So I’m not a psychologist. I have no degree, no classes.
Yet I think this is something every author needs to have some sort of grasp on. Have I read psychology books? Yes. Did I help my husband with his psychology homework? Yes. Partly because humans fascinate me, and partly because as an author, I need to know how people work.
Creating characters that are believable means understanding what makes humans human. How they feel, what they think, the sort of secret things they think no one else understands but that actually, a lot of people experience. The sort of secret things I thought only I understood, but actually, a lot of people experience.
I need to know about PTSD and how it affects the brain as well as behavior. I need to know about anxiety and stress and depression and social awkwardness. If I’m going to write a character that’s had to kill someone in order to stay alive, I need to know what that kind of action does to a person.
You know what one of my favorite psych things is? Code switching. That thing people do where they act or speak differently in different situations or around different people. Like me cussing like a sailor among friends, but barely letting out a “damn” in front of my grandma. Or how kids say “thanks” for a new sweater, but take it off and shove it in their back pack before they get to school.
One of my favorite authors (Terry Pratchett) says in one of his books “People aren’t really fundamentally evil, or fundamentally good, but they are fundamentally people.” And this is so real I just love it.
Or the “prisoner” experiments. Have you heard of these? Where a group of grad students were put in “prison,” and another group of grad students were put in charge of them, and they had to stop the experiment because the “guards” were getting so awful with the “prisoners?”
Or the “shocking” experiments, where people were told to administer electric shocks to another “scientific volunteer” (who was actually a lab assistant not getting shocked but screaming like they were), and kept doing it when they were told to, even when it sounded awful on the other end? You know what I like best about this one? That in most of the experiments, which are rarely quoted in full, the person doing the shocking protested or refused to go on when it sounded like things had gotten really bad.
Or the “Lord of the Flies” experiments, where two groups of boys at sleepaway camp were secretly pitted against each other, and the experiment had to be called off when they caught one group sneaking over to the other camp with socks full of rocks. You know what I love about this one? When they added girls to the mix, the violence did not escalate that way.
I also love the case study of the guy who had a railroad spike blasted through his head while working on a railroad. He had been an honest, well-liked guy, and within months of his injury, he was a jobless, angry drunk. My favorite part of that study? That within 5 years, he was stable again, re-married, and had started his own business. His brain managed to heal on some level, bringing back the person he used to be.
Or the study of the guy who had a stroke, and seemed to come through it pretty all right — until his family started noticing weird things, like he couldn’t make decisions anymore about which cereal he wanted. A brain scan revealed the emotional part of his brain had died. He could no longer make simple decisions because he literally didn’t care one way or the other about anything, not even a little. Our emotions do really guide us, even when we don’t think they do.
A weird side effect of all this is understanding myself and the people around me a lot better. A really weird side effect is knowing what’s going through another person’s head and knowing whether or not they’re aware of it. I mean, I’m not always right, but . . .
Another weird side effect is being able to put some of the most painful parts of me into my stories, and knowing that someone somewhere is going to get it. That my experience is not totally unique, and if I give some of that to my characters, they will live and breathe to the people reading.
I’m really not sure if my therapist knows that when she helped me understand myself, she gave me this bizarre gift of understanding the people around me, and making my characters more believable. She’s a smart lady, so I’ll assume yes.
Am I analyzing you right now?
Hm, “observing” might be the better term. I think I know what you’re going to do, but sometimes folks surprise me.
Go on. Keep going.
