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clearing things up - Steadfast character

July 10th, 2005 · 4 Comments

And now let’s clear things up for the Steadfast character…

Steadfast Wall 1Imagine you’re in a room that’s going to start filling up with water. It starts out very slow. So you put in a row of bricks and stand on it. But then, the room starts filling up faster. So you put up some more bricks and stand on top of those. But now the water is pouring in! So you keep building it and building it — your head just barely above the water line.

But it gets to a point where you can’t build it any higher. You’re standing on these four rows of bricks and there isn’t room for more. Either the pressure of the water is going to be so great that it will knock the whole thing down (Failure) or the water will seep over, and break one of the room wall’s down - relieving the room of pressure (Success). These are the stakes for a Steadfast character.

These two examples of Justification are different than talking about Acceleration - which is where you get into where it feels like for the character to build up or tear down their justifications. More on that in the next post.

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    4 responses so far ↓

    • 1 Shawn Scarber // Jul 12, 2005 at 12:22 pm

      These are great examples, Jim. Thanks!

    • 2 Jim // Jul 13, 2005 at 10:30 am

      Glad you like them! Thanks for the kind words.

    • 3 Tim McPike // Aug 12, 2005 at 8:31 am

      Great posts in general, Jim, and your illustrations and analogies really help clarify the concepts (I smell Dramatica-How-To Book). This particular post seems to me to be illustrating a Steadfast Stop character (waiting for external situation to stop). So how about a Steadfast Start Character?

    • 4 jim // Aug 15, 2005 at 11:26 am

      I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, but if not, check out this post: http://jrhull.typepad.com/story/2005/08/well_or_wall_fo.html

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