Psychology: Interrogating your characters

[— Karen Myers —]

I was raised by wolves. No, really. Nice wolves, well-meaning wolves, but wolves nonetheless.

Let me explain. My older brother and I were raised in a fair amount of affluence, educated at the right schools, suitably cared for, and never submitted to the least bit of abuse. So, what’s my lament?

We had no family engagement with our parents. They didn’t enter into our lives, and never revealed their own. You have to understand, my mother was exotic — a war bride from Antwerp who married an American GI and boogied out of the land-of-no-nylons as fast as she could — sort of a Zsa Zsa Gabor-type bleached blonde with an accent dressed in mink coats. My father ran his father’s business, a multi-state flour-milling company in KC. They were objectively interesting people who had done things with their lives. They had siblings, parents, and so forth, like everyone, and the sort of restrained social life that elite suburbs simulate (though almost no close friends).

In my entire life, I never heard a single family story from them. No tale about how they met in Belgium. No recounting of the reaction of either family to their marriage. No scandal about Aunt Nora, no childhood pranks for Aunt Louise, no tales about their own parents. Nothing. When my brother and I sat at the dining table and asked a casual question about anything personal, we got the subtle look — the look that said “who wants to know?” And, so, we learned not to ask — we were trained not to ask — since it was pointless (and we took up reading at the table instead.)

In reciprocal fashion, my parents didn’t ask us what we were doing. As long as we weren’t obvious juvenile delinquents or in trouble at school, they didn’t enquire. I may have been a bit on the spectrum, but I had read enough books and seen enough of my childhood friends’ homes and parents to understand how odd this was. I didn’t assume my brother and I were somehow at fault and to blame for it, but it was inexplicable to us. I’m sure they meant well in general (perhaps they feared childish gossip revelations to others), but nonetheless this remoteness was damaging, a refusal of intimacy, a form of rejection. Now, I’m a pretty tough and fatalistic person by nature, but my brother was more fragile, and he eventually broke at 50 after a lonely and somewhat unlucky life, having never formed a successful family himself (putting the cap on four generations of male suicide). We had often joked between the two of us (most recently just before his death) that we may not have known what was wrong with our parents, but whatever it was, it would stop with us. And, indeed, we had no children. These situations have consequences.

There’s a reason I’m flirting with TMI here (apologies), but it was necessary background… It has taken me decades to adequately simulate a normal human who can casually interrogate other people socially about their lives. I still find that hard to do, — it’s not that I don’t want to know (I’m curious), it’s that I didn’t grow up having learned the skill, and my training encouraged me to wall the impulse away. I have a deeply inbuilt workaround where I volunteer information about myself in the hope of soliciting an initial response from my interlocutor to break the ice (and notice that this blog post is an example of just that).

Well, guess what? These days I’m out there creating fictional worlds with characters that are mine. And it is my duty to ask them about their lives. And they have to tell me! My characters aren’t wolves, not to me. I know what their stories are, and I can change them as I want to. It’s difficult to explain just how… exotic I find that. In its way, it’s exhilarating. Perhaps it’s why I’m interested in writing fiction instead of non-fiction — my interest in non-fictional events and how things work, though strong, isn’t anywhere nearly as strong as my interest in my fictional characters.

It’s not a matter of recreating one’s life story with some sort of indulgent self-justifying rewrite — that holds no interest for me and I don’t have anything like that in my fiction (though I suppose everything is grist for the mill). Instead, it’s a way of fantasizing about what normal human relations are like, using my fictional simulacra. I grew up with no inside information about how my parents became the way they were (since they wouldn’t talk about their lives), but I learned how to observe instead, and thus to speculate (and introspect). I don’t feel that lack now — my own inner life in its current shape and decades of normal relational experience have buried any felt damage, except for my early-learned habits of question avoidance which are hard to change.

So, the point of this post is to raise an awareness of one’s own psychology, as a creator of simulated lives, to see how one’s own experiences and drives work as an insight into the potential psychology of one’s characters. I hadn’t really sat down and analyzed what I liked so much about writing fiction until I cast about looking for a topic for this week’s post, and realized what a great part of the appeal is — interrogating my characters and getting answers. Your mileage may vary.

How do you interrogate your own characters, to find out what makes them tick? Is it just a craft skill, or is there a deeper drive? Let’s hear about your own fundamental motivations, the ones that work in you that are relevant to your own writing. Your turn…