The Druid Scholar

This post is NOT spoiler free.

Newly unemployed (by choice) and feeling unwell (not so much by choice), I embarked on an endeavor to find some entertainment to which I had high interest and low levels of previous awareness. Basically I wanted to watching something new in which to indulge instead of my steady rotation of comfort media.

I am writing a novel—or…planning one I’ve had on the mind for a good, long while—and my main characters are all PhD students. I have struggled a little with some of their character motivations, mostly because I am a borderline perfectionist and I need to know exactly what their topics of study are and why, and how that will ultimately be relevant to the story. I have inklings of all of it, but in order to do this story justice, their characterizations need to be firm.

Queue Netflix’s “Love at First Sight.” This movie is based on the book of the same (but longer) name, The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight. I’ve seen this book cross my feeds a number of times, usually with pretty solid reviews, but I don’t read much romance so it never quite made it to my (overfull) TBR list. Still, I took note, so when I saw the film was based on the book, I was more than happy to watch it.

The two main characters, Oliver and Hadley, are college students. Oliver studies statistics (which comes through as theme in the film) at Yale, and Hadley is undecided at NYU [incidentally, both schools where peaceful protestors have been arrested this week for opposing an ongoing genocide]. This status in their choices of major, or inability to make one, is a significant reflection on their characterization.

What we study, or choose to study—or choose not to study—can generally be considered an extension of our personality in some form. Characters cannot be assigned majors willy-nilly. It has to make sense. This is an important choice, one I changed my mind on a solid six times before I got my BA, and there is always some kind of motivation behind the choice. Maybe someone majors in economics because they want to be rich, or chooses law because they don’t want to disappoint their parents. Or maybe someone majors in literature because they love stories, or botany because they’re obsessed with fungi. No matter the situation, there is always a motivation. A major or degree doesn’t always speak to personality, but it generally speaks of a motivation. It is, after all, an investment in our futures (or so we hope).

And those motivations are absolutely essential for a story.

What motivates us in pursuit of an area of knowledge or skill acquisition? Play guitar to impress the girl. Learn to swim so you don’t look silly in front of your friends. Study organic chemistry so you can synthesize party drugs safely. Sure, sometimes we just learn things for the heck of it, but by and large, we are all motivated by something.

What motivates Oliver to study Statistics?

• His mother was always sick when he was young.
• His listed fears are:
  • the dark
  • germs
  • surprises
• His mother is dying.
  • He loves his mother.
    • Despite watching his mother dying, he sees how much love his parents have for each other. Oliver is a romantic, and he wants to find a love of his own out in the world, but the world is an uncertain place, and numbers are not

How does the study of statistics ease Oliver’s fears? Every single one of these fears speaks to a fear of the unknown, a trauma response related to his mother’s battle with cancer. We never know what’s out there, what is on that door handle we just touched, what’s around the corner, what is lurking in the dark. Statistics, then, acts for Oliver as a coping mechanism. He can assuage his fears by steeping them in numbers. Firm, unwavering, calculable numbers.

But Oliver still wants so badly to believe in all the good love has to offer. So when Oliver chooses his course of study, and he decides on “The Statistical Probably of Love at First Sight.” (What a thesis, am I right?) This allows him some actually pretty intriguing insight throughout the film as he is the kind of person to bring out numbers when he should be touching on his feelings because numbers are safe and feelings are most certainly not. Oliver didn’t want to be surprised by love, or by potentially being unable to find it, so he looked to the maths for comfort. I do wonder if, statistically, he was more likely to find it because he was open to the data. There must, I think, be some level of synchronicity or manifestation in the very act of looking for that kind of data. Either way, the surprise that was Hadley was something he learned to adequately navigate by the end of the story.

Conversely, Hadley remains undecided in her course of study, carrying around a book she has yet to read, which honestly, mood. Her three listed fears are mayonnaise, small spaces, and dentists. Unlike Oliver, her fears don’t seem to stem from the same level of trauma that Oliver holds from his mother’s long-term illness, so these fears don’t seem to play much of a role in her reasons for not choosing a major. However, the movie adds a fourth consideration to her fears list in something she hadn’t thought to afraid of: divorce. When Hadley’s parents suddenly announced their divorce with her father moving across the ocean to England, she was truly shaken. Prior to the divorce, Hadley had maintained a close relationship with her father. The change in situation rocked her to the core. This is reflected in her lack of direction as a college student. Everything that had once seemed clear and certain had changed, and there was so much confusion and sorrow in her life at that point that making a choice to a path forward in her future was not possible until her relationship with her father was mended.

So these seemingly simple character details actually stand in to say quite a lot about who the characters are and what they want out of life.

How does that apply to my characters? How can I reflect this depth of characterization in the choices my student characters are making? How can I use their studies to show who these characters are, what motivates them in their lives and towards the resolution of the plot? Things to consider.

I guess I have to go write now…

---

Currently Reading

---

Thank you for reading! – Pixie Rose