5 Things I Learned About Psychology That Every Fiction Writer Should Know
I’ve always valued research as a writing tool, a way of getting outside my own experience. As Andrea Barrett writes, research is “a way of sinking into the hearts and minds of our characters.”[i]
For my short stories, I’ve researched professional mermaiding, women’s bodybuilding, ballet, and more, plunging myself into the experiences, vocabularies, and central questions that define these activities in order to inhabit as fully as possible the characters who do them. But inhabiting one of the protagonists of my novel, How to Care for a Human Girl, took my research process to a new level.
(How to Research Topics Like a Journalist.)
How to Care for a Human Girl follows 31-year-old social psychology PhD student Jada and her younger sister Maddy as they navigate unplanned pregnancies in the wake of their mother’s death. Jada’s abortion decision at the beginning of the novel prompts a reflection on the state of her marriage and her fraught relationship with Maddy.
Anxious, analytical, and often lost in her own thoughts, Jada is a divisive figure, and her head can be a cluttered place. Some readers (and some of her fellow characters) see her as icy, overly clinical. I see her as a brilliant woman who feels deeply and who turns to the social sciences to contextualize and manage feelings that might otherwise sweep her away. The more I got to know her, the more Jada emerged as a character whose career would serve not only as an interesting biographical detail, but also an essential, clarifying lens through which she’d view the world and attempt to make sense of her life, sometimes actively referencing research along the way. Maybe it’s unsurprising that while writing about her I would adopt some of these tendencies for myself.
I’m not a psychologist, but the deep dive I took into psychology to bring myself closer to Jada taught me as much about myself and my career as it taught me about her and hers. To understand Jada, I learned about the psychology of choice and interpersonal attraction, often weaving the findings of actual studies into her story (the novel even has a References page). To understand myself, I researched the psychology of writing, reading, and creativity. Some of my findings are included below.
This list barely scratches the surface of everything psychology can teach writers about where our creativity comes from, how it can best be channeled, how to write believable characters, and more, but it offers valuable insights that can be applied to the writing life and practice.
1. When reading and writing fiction, there is value in forgetting ourselves.
Reading literary fiction has been linked to increased empathy, but this empathy doesn’t develop automatically. Research suggests that the most empathetic readers (and writers) are those who experience the “immersive phenomenon of simulating the mindset and persona of a protagonist”—a phenomenon psychologists call experience-taking.
Experience-taking is not the same as “orienting [ourselves] as an observer or evaluator of a character” in order to compare ourselves to them, the way I’ve seen readers do to Jada, and the way Jada sometimes does to her sister. Rather, it requires us to “go beyond positioning ourselves as mere spectators of events” and take on a character’s identity, temporarily adopting their thoughts and feelings and experiencing the story as though we are that character.
A 2012 series of studies tested experience-taking by asking college students to read a story about a college student protagonist. They found that readers with “a higher degree of chronic self-focus” displayed lesser degrees of experience-taking than those who were discouraged from reading with their own individuality in mind. Students who read while seated in front of a mirror—an external, inescapable reminder of the self—scored lower on experience-taking than others who read the same story with the mirror turned away from them.
The takeaway: While our individual identities inevitably inform our experiences, the more we manage to set them aside as we read, the deeper our connection to the characters on the page will be. Truly empathetic, immersive reading—and writing—might involve forgetting ourselves, at least for a little while.[ii]
2. Lean into the illusion that your characters—not you—control their stories.
Social psychology can help us understand the strange phenomenon by which our characters seem to come alive and take on minds of their own—in precisely the way Jada did for me as I wrote How to Care for a Human Girl. Over 92% of writers surveyed in a 2003 study experienced “the illusion of independent agency,” or “the sense that the characters are independent agents not directly under the author’s control.” These writers described their fictional characters as doing such things as “having definite opinions about the narrative in which they live” and even “provid[ing] unsolicited advice about matters concerning the author’s real life” and “sleeping in [the writer’s] bed with [them].”
We writers are basically big kids interacting with imaginary friends—but that’s okay! The more seasoned, published writers in the study reported the illusion of independent agency the most often, which suggests that it may be linked to expertise: With years of experience, the process of imagining a character “could become automized until it is no longer consciously experienced.”[iii]
Check out Ashley Wurzbacher’s How to Care for a Human Girl here:
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3. Embrace the pratfall as a way of humanizing your characters.
If our characters are going to act of their own accord, we might as well let them make a mess. When a well-known 1966 study asked participants to evaluate the attractiveness of contestants on a fake trivia show, the participants preferred not the contestant who answered all the questions correctly and charismatically, but the one who answered them correctly and then spilled his drink.
Competence and charisma can be off-putting without a hint of a flaw to offset them. Because our pratfalls humanize us, they might be instrumental to the development of realistic, relatable characters. (This study is referenced directly in How to Care for a Human Girl when a spilled glass of water endears Jada to Blake, her eventual husband, shortly before he proposes.)
To be clear: I don’t believe that writers are responsible for ensuring that their characters are relatable, let alone “likable,” to readers. I do, however, believe that our characters should be convincingly real, layered, and at least a little bit flawed, and I’m drawn to the idea that our blunders can be a source of connection rather than ridicule.[iv]
4. Take a walk.
I’ve often believed that I do my best thinking while walking. A 2014 study lends credibility to this belief, finding that “walking boosts creative ideation in real time and shortly after.” Participants spoke their responses to three creativity tests while seated, walking on a treadmill indoors, or walking outdoors. The result: Walking significantly increased creative output in both indoor and outdoor environments; even “walking on a treadmill facing a blank wall improved creativity.”
To measure creativity, the researchers employed three widely used tests. The first, Guilford’s alternate uses test (GAU), asked participants to imagine alternate uses for everyday objects like buttons or tires. For example, one participant “heard ‘button’ and generated ‘as a doorknob for a dollhouse, an eye for a doll, a tiny strainer, [or] to drop behind you to keep your path.’” The second, the compound remote associates test (CRA), prompted participants to come up with a word that can be combined with each of three other words (“Given the words ‘cottage—Swiss—cake,’ the answer is ‘cheese’”). Yet another task, Barron’s symbolic equivalence task (BSE), required participants to generate analogies for symbolic prompts (“a robbed safe, a light bulb burning out, and a budding cocoon”).
Walking was particularly conducive to the types of creative thinking invoked by the GAU and BSE, which could perhaps be adapted for use when we need help getting our creative juices flowing. At the very least, “taking a walk immediately before a brainstorming session should help improve one’s performance.”[v]
5. Let your mind wander.
Mind wandering about topics other than the task we’re trying to complete is generally thought to decrease productivity, but it holds value for those in creative professions; studies indicate that mind wandering actually provides the occasion for a significant number of creative people’s ideas.
Researchers asked writers and theoretical physicists to report their most creative idea of the day, what they were doing and thinking about when it occurred to them, whether the idea felt like an “aha” moment, and how good they thought the idea was. They found that one fifth of the writers’ and physicists’ best ideas were formed during “spontaneous task-independent mind-wandering,” defined as “(a) engaging in an activity other than working and (b) thinking about something unrelated to the generated idea.”
While there were no significant differences between the overall importance of ideas generated during task-independent mind wandering and those generated on task, ideas that occurred during mind wandering tended “to be experienced with a greater sense of ‘aha’ and were more likely to involve overcoming an impasse” than on-task ideas. Even if those ideas that feel like “aha moments” don’t always end up being the best ones, they still play an important role in getting us out of creative ruts, providing momentum to spur us forward in times of need.[vi]
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[i] Barrett, A. (2012). Research in fiction. The Writer’s Notebook II. Portland: Tin House Books.
[ii] Kaufman, G. F., & Libby, L. K. (2012). Changing beliefs and behavior through experience-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(1), 1–19.
[iii] Taylor, M., Hodges, S. D., & Kohányi, A. (2003). The illusion of independent agency: Do adult fiction writers experience their characters as having minds of their own? Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 22(4), 361–380.
[iv] Aronson, E., Willerman, B., & Floyd, J. (1966). The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 4(6), 227–228.
[v] Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152.
[vi] Gable, S. L., Hopper, E. A., & Schooler, J. W. (2019). When the muses strike: Creative ideas of physicists and writers routinely occur during mind wandering. Psychological Science, 30(3), 396–404.