Why good characters know very little about themselves
Some thoughts on self-awareness – good for humans, bad for stories.
Paying subscribers can listen to an audio version of this newsletter here.
I’ve realised recently that self-awareness is not great for a fictional character.
In the real human person who sits next to you at work, it’s a positive for sure. You want it to occur to them that their behaviour might be annoying or difficult for other people, and try and mitigate it as best they can. You want them to take their egg sandwich and eat it somewhere else. You want them to go and see a doctor about that sweat problem. You want them to stop themselves from telling you in detail about their efforts to find a good patio heater (‘So at the weekend we tried B&Q, and they do have one around the right price, but when John looked at the reviews, they said it uses a lot of fuel – so I went back to the spreadsheet, and’ etc).
In a character though, I think that would be so dull. Characters shouldn’t be well-adjusted people who’ve had a lot of therapy and grown to understand themselves – they need a blind spot or two. If they have had therapy, they should probably show that in idiosyncratic behaviour that still lacks self-awareness – by relentlessly communicating in ‘I feel’ statements, or trying to apply amateur psychology to everyone around them. That would be so much more fun to read than somebody being thoughtful and reasonable.
Once I started thinking about this, I struggled to identify fictional characters who have real awareness of their own flaws or motivations. Take Kazuo Ishiguro’s Stevens (The Remains of the Day): so frightened and duty-bound that he lets love pass him by. Sally Rooney’s Marianne Sheridan (Normal People): basically wants someone nice to give her a lovely hug, but behaves as though she wants the opposite. Ian Fleming’s James Bond: just an absolute arsehole, excuse my French, and lack of self-awareness is pretty much the whole theme of Jane Austen’s work.
It’s definitely a prerequisite for comic characters: Alan Partridge, Selina Meyer, Niles Crane, David Brent, Moira Rose, Lindsay Bluth (all the Bluths), Jeremy Usbourne, Mrs Bucket… there are a million examples on screen of people we love to laugh at because they don’t understand why we’re laughing.
(In terms of great characters who are not deluded about themselves in some important way, Atticus Finch sprang to mind – but I haven’t read To Kill a Mockingbird since the 1990s and I have a memory like a sieve. Does he have any blind spots?)
Of course, characters often get a flicker of self-awareness at the end of a story, and that can provide a satisfying narrative arc: we want to see people change for the better, or we want some heartbreaking clue that they know how awful they are, even if they won’t be improving themselves (see Succession’s Tom Wambsgans, or even Kendall Roy, who definitely knows he’s horrendous but never succeeds in getting any better).
My point is that even when you really like a character you’ve written, you have to work out why they’re not perfect – and accept that their very imperfection makes them more perfect for your story. It’s a bit like falling for somebody and having to accept, after a while, that they have an unbearable habit of removing hair from the shower drain and leaving it on the side of the bath.
I also believe strongly that real people can change for the better, but also that the very things that are attractive about someone are often the qualities that will drive you insane. The person who’s the most fun on a night out might turn out to be irresponsible as a partner; the person who has dazzling integrity can be inflexible and pompous. I don’t know what my blind spots are because I can’t see them, but I can tell you that although people like my empathy, they enjoy it less when I ask them for the sixth or seventh time, ‘Are you OK? What’s wrong?’
Am I mistaken about characters? Can you think of a very self-aware, sane one who carries a good story? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
Last week I said I was going to ease off social media this month, which so far, I have. It feels good! Very liberating and more peaceful. What I didn’t say last week was that this was influenced by a conversation I had with the cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, who studies addictive technologies, with a particular interest in machine gambling (she wrote the book Addiction by Design).
Her findings also very much apply to apps like Instagram – irresistible to us because of the bottomless scrolling, the unpredictable rewards, the responsiveness, and the frictionless solitude of the experience – as well as to dating apps. You can read some of her thoughts in this article I wrote about the latter for the Evening Standard: ‘We’ve become addicted to ‘stable ambiguity’’ — how dating apps rewired our brains forever.
(Unfortunately, I think I’ve replaced Instagram with obsessive use of Duolingo. At least it’s good for my French.)
Before I go, one of the funniest and cleverest people I know, the illustrator Tor Freeman, has launched her own newsletter, The ReposiTORy. It’s brilliant and it’s going to bring joy into your inbox – subscribe now.
If you’re enjoying my newsletter, please do share it with someone else who might like it – and/or think about upgrading to a paid subscription for £4 a month or £40 a year, to help me keep making it.
That’s all for this week. Good luck with your writing!
I agree. I wonder why these sorts of characters are so engaging? They’re certainly more human and attractive for that reason. But I wonder if we’re also attracted by the conflict between the character’s self-conception and the person they actually are (in the same way that we might be by a conflict between two distinct characters). We want to know how the conflict will be resolved maybe.
Loved this! Have subscribed!