I teach creative writing at a public arts high school in Chicago. If you’re picturing Fame, with students breaking into song and dance in the hallways, you’re not far off. But for all the joy they bring to the classroom, my students often want to write about characters who have bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, PTSD, and many other conditions defined in the DSM-5. While it’s certainly true that some students write toward these terms from personal experience, many others have simply absorbed the vocabulary of psychopathology via its ubiquity in our culture. The trouble with this approach is that a clear diagnosis becomes the foundational feature of these characters, easily accounting for their actions, their thoughts, and emotions. Rather than providing complexity, the tendency to psychoanalyze a character before they’re even walking and talking in the reality of the story corrals the character into symptomatic bullet points while limiting both the writer’s creativity and the audience’s ability to empathize.
I’m certainly no stranger to this method of characterization, as much of my earliest writing was informed by literature classes, which tend to whittle characters down to easily identifiable subject positions in order to facilitate the type of analysis that will result in passing the AP exam. Fortunately, one of my first creative writing classes in grad school was with the writer Aleksandar Hemon, who introduced a different approach. The class was not a traditional workshop where my fellow wannabe writers would share and critique work, but rather a seminar on the short story, specifically mimesis or the representation of reality. Eager to please and to be perceived as brimming with potential, we came to class having devoured the assigned short stories, our effort evidenced in our torrent of pencil marks and annotations. But when it came time to discuss the stories, none of the answers seemed like the right ones. We would make an observation, and Hemon would glare at us all and ask, “What else?” Which I often heard as, “God, why must I suffer these fools?” When one of us had the courage to speak up, we would offer an explanation of a character’s action with something simple like, “they seem depressed,” or “the dude’s an alcoholic,” or, “she’s totally got OCD.” The withering scorn on Hemon’s face cannot be adequately captured. “No, that is psychology,” he’d offer, exasperated.
It has taken me a while, but I think I finally understand what he was talking about now that I have my own students to intimidate with my looks of displeasure. Discussions of psychology veer toward literary interpretation, which seeks to apply a character’s behavior to a theory or moral or theme, thus abstracting the behavior from the complexity of the story, and, of course, its writing. And if we’re trying to understand how a piece of writing gets done so that we may also practice it, these types of conversations can be counter-productive. As the literary critic Parul Sehgal puts it: “Trauma trumps all other identities, evacuates personality, remakes it in its own image.” Trauma here is interchangeable with psychopathology. When we begin writing a character with the diagnosis of trauma, trauma determines the actions of the character, trapping them in an ouroboros of deterministic cause and effect.
Among the many pleasures of genre fiction is its willingness to disregard psychoanalysis, or at least to limit its determinism. Evil and malice can exist without a backstory or a character-defining pathology. We do stupid shit because we are people, and people do stupid shit. We date people who are bad for us. We commit ridiculous crimes. We hurt the ones we supposedly love.
I don’t have insight into Patricia Highsmith’s creative process, but I’m willing to bet she did not conceive of Tom Ripley as a character with antisocial personality disorder before she sat down to write. (I can say this with confidence because that diagnosis did not exist in 1955). Ripley does not kill Dickie and steal his identity because of his ASPD. His actions precede any interpretation of them. Ripley acts within the reality of the story (beautiful rich people!) in order to get what he wants (to be a beautiful rich person!) It just so happens that those actions are murderous and duplicitous.
To use a more recent example, in Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home, the narrator Mario becomes a gun for hire after he’s lost his daughter, his job, and his wife. Yes, bad things happen to cause him to turn to crime, but it’s not a diagnosable condition that makes Mario a killer. In fact, such a characterization would ruin the power of the novel’s social commentary about the violence of the American healthcare system and the capriciousness of life on the margins, which might turn us ALL into killers given the right circumstance.
When we use psychopathology to explain character motivation, we are allowed to distance ourselves from that character’s behavior if we do not have experience with the corresponding pathology. Therefore, we tend to “other” that character rather than see ourselves within them.
My new novel The Quail Who Wears the Shirt takes place in a world where some people have been mysteriously turning into quail hybrids. Answers as to why this is happening are hard to come by, so the afflicted are treated with scorn from some and sympathy from others and ignorance by many. The main character and narrator, Lee Hubbs, accidentally kills one of these quail people but easily covers up the crime and goes on about his life. Lee is a character who has done something horrible and must react. In the moment he chooses to protect himself. Is he a narcissist? Almost certainly. Does he suffer from narcissistic personality disorder? Only a therapist could say, but Lee would never see a therapist. Avoiding pathologizing his faults means Lee is the way that he is because he is human, which means he can never be wholly good or wholly bad, but has an infinite capacity for both, an ability to be good one minute and bad the next. You know, like you and me.
When my students center psychopathology in the creation of character, it’s as if the reality of the story doesn’t matter. They are immediately shutting down the possibility of the character (and the story) taking them in unexpected directions. The character would behave the way they behave no matter where they are or what they confront. There is a total lack of context because they believe the diagnosis itself is the context. The writers are watching from the dock rather than getting their feet wet. Sure, the pond is filled with cottonmouths, but isn’t that terrifying!
I’m certainly not suggesting that these young writers stop writing about the psychopathologies they are interested in or have been diagnosed with. I’m simply encouraging them to approach the creation of character a different way, more inside-out than outside-in. Even if we do write characters who have PTSD or OCD or other disorders, it’s disrespectful to that character (and to the act of writing) to attribute all of their behaviors to that particular identity. None of us are that simple. And if a writer already knows the type of character they are writing, how can that character do anything surprising? Which is to say, how can that character become more than their condition? So now when a student announces they have an idea for a character straight out of the DSM-5, I echo the words of a wise mentor and ask, “What else?”
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