The Burning Stage

I plan to collect all my posts and essays about The Burning Stage here. Some of it will be copied over from my posts on Thinking but I hope to rewrite it as I go and make something comprehensive out of it. It won’t be a How-To guide but more a “This is what I did. maybe it will give you some ideas.”

Imagine, if you will, that you find yourself in the middle of a dark forest.  The trees gather round you and their branches sweep overhead, closing you in.  What you can see of the sky is darker still and you can see no stars in the blackness.  You are alone and cold.  But in the distance, you see a faint glow of reddish light.  As you stumble forward you find yourself in a clearing in the centre of which a fire burns brightly. People are gathered round, enjoying the warmth and companionship.  You sit yourself in the circle and watch the fire burning.  You notice how, at the heart it shines with brilliant intensity, the filmy blue fire consuming the resiny vapours given off by the logs.  Further from the centre of the blaze, red and orange flames dance, giving out the warmth and the glow that reflects in the faces of those watching. And, at the margins, hot coals give a comforting warmth that exists long after the fire itself has died away.  Behind us, the shadows watch from the trees.

Now imagine a theatre performance.  At its centre, the actors are alive with intense energy, projecting their interactions with each other outwards to engage an audience who are drawn forward by the humanity of what they are seeing.  We are together in one space. All are Experiencing the real warmth of human contact, actor to audience and audience to actor.  Our combined imaginations produce one drama.

What I am trying to describe here is a human experience, stripped of anything but the actor and the audience.

When I work with actors, I like to work in small, human scale places with the audience as close to the actors as possible. I try to do away with anything that does not belong to this experience.  That includes lighting, music, complicated sets and effects.

This stripped back, unplugged, intense form of performance I call The Burning Stage.

This is not a prescription or a set of rules.  It does not denigrate any other performance or style of performance.  Every performance and style is valid and will work for some but not others. I merely offer this as a collection of thoughts for anyone who may find themselves bogged down in the minutiae of theatre making or who find some current work unsatisfying and distant.  And, of course, thousands of theatre companies, large and small, are working in this way already. I love all forms of theatre and performance and admire everyone who plunges into this world but this is how I’ve worked over the last fifty or so years and is, in the end, how I like to work with actors and audiences.  That’s all.

This is how others have described The Burning Stage:

The Burning Stage is a unique and experimental approach to theatre developed by Peter John Cooper. It is influenced by Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. Here are some key aspects of Burning Theatre:

Immersive Experience: Burning Theatre aims to create a truly immersive experience for both the audience and the actors. It challenges the actors to fully commit to the limited space they share with the audience, fostering a deeper connection.  Here the experience is focused and committed.  Both bring their concentration and attention to this moment. The stage becomes a holy place and is treated with respect by both participant groups.

Triangle of Responsibility: In Burning Theatre, the responsibility for the performance is shared equally among the writer, actor, and audience. This creates a social ritual where each performance is a unique and collaborative event.

Raw and Unfiltered: The style emphasizes raw, unfiltered performances that strip away traditional theatrical conventions, focusing on the raw energy and emotion of the actors.

To sum it up in another way, Burning Theatre is an Attitude or a mindset.  It does not require special training or experience. Beware anyone who tries to teach it to you.  It will be something you can work out for yourself.  It does, however, require commitment from all parties involved.  And these suggestions are ways in which I try to generate these attitudes with the actors and draw in audiences many of whom will be excluded by the weird formality that we love to generate in the theatre.  This might provide us with warmth and security but tends to alienate others.  Perhaps, more fundamentally, theatre is expensive these days.  Productions cost huge amounts to stage and ticket prices are, accordingly, out of reach of many audience members and prevent a theatre going habit forming.  Theatre becomes an occasional treat. Part of the reason for this, I guess, is because traditional theatres see themselves in competition with films and video games.  They are creating extravagant spectacles and star vehicles. But, maybe, our unplugged approach will enable more people to get involved either as theatre makers or audiences.  By doing away with the need to pursue bigger and better special effects we can concentrate on the golden USP of theatre – imagination.

The unplugged approach also releases us from the movie conventions that force the attention of the audience to experience pre-set emotions by the use of music or mood lighting.  Movies insist that the audience looks at this thing or follows that scene through the lens of a camera. At the Burning Stage, audiences are freed of the constraints imposed by the film editor or director. Their emotional response is directly related to the emotional intensity of the Drama.  It is not emotionally manufactured or imposed.  And if the audience finds the tragedy funny or the humour sad, that is a genuine, unforced response.  So be it.

And here is another thought.  There is a tendency for the arts to deliberately distance themselves from an audience.  “Look at us.  We are clever and brightly lit.  With music and effects to make us even grander.  And you are not.”  This is the Theatre as Spectacle. This is what’s known in the trade as a power gradient.  I don’t like power gradients.

Cooper's approach is designed to challenge both performers and audiences, pushing the boundaries of traditional theatre to create a more engaging and dynamic experience.

Let’s start with the stage.

For me, the crucial thing is that actors are seen and heard as human beings.  This means that stages are best when small and intimate.  This is only one step away from street theatre and stand-up comedy and is only different in that we are portraying drama, be it comedy, tragedy or farce.  And we are allowing time for the audience to focus on the interactions.  For this approach, I prefer to work in the round or in traverse.  Here the audiences are aware of both the actor and the audience members sitting opposite.  At the same time actors are conscious of their audience.  They feel a personal responsibility for them.  On a small, enclosed stage the actor is not constrained to perform facing in one direction.  They face the natural direction of the action.  Importantly, they can address the other actors they are interacting with.  The magic then arises because the audience call the shots.  They are not compelled to look in one direction.  They are free to experience every detail of what is going on.  There are no filmic close ups. Actor and audience are conscious of being in the same space together. And they are free to follow the fortunes of whichever character they choose to.  In this way, understanding and emotions derive truthfully from the performance and is not imposed by the director.

In my direction, I always insist that the stage is treated with respect.  There is a clearly delineated stage area.  Maybe the size of a carpet or a drugget.  Nobody walks here unless they are committed to their character.  I describe the feeling they should experience when crossing the threshold like being struck by a lightning bolt.  The performer should transform from actor to character in a split second. For this reason, the stage is kept clear except the very times when the characters are present.

One other advantage of small, intimate acting areas that I can do away with sound reinforcement. Actors’ voices should be able to reach any audience member. There is no need for microphones and associated sound gear except for hearing loops. Sound reinforcement produces another power gradient and we know what I think of them.

For more ideas about these sorts of stages click back to have a look at my blog where I talk about writing for the stage. “Choose Life. Choose the Drama of Life. part 3 about writing for the Drama”

The Classical Unities

Although the so-called Classical Unities of Time, Space and Action are artificial notions dreamed up by Renaissance intellectuals, I find them a useful starting place in thinking about dramas on the Burning Stage. Gian Trissino claimed that they originated with Aristotle but nowadays we know that is a bit of self-dramatizing.  However, the Unities do perform a useful focusing notion for dramatists that enables their work to coincide with the Burning Stage idea. Through the unity of time, we can experience the events of the stage as they happen before us.  It removes scene breaks and time jumps.  We are aware of the reality of the actor and the fact that it takes this amount of time to get from here to here or consider this or that course of action.  Of course, the writer will condense and compress but we do gain a sense that this could have happened to a living and breathing human being in the setting of the piece.  Unity of Action means we follow one thread or intellectual idea.  Not so useful if you want to demonstrate a complex set of relationships but it’s still useful focus for a playwright to bear in mind.  Unity of Place is an almost sine qua non on the Burning Stage, “We are here and we will unravel the magic here and now.”  Of course, all of these are artificial constraints but they are useful place to start to develop the attitude of The Burning Stage.

The Triangle of Responsibility

I have written about this elsewhere at length so I won’t go into it in too great detail. In short I suggest that the experience of Drama is divided in three equal parts. The writer, the actor and the audience share an equal responsibility for the eventual outcome of the production. The writer devises and orders the ideas, the actor communicates to the audience and the audience contributes the attention and makes the decisions about how they will watch the piece. There is no power gradient here.

A New Audience

So, how do we cope with the disappointment of an audience who come expecting a cast of thousands, glitter balls and extravagant special effects?  The answer is, by the intensity of the performance and the demands on the imagination of the participants and watchers.  And don’t forget, just because it’s intense it doesn’t mean it can’t have a grandeur and scope.  We can still tackle the great dramas of the Greek Classical canon.  Shakespeare, Comedies, farces all can be performed with this approach just as well as Becket or Genet.  The main strength, though, is that The Burning Stage can be a local phenomenon.  It works just as well in the upstairs room in a pub as in a studio theatre.  A small space can provide the seed bed to grow a new audience.  Of course, the limiting factor is, as always, money. But it can be done. And is being done.  And, if we really believe in this approach, it is up to us to persuade funding bodies that this is a worthwhile way to distribute public funding.

The Burning Stage #2

One Story, One Stage, One Day

I touched on the idea behind the Classical Unities in my last post:  Unity of Place (The action should occur in one location), Unity of Time (Over a single day) and Unity of Action (Follow one event or course of action).  The chap who first devised these in 1514, author and critic Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478 – 1550), reckoned they originated with Aristotle but, as Aristotle’s Poetics weren’t actually translated properly until years later, I think we can discount that as poetic licence. The problem is , because of that, the Classical Unities are seen as having little value and any attempt to adhere to them has resulted in plays of an unbelievably stultifying nature. Playwrights avoid them.  After all, they reason, Shakespeare didn’t subscribe to the Unities in his plays one bit and he got by OK.

Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478 – 1550) holding his Poetic Licence.

Despite that, however, I think the Unities are somehow a natural manifestation of play making.  What Trissino saw were emergent qualities of the drama.  And they are a useful thing to bear in mind; if not to follow slavishly.

First, let me clarify something about the Triangle of Engagement in which I envision an equal responsibility for the drama from the writer, the actor and the audience.  The audience sees an interaction on the stage between the characters.  This is mediated by the actors and so their physical reality for the audience results in a sort of meta-interaction.  At the same time there is an interaction between actors, audience and the playwright.  This is a sort of meta-meta-interaction where the audience responds to the playwright and the way they have shaped the story to convey a narrative.  These interactions are all present on the stage at one time and all are real.  We are, at the same time, conscious of the characters, the actors playing them, the writer who has formed them as well as the reactions of other audience members.

The point being that, in the intimacy of the Burning stage, all protagonists: audience, actors, writer, are conscious of the each other and, even if the audience suspends their disbelief enough to follow the story of the drama, they are still conscious of the work of the actor and of the machinations of the writer.  Consequently, the limitations of our physical world impose themselves.  Time and distance are still same for all of us.  It takes this amount of time for an actor to cross a room.  If they leave by one door, we question how long it will take them to re-enter and what has happened to make them re-enter from another.  What is the character doing whilst waiting for an entrance? Consciously or subconsciously, we are following that meta reality.   Thus, the Unities can become less abstract, intellectual restrictions but more emergent, natural properties of the story being told.  And even Shakespeare was conscious of this.  On his stage he could shift focus but remain, largely, in one place.  Thus: “Another part of the Battlefield,” “Another part of the Garden” and so on.  Even if these aren’t strictly Unities of Place, they do not require a break in the action for the audience.   The drama might occur in any fantasy location but it must be consistent and obey the inescapable laws of physics as we know them. As an audience member I do not want to be wearied by continually shifting place and time, or having to understand different realities, and having them signalled to me: Now we are Here. Now we are somewhen else.

That’s not to say I don’t like to play with these unities when I am writing but I remain conscious of the reality, the meta-reality and the meta-meta-reality that the whole enterprise is subject to.  Occasionally it is fun to fold two time-lines together, to coincide two places, the let more than one course of action resonate off another.  As wise people always remark “Rules are made to be broken” but, I think understanding what natural rules and restrictions there may be, make the breaking more artistically satisfying.

What’s more, there are a couple of definite advantages in using the Classical Unities as a guide to making theatre.  One is that it avoids the temptation to show scene after scene after scene using a sort filmic language that can be wearying on stage and lead to a more alienated response.  This alienation I call Spectacle. This dodging about from location to location also implies that we are in the hands of the writer and director who show us what details of place and time they want us to see and how they want us to feel about it.  It becomes a Power Gradient in which the audience is manipulated into one response to the narrative. There is less room for engagement.  The audience can only sit back and watch as the parade passes by. 

For any writer brought up with the language of film, thinking in terms of the Classical Unities, may help to produce a crisper, more direct form of narrative.  On the Burning Stage it is better to show us one setting in great detail rather than a sketchy attempt to reproduce a huge series of landscapes. It is using the very thing that is unique to theatre, a living experience, to its best advantage. In a Burning Stage drama, the audience is physically present in the bedroom as Othello murders Desdemona. Our response is immediate and genuine.

The other reason to follow the Classical Unities is to avoid a sort of nudge-nudge wink-wink cheap gag which breaks the fourth wall convention.  In The Burning Theatre, there is no fourth wall. The actor does not refer to the audience either in character or out of it because that is to say in effect, “I have no faith in your commitment to the piece” and “I know you don’t believe any of this nonsense.” This can degrade any genuine emotional response into a forced humour.  And while this might have its place. Anything that breaks the fourth wall has the danger of being obvious and lumpy. Set off on a journey and allow the audience to accompany you.

The great advantage in the Burning Stage is the intensity and focus given by the audience. This enables the writer and actors to explore characters and situations further and deeper than they might in traditional settings.  We are told that a person’s attention span is 15 minutes.  But my experience, backed up by contemporary research by Kings College London shows that, provided that there is a subject that the audience can identify with, an individual can and will concentrate for much longer than this. Given the right environment and a feeling that the experience is direct and personal the audience member will want to follow the narrative to the end without being constantly harassed by scene changes and effects. My advice to writers might be:  Don’t be afraid to experiment with the Classical Unities.  Keep the ideas flowing.  Let the drama expand at its own speed and engagement will follow.

Are you a writer or theatre goer? How do you respond to a drama that takes time to unfold? Do you get bored easily or are you pleased when a writer treats you as someone who can follow a narrative without being prodded to stay awake every few seconds?

The Burning Stage #3

Up Close and Personal

A village pub in the remote west of Ireland.  A young man bursts in and claims to have murdered his father by hitting him with a shovel.  The inhabitants of that place are shocked but there is grudging admiration for such a man of action.  Soon the girls are falling in love with him and coming to blows over him.  But then the young man’s father appears, still alive.  Now the village turns against the young hero.  They thought highly of him as a great story teller but now he appears to be a liar and a failure in the very thing he was boasting about.  So, in order to regain his standing in their eyes, he again attacks his father leaving him for dead.  This time the villagers are disgusted by his cold-blooded actions.   In the end the father recovers. And, after a reconciliation, Father and Son leave to wander the world togetheer..

The Murder weapon

One of the great advantages of working in a Burning Stage style is the fact that the drama occurs in a very intimate setting.  Close enough to the audience that the actors are within touching distance.  Or, at least human-sized to the watcher.  There is something about this very aspect that makes the drama so compelling.

The play I described above was a turning point for me in my life.   And for that very reason.

It was a school trip to the theatre.  The old Salisbury Playhouse.  It was a converted chapel as so many theatres were (and still are).  They were presenting “The Playboy of the Western World.”  A drama about small village life in the far West of Ireland.  There was something about the energy and the language, the proximity and sheer reality of the actors, which made me know that this was something I was going to have to do myself. 

An odd thing.  My father was an engineer on a farm.  He always wanted to follow his father into being a blacksmith but his mother was strongly against this and insisted on him having a white-collar job.  In the end he rebelled, ran away to London, suffered a severe road accident and, when the war intervened, he was able to take up his mechanical life.  It is, perhaps not so strange, that my trajectory was similar.  Having got over wanting to be a train driver and RAF pilot, I felt I wanted to work on farms like my father. My school, and my mother felt differently and wanted me to go into accountancy or teaching.  But then - the school trip - and my future was sealed.  In the end I was thrown out of school, hitch hiked to London because that’s the only place I knew where theatre happened.  Slept rough, got a job in a West End Theatre and the rest, as they say, is history.  Incidentally, I loved my father very much and never wanted to kill him with a shovel so any parallel stops right there.

The fact is that something whispered in my ear that that was to be my life and thus it was.

Amid the glamour and glitz of the West End in the Swinging Sixties, I still felt slightly dissatisfied.  There was something still to be achieved. I eventually trained as a teacher and learned all those important things like the science of people - Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychology.  And, returning to the theatre, I knew that it was to be the personal, human sized aspects of the theatrical experience that mattered.  It was an exploration of the world through human experience. It was never about me; what I wanted to explore was not what I waas familiar with but what I didn’t know.  “The Playboy of the Western World” was as far from my experience as could be, in a language I could barely follow. But it spoke to me personally of what it was to be human. 

And being human is crucial.  Being a writer has big responsibilities.  Those of us who are driven to it have a duty to use the impetus for good.  By which I mean furthering human contact.  In the days of the distancing effect of social media we can be a catalyst for bringing people together.  It is not about me.  It is me using any skills I have acquired to create a tiny corner of a better, more human and humane world.  Thus, I do not write about my personal issues.  Any issues I have with the world are mine and mine alone.  I want to talk about what is universal. I have always been wary of Issues.  An Issue is what makes you different from me.  It forms a power gradient. I want the drama to describe how you and I are the same. 

If you scroll back to read my previous essay about Writing for the Drama #7 (Choose Drama. Choose Society: part 7) you will see that I argue that issue-based theatre is, generally, a drama devoid of characters.  What characters there are, exist only to be the mouthpiece of the writer. They do not grow organically out of the events and interactions portrayed.

So, I always seek the exotic.  As I writer I choose to write about what I don’t know rather than what I do know.  I want to find out things about the world and share them with my audience.  Thus, I have written plays about people with unusual lives.  About remarkable men and women.  Are they so different from us?  About people from different cultures.  All the time I want to learn more about other human beings to try and distil that very human thing that unites us all.

Back in the sixties and seventies we could envisage a future where everyone would be networked together for the common good.  It was called the Global Village.  Then the internet intervened and made that come true.  But, sadly, instead of uniting people it drove them off into their own rabbit holes and reach for their six shooters to ward off anyone they couldn’t understand.  Now we need the Global Village more than ever.  Somewhere people can nod to each other in the street as they pass by.  Places where we can sit and talk and listen.  

And, when I have directed plays, I have wanted them to be close to the audience.  Within touching distance so that we share the same things.  The themes can be enormous. Cataclysmic or domestic.  Either way, they are about the human response to them.  When I was appointed to be Artistic Director of different companies, I deliberately set out to produce theatre in just such unlikely settings:  Village halls, churches, small studios and arts centres.    Adaptations of Classic novels, a play from Russia, retellings of Don Quixote, Frankenstein, Hiawatha and The Thousand and One Nights. A play about a car factory, about young homeless people living in a caravan.  These we performed in the round or in unusual arrangements within these settings.   Some I wrote myself, others I commissioned new writers to develop. 

I also worked with some far-sighted designers who, with the minimum of technical requirements could make these unlikely spaces into somewhere the audience could notice what was happening and feel at once homely but where the unusual could happen. 

Peter Brook changed the way I thought about theatre.

When Peter Brook wrote about creating a new sort of theatre in the “The Empty Space” he was describing of the sort of ways theatre could be more relevant to its audiences. Those ideas still resonate through everything I am writing here.  For me, it is not necessarily about making new dramas, but about creating a new form of theatre that will populate those spaces. 

Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH CBE (21 March 1925 – 2 July 2022)

“The Empty Space” Brook, Peter (1968). The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate. ISBN 978-0-684-82957-9

Have you read “The Empty Space”? What other books or theatre visits have inspired you? Has theatre changed your life in any way?

The Burning Stage #4

Writing for the Burning Stage

Talking about the Burning Stage, let me return to something I wrote earlier in Writing Drama.  And ask the question “Why do you write?”  Ok, there are thousands of answers to that but let me put it on a more comprehensive scale.  Why do so many of us have the urge to write?  Poetry, plays, stories? Why do we create anything?  At all? Where, indeed, does creativity come from?  And how does that relate to the human-sized Burning Stage? I must emphasise I am not a psychologist or philosopher or sociologist so my answers, such as they are, originate entirely from my own experiences.  But, bear with me and let’s give it a go anyway.

I’ll start with my daughter’s cat, Tinkerbelle.  Well, why not?  It would be an excuse to put up a picture of her if she’ll stand still long enough and thus have the post go viral.

Tinkerbelle

She’s quite a good hunter when she can be bothered.  She’s an indoor cat so it isn’t (I hope) mice she’s after but the little red laser dot that keeps appearing under her nose.  She flattens herself to the carpet and inches forward ready to pounce.  But then, some superior force causes the dot to disappear.  If she’s got the energy to wait, she will crouch there ready to spring at a moment’s notice.

The point I am making here is that she hunts using her memory of where her prey went last time she looked.  And, like any other hunting animal, she uses her memory of the past to begin the hunt.  She lives in a present informed by the past.

What she is not so good at, is thinking of the future:  Asking herself where the red dot will come from next.  Her lack of future forecasting means that she is entirely uncertain about where dinner will come from if she eats all her breakfast now.  Her knowledge of the future is limited to her awareness of the past.  She knows where her litter tray was this morning and she expects it still to be there later.  It is said that some animals can forecast earthquakes or sense changes in the weather but this is more likely down to subtle atmospheric changes humans are not sensitive enough to detect.

The little tweak that humans and higher primates have is the ability to forecast the future.  When hunting, we not only know where the prey went but we can extrapolate where it might appear from in a while.  So, hunters will lie in wait, not where they last saw their prey, but where it might come from afterwards.

We humans, on the other hand, see a deer disappear behind a rock and a hunter will go to the other end of the rock to pounce on it as it emerges.  But we can also add in another element.  We have to reckon on the fact that from behind the rock, our prey may dash off in a different direction unseen by us.  This depends on whether we have learnt from past observations that this is possible.  If we are hungry and need to eat, we cannot afford the energy to wait where we expect on the deer’s reappearance and hope for the best. We apply a statistical analysis of the possibilities and conserve our energy by hiding out near the Most Likely place for it to reappear.

So, what seems to have given humans the edge in this world is the ability to forecast the future and to bet on the outcome.   We are able to use the past to extrapolate the future.  And this is a transferable skill that applies to farming (which is basically hunting carried on by lazy people) or any other undertaking.  With the transition to farming, if we saw a particularly fruitful berry bush that we have marked out as being worth returning to, we might settle down near it to look after it. Perhaps observing where new bushes grow and burying berries in more favourable locations.  Our success stems from our ability to make calculations and bet on the future.

And we have another element to add to this.  Human beings, for all sorts of reasons, are social creatures.  We need to operate together to nurture our young or to look after the sick or elderly who might still be useful to the tribe.  This gives us the ability to empathise with others.  To think ourselves into their heads. We understand their pain and discomfort because it will be very much like our own.  And we can act on this empathy for good and ill.

Thereby our hunting ability advances another notch forward.  We can extrapolate the future based on our knowledge of the past allied with our understanding of what is going on in the head of our prey.  The hunter thinks themselves into the mind of the prey.  Our efficiency goes up accordingly.  And while, in the twenty first century, we may not spend the day tracking down deer, we still have these tools at our disposal for other uses.  And, like a cat, we exercise what skills we have to keep our claws sharp.  We exercise our memory. Develop our forecasting skills and we practise our empathy by living and thinking with others.

Add in a soupçon of cooperative working and a dollop of language and we have a complete ready meal.

Now our empathetic awareness means that we have a desire to share that delicious skill feast with others.  The skilled hunter will relate the details of the hunt, not only demonstrating their actions but also, those of the deer they have been chasing.  The hunter relates how they entered the mind of the deer and how they felt and what they saw through the deer’s eyes.  The journey of the hunt becomes a story told from the point of view of the deer and how it has been outwitted by the skill of the hunter.

And, of course this applies to all the other aspects of daily living for us in the 21st century.  We can tell stories through the eyes of others.

These stories are created from transactions or interactions between characters using the knowledge we have of the past, our empathy with them and our extrapolations of the future.  A story teller uses hunting skills to enable their journey to progress and reach an end.

A little while ago in Writing for the Drama about creating characters, I suggested that a character is made up of many different strands and creating a character is merely a question of weaving these character traits together in odd sequences.  Following this pattern, any character you create will be true because somewhere out there will be someone who matches your selection.  The writer’s success depends on hunting down a character’s past and extrapolating their future.  And this, I think is where story telling can run into the mud.  Too often, we rely on a character we have seen or heard of before.  We have a character in mind but we do not apply enough analysis to unravel all the strands that may be possible.   The more strands our character has, the more likely they will appear authentic to our listeners.  The more likely they are to strike a chord and apply in a real world.

This sort of awareness contributes to the idea of the Burning Stage. The Burning Stage thrives on story telling that is compressed but complex. It is essentially a human sized endeavour. The characters in our story walk towards the future carrying the past on their backs.

I have often written for historical or adapted from characters in literature.  Here, I need to write back to front.  I know their end point, which must be true to the historical record or the literature they come from, and then follow back all their strands of character traits to the beginning of the story.

This is also why it is unwise or less than fruitful to write about ourselves.  We seldom have the self-awareness to create a whole, rounded character based on our own experience.  We will follow a bare strand, most likely an issue we have, and not be brave enough to have all the other stuff at our disposal. Better is, I suggest, to create another character that contains some of these issues we want to portray and leave writing about ourselves to others.