Need to know
It’s first thing in the morning, I’ve plenty to do but I can’t stop thinking about Nicole Kidman’s character from the American TV series I watched last night, The Undoing. It’s a psychological thriller, and Kidman was mesmerising. When written well, characters seize our attention and compel us to engage. They stay in our minds long after we’ve closed the pages of our novel, binge-watched the entire box set, or exited the auditorium. We mull over their relationships, wonder if they did the right thing, and ponder how they might behave in different scenarios. But why is it that some characters are more compelling than others?
Perhaps you’re a writer struggling to create your own captivating characters. Or maybe you’re an avid consumer of novels, films and TV dramas and you’re intrigued that made-up people can cast such a spell on you. Either way, I believe that scientific psychology can offer a fresh, illuminating perspective and I’m going to show you how.
There are drawbacks to the traditional approach
Many books that discuss the craft of writing fiction suggest that the best approach towards creating engaging characters is by ensuring that they are believable, complex and flawed. Suggestions typically include drawing on personal observation, giving the main character conflicting conscious and unconscious goals, and developing an interesting character backstory. One of the most influential books of this genre is Aspects of the Novel (1927) by the English author E M Forster. In it, he argued that the most engaging characters move us emotionally because they feel real, and continue to surprise us as we turn the pages of the text. Describing these complex characters as ‘round’, Forster included as prime examples Madame Bovary, the romantic heroine from Gustave Flaubert’s novel of the same name, as well as characters written by Jane Austen.
By contrast, Forster proposed that ‘flat’ characters have just two or three pronounced character traits, can be summarised by a single sentence, and are incapable of moving us in any way other than through humour. When confined to secondary roles, these flat characters support the main story without distracting the reader. However, to Forster, the most compelling characters capture the full complexity of being human. They also transform and surprise us in believable ways.
Along with Forster, many other writerly guides offer similar advice about the importance of creating complexity in characters – but what is ‘complexity’ in this context, and how do we go about creating characters who are at once surprising but psychologically credible? As a psychology graduate-turned-writer, these questions intrigued me during my doctoral research. Early in my writing career, I received notes on one of my screenplays from a respected script consultant. They were full of excellent observations and useful suggestions, except on the area of character. I was in full agreement that my character needed more complexity and was missing something, but these comments alone were too vague to be useful. What I needed was to better understand what complexity means in a character, and with that to recognise what specifically was missing from my character and how to go about fixing it.
Personality psychology offers another way
Although some literary critics have resisted the idea that fictional characters are anything more than textual constructions (ie, a writer’s device or tool), an alternative approach – and one that I find far more useful for practitioners – is to treat them as akin to real people. Since most writers intend for their fictional characters to be proxies of their human counterparts, it arguably makes sense to examine and understand their characters through many of the same scientific models used by psychologists to understand real people. More specifically, the field of personality psychology is likely to be especially illuminating because writers characterise their fictional personae by describing their thoughts, feelings, motivations and behaviours – the exact same set of factors that psychologists see as making up personality.
The most widely supported scientific model of personality is the ‘Big Five’. The approach originated with the US psychologists Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, and was further developed by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae and others. These pioneers built on the idea that the attributes of personality that we consider to be most important must be encoded in everyday language. They used factor analysis on personality survey data to reveal five broad semantic groupings among the words that we use to describe each other, and these have become the Big Five traits or personality dimensions: extraversion-introversion, agreeableness-disagreeableness, neuroticism-emotional stability, conscientiousness-unconscientiousness, and openness to experience-closed to experience. The idea is that these dimensions are independent of each other, so the degree to which a person rates on one dimension has no bearing on how they rate on any other dimension.
By applying this framework to our understanding of what roundedness means in relation to fictional characters, we gain an immensely useful approach for fictional character analysis and problem solving. This five-factor model allows writers to examine whether they’ve characterised their fictional personae across all five dimensions of personality, and whether they’ve achieved this consistently enough through their text to create the sense of another being. In addition, the Big Five model illuminates the way that people typically transform throughout their lives – writers can use this knowledge to create more believable character transformations in fiction, and consumers of fiction might find it intriguing to reflect on the evolution of their favourite characters in the context of what’s known about real-life personality change.
The Big Five model also gives us insights into why some characters are more compelling than others. In reality, the range of scores across all personality dimensions are normally distributed in a population (similar to height or weight), and so the majority of people that we meet are moderately extraverted, moderately agreeable, moderately conscientious, moderately neurotic and moderately open to experience. They’re likely to make less of an impression because they’re rather average. By contrast, people are more likely to stand out from the crowd if they score towards the extremes of at least one or two of the dimensions. Such characters are compelling because they’re unlike the majority of people we meet every day. Whether real or imagined, we’re more likely to remember these individuals, precisely because they’re different.