“Where do you see yourself in The We and the They?”
On September 26, 2020, I hosted my first author talkback and had the opportunity to engage in a fantastic discussion with some of the most amazing people I know. It’s hard to believe that the book event happened four weeks ago, but I was so spellbound by the experience, I needed that time to do my due diligence in processing it all. When I first started drafting an event reflection, I quickly realized that I had a lot more to say than the quick little blurb I initially planned. But then again, brevity has never been the way that I show my wit. To pay homage to the inaugural book conversation of my dreams, I wanted to pull out all the stops. I even used my rudimentary (but improving!) iMovie skills to edit the raw Zoom recording footage into four main clips, the first of which being exquisitely displayed above. I’m so excited to reminisce and continue engaging with you all in this four-post-long The We and the They Author Talkback reflection series! (WARNING: All of my event videos will incorporate jazz music into the intros and outros. I love jazz, so this situation is inevitable. Sorry, not sorry.)
In this first segment, my fellow interlocutors and I considered the following questions: "Where do you see yourself in The We and the They? Which character do you relate to most?"
Throughout my academic career, in my English courses, my favorite class discussions were almost always about the character development within a given narrative. This isn’t to say that the settings of the stories didn’t fascinate me at all. Context is key in creating the mood and stakes of the circumstances. But for me, the characters are the ones that make a story compelling. We as readers, watchers, and general narrative absorbers are drawn in by the characters’ ability to reflect aspects of our collective humanity. That’s how we come to love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love characters and the worlds that they navigate.
Surreal is the only world I can use to describe how it felt to discuss the characters in The We and the They. As cliché as this sounds, Adelaide, Rose, Samson, Zenith, Jordan, Tabitha, Isaac, the rest of the We, and the They are profoundly real to me. If I felt so inclined, I could hold full conversations with each and all of them in my mind. However, it’s one thing to revel in the company of people I encounter in the realm of my imagination. It’s another completely new and exceedingly exciting thing to see how the characters come alive for other people. This part of the author talkback was interesting for me, but in the best way. I felt like I was talking about family and friends that I knew or characters that I admired from something I hadn’t written. I often had to remind myself that I wrote the book and I had the authority to articulate my characters’ histories, attributes, and motivations. But like people in “real life,” there is always something more to learn about characters in stories. I hope that by getting to know The We and the They characters better through dialogue, I’ll have the even more incredible chance to be better connected to other people through shared stories.
Also, just for fun, here’s the "Which The We and the They Character Are You?" quiz mentioned in the video. Please let me know which character you get in the comments!
