The Science of Writing Characters

Using Psychology to Create Compelling Fictional Characters

Kira-Anne Pelican

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501357237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

The Science of Writing Characters is a comprehensive handbook to help writers create compelling and psychologically-credible characters that come to life on the page. Drawing on the latest psychological theory and research, ranging from personality theory to evolutionary science, the book equips screenwriters and novelists with all the techniques they need to build complex, dimensional characters from the bottom up. Writers learn how to create rounded characters using the 'Big Five' dimensions of personality and then are shown how these personality traits shape action, relationships and dialogue. Throughout The Science of Writing Characters, psychological theories and research are translated into handy practical tips, which are illustrated through examples of characters in action in well-known films, television series and novels, ranging from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri and Game of Thrones to The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Goldfinch. This very practical approach makes the book an engaging and accessible companion guide for all writers who want to better understand how they can make memorable characters with the potential for global appeal.

1

Introduction

Behind me, on the shelves in my study, are dozens of books. There are several shelves of my favourite novels, bound and published screenplays, stage plays and collections of short stories. Open their pages and living breathing characters take our hands and pull us into their worlds. We travel with them to new places, form new relationships and encounter new things. We step outside our everyday lives, take different points of view and experience life events that we might never have had otherwise. We’re taken on moving emotional journeys that we continue to think about even after we close the last pages of our book and return the volume to our shelves.

Another shelf in my library is dedicated to books on writing. Books which remind us that characters are at the centre of our stories, and that we need to make them rich and complex with interesting emotional lives. Many of these books make other claims too: that characters are transformed by their experiences; that they must start their journeys pursuing external goals, and return home having fulfilled previously unrecognized internal needs. For many years in my work as a writer, researcher and script consultant, I’ve been wondering about the validity of these claims. Are they culturally propagated, formulaic inventions, or could it be that these narrative patterns reflect fundamental truths about our human nature? If so, is the scientific study of the human mind best placed to answer these questions? Furthermore, given how ill-defined our understanding of what is required to make a character rich, complex and emotionally compelling, is there any more that we can learn from psychology that could help shed light on this process?

It may be that our lack of detailed, procedural knowledge about how to write memorable, compelling and believable characters is best explained by the fact that writing great characters is an intuitive talent that few are born with, but most aren’t. Or it may be, as I’m going to argue in this book, that we find it hard to pinpoint what exactly needs to go into creating a great character because we haven’t yet been thinking about characters in terms of the right framework, and that this is why when talking about characters, our vocabulary is limited to vague generalities like ‘complex’, ‘rich’, ‘nuanced’, ‘engaging’, ‘thin’, ‘flat’, ‘strong’ and ‘cartoonlike’. This, of course, doesn’t mean that if we improve our framework we are handed the right craft skills to make everyone a good writer, but it may help deepen our understanding of the elements required to write a compelling character, and enrich our psychological vocabularies. This book sets out to propose this new framework for writers.

Who is this book for?

This book is for everyone who creates fictional characters and has an interest in using insights from psychological research to create more engaging characters. It is for screenwriters, playwrights and novelists, writers of games, short stories and radio plays. It may also be useful for directors, development consultants, literary consultants and script editors whose work involves analyzing and developing fictional characters. My hope is that this book will span the varied needs of writers just starting out, university students looking for a core text on characterization and professionals wanting to broaden their insights.

This is not to say that I’ve written a book for all writers. It is evident that some writers have an instinct for the mimetic arts and understand how to capture character. Many prefer to work intuitively, and find that more analytical approaches impinge on their creativity. However, for the majority of writers, the process of developing a character is a craft skill that needs to be honed through years of practice. For these writers, additional knowledge about what is required to create believable and interesting complexity in a character can be immensely useful. If you are one of these writers, you may already be writing characters that are fairly well constructed but missing some as yet intangible quality to make them stand out from the crowd. You may be wondering how you should go about addressing notes on your latest draft that suggest that your characterization needs a bit more work. Or you may already be interested in psychology and looking for a new approach towards character development. Whichever kind of these writers you are, I’ve written this book for you.

What makes a great character?

Before we go any further and start trying to define what makes a compelling character, we first need to ask if there is any consensus about which characters are great. Given that many of the same characters appear on list after list compiled by critics, or chosen by public vote, the answer appears to be yes. Beginning with film characters, among those most frequently appearing on lists by the American Film Institute, Empire magazine, Filmsite and Ranker.com are Indiana Jones (from the franchise beginning with Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981), Ellen Ripley (the Alien franchise, 1979–97), James Bond (from the franchise beginning with Dr No, 1962), Clarice Starling (The Silence of the Lambs, 1991 and Hannibal, 2001) and Han Solo (the Star Wars franchise, 1977–). From television and streaming content, we can add Tony Soprano (The Sopranos, 1999–2007), Fleabag (2016–19), Walter White (Breaking Bad, 2008–13), Tyrion Lannister (Game of Thrones, 2011–19) and Beth Pearson (This is Us, 2016–).

Turning to literary fiction, lists of the greatest characters of all time usually include Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 1813), Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair (Thackeray, 1847), Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald, 1925) and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951). From popular fiction we can add Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 1997–2007), Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008–) and Matilda (Dahl, 1988).

So, what is it that these characters have in common? First and foremost, they are believable. We, of course, know that they are textual constructions, but once we are transported into their worlds we invest in them emotionally, we root for them and we may even continue to wonder about their fictional lives after the story has ended. We talk about these characters as though they exist beyond their fictional worlds and are almost real. This is certainly not to say that all fictional characters are believable. Many writers set out to create psychologically credible characters and don’t pull it off. Other writers, particularly postmodern authors, set out to challenge the convention that characters are portrayed as believable, consistent and having an identifiable and unique ‘self’. Characters in postmodern fiction may have fluid or multiple selves. So rather than being imitations of our selves, these postmodern characters have been described as ciphers or even ‘word-beings’.¹ The focus of this book, however, is on the most popular characters that fill our shelves, and these characters are nearly always believable.

One reason why the most popular fictional characters are believable is that we perceive them to be realistically complex. But what does that mean? The British writer E. M. Forster made a start on answering this question when he defined some characters as being round, and others flat. By his definition, round characters are complex and have the capability of surprising us, while flat characters may be expressed by a single quality or idea.² Forster observed that both types of characters have their places in fiction. While having complexity is generally a requisite of the main character in more realistic fictional stories, Forster noted that flatter characters are useful in smaller roles because of their consistency and the fact that they usually don’t transform. Because of this they don’t distract the reader away from the main storyline.

In Chapter 2 we’ll be taking a look at the meaning of complexity or roundness of character from a psychological perspective. Research demonstrates that the complexity of all aspects of our personality is most reliably described and captured across five dimensions, known as the ‘Big Five’. Personality psychologists have found that the Big Five dimensions are at the very core of character. They describe who we are, how we are likely to behave, how we interact with other people, and even how we typically feel. The Big Five model describes the ‘consistent self’ that we experience when we meet someone or a new character for the first time. Since these five dimensions are required to describe personality in full, by definition a rounded character needs to be expressed on all five of these dimensions.

Returning to those lists of great characters, in addition to being complex, believable and consistent, they are also memorable. They stay in our minds precisely because they behave in ways that are unlike the average person that we meet. In Chapter 2 we’ll be looking at how the Big Five dimensions can be used to create characters who depart from the average and who stay in our thoughts. One essential aspect of their characterization is through their dialogue. In Chapter 3 we’ll be investigating how personality influences the way that we speak, from the kinds of subjects that we choose to speak about, the fluency and formality of our sentences, to the choice of words that we use.

In addition to having engaging personalities, memorable characters also tend to be highly motivated. They have long-term desires that propel the story forward and drive the plot. And they also have shorter-term motivations that drive their actions from scene to scene and put them into conflict with characters with opposing motivations. In Chapter 4 we’ll look at the fifteen universal motivations and why some make characters more compelling than others. In Chapter 5 we will also investigate why protagonists tend to be motivated by desires for status, power and personal freedom in the first half of their journeys, but experience a change of desire towards more connectedness in the second half of their journeys. We’ll look at the psychological evidence that suggests that these changes in protagonists’ motivations reflect the natural, developmental changes throughout our own lives. We’ll explore when we change, why we change and how we change as well as how we can use this knowledge to create more compelling narratives for our characters.

The most memorable characters typically engage the reader the moment they meet them, and then take them along with them on their emotional journeys. In Chapter 6 we’ll look at how we can create characters readers and audiences care about and identify with. As we investigate the universal emotions we’ll uncover why some are particularly powerful in the way that they move audiences. We’ll also explore the six main emotional story arcs and what these have to tell us about their protagonists’ journeys. Characters are, of course, rarely alone in our stories, and their relationships with other characters have the potential to be fascinating. In Chapter 7 we’ll explore how your characters’ personalities should shape the way they interact with other characters, and the twelve different ways in which people try to get what they want. We’ll also find out whether opposites really attract and what this tells us about sparking chemistry between your characters. Finally, in Chapter 8, we’ll draw all these different threads together in a character workshop. Here you’ll be prompted with all the questions that you’ll need to answer in order to create a five-dimensional, memorable and engaging protagonist as well as sufficient complexity for the other characters that your story requires.

Is this another book on Jungian archetypes?

No. Although psychoanalytic theory and analytical psychology have been hugely important from a historical perspective in shaping a number of contemporary psychological theories, and provide the inspiration for archetypal character analysis, the mythical school of narrative structure and a popular branch of film theory, these fields are comprehensively covered by other books. My focus in this book is on research and theory from the many other contemporary branches of psychology that are hugely illuminating on subjects including psychological universals, our individual differences, motivations, emotions, and relationships and the way that we change and develop throughout our lives. In the chapters that follow I will be drawing on theories and research from personality psychology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, narrative psychology, media psychology and developmental psychology. Before we go on to uncover their research findings that can be most usefully applied by writers, first a few words about each of these branches and their main concerns.

Personality psychology

Central to the framework that we’ll be using in this book, personality psychology tells us how personality influences thoughts, feelings, actions, dialogue and motivations in different situations. It aims to show how every individual is different, and which psychological forces cause these differences. By placing personality psychology at the centre of our understanding of the psychological processes behind characterization, we’re given a powerful framework with which to understand how to create a fully rounded character as well as why some characters seem ‘thin’ or ‘flat’.

Evolutionary psychology

Taking the view that our minds are genetically adapted to our ancestral environment which existed around 40,000–50,000 years ago, evolutionary psychology examines human behaviour and psychological traits from an evolutionary perspective. Theories of evolutionary psychology usually propose that since there are many adaptive problems to solve, the human brain has evolved as a collection of modular, specialized adaptations, rather than one generalized adaptation.³ This modular theory explains why we may be motivated by conflicting thoughts, emotions and motivations at any one time – an idea that is central to many fictional stories.

Although evolutionary psychologists point out that our mental structures evolved during the ...