Put Your Characters on the Couch
Think like a therapist to get to the authentic complexity of every individual in your story
All individual choices, in every literary form as in life, are colored by personality. And personality reflects the workings of two interweaving sets of traits: Temperament and Character.
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I was going through my MFA files the other day and noticed that I have yet to share with you some of my most popular workshops. Foremost among these is my “Characters on the Couch” class, inspired by the research I did for my book Gaining.
There are, of course, many ways to analyze personality types. Familiar options range from horoscopes, to the Myers-Briggs test, to Enneagram descriptions. But my research, which focused on the genetics of personality, led me to a psychobiologist named C. Robert Cloninger and a system he called the Temperament and Character Inventory. Cloninger identified four core temperament traits that are hardwired by genetics from birth, plus three core character traits, which are influenced by genetics but develop, for better or worse, in response to the circumstances that shape one’s maturity. Ideally, mature character helps direct temperament, optimizing helpful traits and modulating vulnerabilities. Immaturity (as we can see in some of our most notorious regime members today) tends to have the opposite effect.
What does all this have to do with creative writing? IMHO, writers must understand the workings and variability of personality so they can make sense of their characters’ interactions and responses to each other. If you’re writing nonfiction, this science can help you unpack the thinking, say, of an abusive relative, or a confounding criminal, or your own reactions to a traumatic past. If you’re writing fiction, knowledge of temperament and character can help you deepen the individuality of your characters while also enhancing the authenticity of their behavior on the page.
The most simplistic reason to make a study of personality is to avoid the fatal pitfall of writing all characters in your own mirror image.
Some of the core concepts of personality are introduced here:
This post will move on from there.
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“Plot construction often depends on what Henry James might have called ‘the finer distinctions’ and what we might call psychology, in its broadest sense: the particular emotional coloration of individual choices and situations.”—Charles Baxter
Characters on The Couch
Whether you’re writing fiction, narrative nonfiction, or plays for stage or screen, the degree to which you know your characters can make or break your story. It’s not enough just to be able to visualize them or list the major events of their lives. You really need to psychoanalyze them. What motivates them? What differentiates them? What stops them in their tracks?
To get to the heart of these questions, you need to apply the basics of personality structure to character development on the page.
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