The Psychological Imperative of Characterization
By: Adam Thompson
Tags: Work, Creativity, Psychology, Writing

The Psychological Imperative of Characterization

How writers can use psychology and archetypes to create more engaging and honest characters. With thoughts on the role of narrative in human identity.

Our brains take in information about the world through the senses. The little experience simulator processes sensory information, and we react to this information to play the video game we call life. But, we have another powerful tool that informs our reactions outside of sensory input: narrative.

I always want to hang out with the storyteller. I love those old guys who have stories they’ve been refining for years with family, at dinner parties, with anyone who’ll listen. It isn’t important that his stories are actually true. Most stories get stretched with time. What is important is how truthful his story is.

Children suffer from this. They will experience something incredible, but they lack the storytelling skill to communicate the importance of the event. I think the stories children tell are boring because they lack experience. They experience life, but they are in the process of creating their narrative.

The best characters have motivations that are real, have a psychological purpose, and reveal a truth about the human experience.

Narrative is important because it is one point in the data set of human experiences. As someone who consumes narrative, we begin to see patterns of human behavior based on each of these individual tales. For writers, these patterns of behavior become archetypes. Archetypes are simply patterns of behavior.

An example of an archetypal figure is the mother. Now, if we were simply using our senses, then we would understand that there are similarities in the experiences of women who have children. This isn’t interesting, and it’s certainly not narrative. The narrative element to archetypal figures rests in motivation.

When we look at the motivations of mothers, we get into different motivational archetypes. A mother may want to have a child because she’s vain. She may want to have a child to continue her family lineage. She may not even want a child. These motivations create narrative. They’re also interesting to consider. So, we have to base characters on their psychological motivations. We find archetypal patterns in motivations, too.

The best characters have motivations that are real, have a psychological purpose, and reveal a truth the about human experience. Carl Jung believed that humans possessed an inherent, a priori unconsciousness that consisted of “mythological motifs … primordial images … and myths.” He called this the “collective unconsciousness.” If this is true, then writers should be able to tap into the collective unconsciousness to create characters that are true, captivating, and relatable.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood from Pexels

Here is my plan.

I’m going to try to become better at writing characters by studying psychology. I’m going to do a deep dive into the work of Carl Jung. I’m going to examine the archetypes of human motivation. Next, I’m going to make sense of the human psyche by exploring twelve archetypal figures.

My objective is to understand patterns of human behavior. My other objective is to use psychology to root my characters in psychological realism. For each archetypal figure, I want to create a template of human behavior.

The first installment will be ‘the outlaw’ archetypal figure.