Alexander Portrait

Alexander Portrait

The Id, the Ego and the Writer

‘Sigmund Freud…analyse this' – Madonna, ‘Die Another Day'

How well do you know your characters? What drives them? If asked for the resume of one of your main characters, would you be in a position to deliver?

No writer wants to be told that his are ‘cardboard characters' spouting ‘wooden dialogue' but trying to create believable characters – characters that readers can care for – can be like trying to grow grass in the Nevada desert simply because the characters don't exist in reality! Many authors make the mistake of basing ALL their characters on themselves which is a grave error (unless, of course, the work is semi-autobiographical, like Le Carre's ‘A Perfect Spy'). A better technique is to base various characters on various real-life personalities and then work on the details.

In the writing of short stories and TV/film screenplays, the writer doesn't have much room for detailed descriptions of his characters. For screenplays, the trick is to give the main characters easily identifiable features: Can you imagine Indiana Jones without his whip and cowboy hat? Another good example is TV's ‘Friends'. The friends are all funny but they are totally dissimilar in character. Joey is a chick magnet but not overburdened by brains, Ross is a scholar but lousy in the dating department, and so on. When it comes to the short story, the trick, I've learned, is to say SOMETHING SPECIFIC about the character you're describing. In one of Jeffrey Archer's super-selling short stories, he describes a chance meeting with a friend in a restaurant. The man was ‘seated opposite a slight, not unattractive strawberry blonde of half his age who could have trodden on a beetle and failed to crash it.' Pure magic. Imagine if he had said, ‘He was seated opposite a fabulously rich and classy woman.' Why, that could be anyone from Britney Spears to Oprah Winfrey! Archer gives us the female character's build, age estimate, hair colour, race and visual appeal all in one line! A rule of thumb when gauging the clarity of your character's sketch is this: If the reader met your character on the street, would he recognize her?

But it's in the case of the novel that the issue ‘character development' really looms large. You have all the space in the world so there's no excuse for creating ‘cardboard characters'! In the screenplay for ‘Being John Malkovich', the main character is described as simply ‘30 years old and small'. Try that in a novel manuscript and the editor will drop it into the nearest trash can and wash his hands with anti-bacterial soap. God is in the details. Some industry experts go as far as suggesting that, in the ‘pre-writing' stage, you should write up the main character's CV.

I have some poems under my belt but I consider myself a prose writer. Readers of my poems will have noticed that most of them are ‘story poems' that come dangerously close to the poetry-prose border and even threaten to jump over like illegal immigrants. As a novelist, I have discovered that learning the basics of human psychology can be a big help in explaining your character's motives and behaviour, especially if you write crime or drama books. Think ‘Silence of the Lamb' or ‘Kiss the Girls'. Why do those killers behave the way the do? The answer is in black and white – read books on psychology.

One of the exciting yarns spun by master story-teller Frederick Forsyth in ‘The Deceiver' describes a character on the run. Finding himself in a world of problems, he returns to the place where he used to hide as a child! Now remember where ex-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was finally caught after the Allies won the war – in his hometown of Tikrit (not Baghdad, not across the border.) Psychiatrists call this ‘regression' – when overwhelmed by problems, your mind is likely to travel back to the ‘last time you felt perfectly safe' and you might find yourself in your childhood neighbourhood, as if you're trying to crawl back into the womb.

Psychology is not an exact science and we have a variety of ‘personality theories' to choose from. I personally prefer the theories of Sigmund Freud (pronounced ‘Froid') although it has been argued that, like the Curate's Egg, they're only good in parts. I agree with his portrait of the ‘Id, the Ego and the Superego' and have actually used his ideas on ‘narcissism' in my crime/drama novel, ‘When the Whirlwind Passes' in which a woman suffering from NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) spins a web of drama on which very many people get stuck – and one dies. Other interesting theorists include Alfred Adler (a former student of Freud's) and Carl Gustav Jung.

All of the major pioneers of psychology agreed that personality is established early in life, that your early environment shapes you. A man born and raised in New York will often be markedly different from an age-mate raised in Texas (accent, mode of dress, attitude etc). By the same token, a woman born and bred in London will talk differently from a woman from, say, Belfast, even though they're both Brits. If a girl is born and bred in rural India then, pound to a penny, she'll be a Hindu, a subservient wife, inclined towards music and dance, love Bollywood movies and insist on wearing cultural attire even after changing countries.

Human psychology tells you what makes people tick. Why they're introverts, extroverts, perverts, neurotic, psychotic, sarcastic, narcissistic, homicidal, suicidal and so on. Notice how many psychoanalysts have been invited to the ‘Oprah Winfrey Show' to comment on everything from parents who live vicariously through their children to women who are addicted to plastic surgery and other forms of "beautification". Across the globe, analysts are appearing in newsrooms to explain what goes on in the head of a terrorist, a child molester etc. In one late-night CNN broadcast, there were no less than three analysts linked by satellite, discussing ‘psychos' (people with NO CONSCIENCE.) Psychoanalysis is legit. It works. And it can mean the difference between creating two-dimensional characters and ‘living' characters that readers can identify with. That, and no more, and it is everything.

 

About the Author

Alexander Nderitu is a Kenyan-born novelist, scriptwriter and Internet guru. He has also expressed interest in fashion design, music production and sports entertainment.

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