New on OUTLIERS PSYCHOLOGY AND WRITING: Three Books on Writing that Enhance Character Psychology by Katherine Ramsland

OUTLIERS PSYCHOLOGY AND WRITING: Three Books on Writing that Enhance Character Psychology by Katherine Ramsland

Writing advice is easy to find. There are books, articles, groups, and websites galore that offer it. What grabs my attention are resources that pull me deeper into my characters’ heads. I’ve read a lot of books on writing. The following three stand out.

A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting, by Mary Buckham

The idea of active setting is to experience a location through needs, fears, goals, and regrets. Items in the setting should feel like they matter to someone in the story. When they do, we not only feel them but we also learn more about the character. Buckham tells us that setting “can create the world of your story, show characterization, add conflict, show or speed up your pacing, add or decrease tension, relate a character’s backstory, thread in emotion, and more.” But this happens only when the elements of setting have emotional impact.

You must assume that your reader has never been in this place. Even if they’ve visited the cemetery in Montmartre, for example, they haven’t experienced it with kind of trepidation my character does in Track the Ripper. My work would involve anchoring readers in this setting through how it traps her and how it offers a way out.

Buckham demonstrates with examples how to make characters experience a setting, specifically how the details impact their needs, fears and goals. One character might think a tunnel is the safest route for escape, while another dreads dark spaces more than the predator following him. Setting can effectively convey subtext and backstory: what would this character notice, and why? How would another character view the same item? How might this difference affect their interactions and impede their goals?

Active setting is not mere description. It’s energized with emotion, conflict, and/or complication.

*****

Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron

Story, says Cron, is our brain’s “decoder ring.” She describes how stories trigger basic neurological mechanisms. That is, for us to pay attention, a story must have an implicit momentum. This involves four steps, all of which are neurologically attuned: meaning-making, identification, anticipation, and expectation. 

Step 1. Making meaning: The characters have a goal. No matter the chaos they might encounter, this imperative keeps their minds focused. The brain hunts for meaningful patterns so it can predict what lies ahead. It achieves this through the character.

Step 2. Identification: As we watch characters struggle with hurdles to their goals, it fires up “mirror neurons,” which help us to feel what they’re feeling. The concept was developed by neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti. He’d placed electrodes in monkeys’ brains to study cells that fired up during their hand and mouth movements. One day, a lab worker lifted an ice cream cone. He noticed that the brain of a monkey watching him showed movement-responsive activity even when it didn’t move. Rizzolatti looked closer and discovered that the same brain cells fired when the monkey was watching an activity as when it performed the activity. These “mirror neurons” start processing sensory information when we perceive an action we can perform. As Cron puts it, the brain innately casts us as active protagonists. So, readers will best identify with characters who do things they themselves can do.

Step 3. Anticipation: The neurotransmitter dopamine rewards us during moments of vigilance and anticipation. That’s where a good twist comes in. Plots that unfold in unexpected ways release dopamine to keep us alert. This makes reading rewarding, even addicting.

Step 4. Expectation: The payoff is getting the resolution we expect.

“The initial job of an effective story,” says Cron, “is to anesthetize the part of your brain that knows it is a story.” You want the reader to become the protagonist, to believe that the situation is real, and to experience how protagonist deals with it—especially when things grow more complicated. The things that happen to protagonists matter less than what’s at stake for them and how they’re affected. Story instills meaning through feeling.

*****

The Fire in Fiction, by Donald Maass

I once listened to Maass describe the abundance of lackluster writing he encountered as a literary agent. So much of it “lies flat on the page.” Still, some works have the “fire,” and he explains why. “Passionate writing makes every word a shaft of light, every sentence a crack of thunder, every scene a tectonic shift.” To some extent, Maass’ advice overlaps others, but what stands out is the notion of micro-tensions.

We know that conflict makes a story, and Maass states that the application of micro-tension will keep readers glued to every word. They should want to know what will happen in the next few seconds all the way through the book. Writers can achieve this by including emotional friction in every scene.

This doesn’t mean you must include continuous action. For example, in The Gales of November, a book about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the backstories for each of the twenty-nine sailors could easily feel like info dumps. However, the drama of what’s at stake for each of them as they move unknowingly toward disaster makes these bios bristle with anticipation.

Maass demonstrates what he means with examples from dialogue, action, and exposition. Tension, he says, springs from within the characters. It reverberates in what they say and what they hold back. He shows how to find the “torn emotions in your characters” and use them “anywhere that tension is needed to keep us unsure of what will happen next.” He provides a set of practical tools for trying this with your own work.

Each book offers a unique slant on probing your characters’ inner worlds. I advise reading them all.

Katherine Ramsland, PhD

https://www.katherineramsland.net/