Writing People

The quality of your writing is absolutely capped at your understanding of human behaviour. You’ll never write above what you know about people.

- Tony Gilroy, writer of the Bourne films and winner of the Original   

   Screenplay Oscar for Michael Clayton

I’d add to that statement. I’d say that you’re writing will always be capped by your understanding of yourself. Because you are a person. And you are the standard by which you judge all other people.

And vice versa.

I've been told a few times that psychology has nothing to do with writing. That just because I consider myself a writer, that does not mean I know anything about how the human mind works or how humans tend to behave.

The truth is that writing has everything to do with psychology. At least, it does if I am any good.

Writing is about character. Every character in a story is an audience proxy. If I don’t know what a human wants, needs, feels and thinks, how the hell do I know how to create a proxy that a real human will believe in? If the audience is human, the stories are about humans. The characters can be fish or dogs or candlesticks or lions, but humans is what the story is about. So until people start writing stories for an audience of fish or lions, an understanding of human psychology will be integral for any sort of writing.

So it follows that in order to build and manipulate convincing human proxies, you need to be good with human behaviour. You need to understand why people do what they do; the  ABC of their life choices; you need to be able to predict behaviour based on human observation; and, most importantly, you need to be curious to learn all this stuff in the first place.

I am a strong believer in the power of learning. I believe anyone can learn almost anything. But there are certain things that you either have or you don’t. Imagination is one of them. So is observation, pattern recognition, empathy, and many of the other traits required to properly study and categorise human behaviour. These skills can be enhanced, practiced, nurtured, but if you don’t have them to start with, then you may as well be a colour blind interior decorator. Because a part of the world is missing from your view. And a good writer needs to see the full spectrum.

I think the people who don’t see the link between psychology and writing don’t really understand themselves. Or other people. They think that writer’s are strange whimsical individuals who swan about plucking ideas arbitrarily from the air. They don’t realise that all writing is based on perceptions of reality. That everything from fairy-tales to news reports is just human beings trying to make sense of the world as they know it. That for any form of communication to be conceived from and then relayed back into the real world it must be built using real world structures. Nobody can create something out of nothing. Especially if they want anyone else to understand it. New reports use facts and testimonies, fairy-tales use metaphors and hyperbole. And so do news reports, come to think of it.

Biology, upbringing, gender, socio-economic status, what they ate for breakfast that morning – it all has an effect on a writer’s work. And the audience's response to it. Writing is really just an expression of perception. And if you’re dealing with perception, you’re dealing with psychology. Human buttons and how they can be pressed.

And because writing relies on the ability to understand others, one of the first steps to being a good writer is understanding yourself. If you know why you do things, why you get angry, why you get jealous, why you feel joy, you can superimpose that model over the behaviours you observe in others until you begin to see patterns. Then you’ll start to know people as a group. Then humans as a species. You’ll start to understand the “personal-yet-universal” dichotomy of all good stories. And you’ll start to see writing in a way that the average person does not. What it’s for. How it works. And what it can do.

But if you are one of the people who can't see how psychology and writing interact. If you don’t know why you do things, if you can’t figure people out, if you’re not interested in human nature and human perception and human humanity, then you don’t really understand what stories are. 

But you might be able to change that.

If you really want to write, and write well, learn about yourself. Because stories are about people, and your understanding of them relies on your understanding of you. And you can’t write about something you don’t understand.