W-Two Worlds Apart- How one K-drama validated my entire perspective as a writer.

 W-Two Worlds Apart

Image from Netflix

How one K-drama validated my entire perspective as a writer.

It is easy to think, as a writer, that we are somehow Gods, holding the Universe of our imagined worlds in our creative hands. This is a dangerous belief for we are not gods, but care-takers. 

I once heard an author-tuber say something I have never forgotten and, equally, have never forgiven. Now, don't get me wrong, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for this particular author-tuber, though I freely admit I have no specific desire to read her work. I mean her no disrespect and she's certainly free to have her own opinion. That doesn't mean I can't vehemently disagree with what she said.

The offending comment?  They're only characters, people! They're not real and they do what YOU tell them to so get over yourselves.

Heresy!

I don't know about other authors but, to me, my characters are not simply cardboard cutouts on a storyboard. They're real, with real backstories, real lives, and real thoughts, fears, feelings, goals, and aspirations. They love. They hate. They laugh. They weep. Don't tell me they're not real!

They should be real. If they're not real, if you can't literally see them walking, talking, eating, sleeping, and living, how can you write them? It doesn't mean you have to describe every single detail of their lives, but you at least have to understand who they are so that the things you describe are real to them and thus, by default, to your reader. In my humble opinion, the greatest joy I can experience is when a character begins to act independently and begins to drive the story on their own. They're the ones writing the story. Their story. Isn't that what it's all about?

This brings me to W-Two Worlds Apart. This Korean drama put in vivid cinematic imagery what I've believed all along: the characters are real and they inhabit a world independent of the portion of that world which is encapsulated in our stories. When we fade to black and skip to another scene, it doesn't mean they were sitting idly in the interim, twiddling their thumbs while waiting for us to pick up again. They were still busy. Living. Exactly as we expect our readers to believe. 

Did we leave our protagonist in the middle of a journey to meet up with him again at his destination? What was he doing in the meantime? Did he simply teleport to the castle at which he then arrives? Of course not. It is rightly assumed he was journeying until he got there and that the reason we jumped ahead was that that portion of the journey was irrelevant to the story we're telling.

We also have a responsibility to our characters, to be logical, to fill in the right blanks, to permit them to fulfill the purpose we gave them, and to let them choose their own destiny if ours doesn't match who they are.

W-Two Worlds Apart centers around a webtoon character who challenges the story he's given, the one that was written for him, and who, in the process, becomes self-aware. It's a grueling story and frightening in places. I've heard it described as a head-f*ck, and that's an apt description. It refutes the idea of the writer as god and emphasizes instead that the writer has an obligation to the characters, to give them both purpose and logic. To paraphrase the protagonist of W-Two Worlds Apart, 'events must have context'.  If your story has no context to the events you throw at your character, both the character and the reader will reject the story and its consequences.

If you're one of those blessed writers who honestly believe they are simply the narrator of real stories, belonging to real characters, even if they inhabit an imaginary world, then you ought seriously to check out this drama. It is well worth the subtitles!

W- Two Worlds Apart (Netflix)