viruses that can cause most cervical cancers.  His work paved the way for development of a vaccine.

I suggest that social proof of nonscientific principles predisposes a population to epidemics.  In other words, endemic misinformation is a necessary precondition for “eradicated” diseases to make a comeback.