Joshua D. Hoyt - How to Diagnose Your Character: Using Psychology to Create an In-Depth Character

How to Diagnose Your Character: Using Psychology to Create an In-Depth Character — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "How to Diagnose Your Character: Using Psychology to Create an In-Depth Character" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...23

Acknowledgements

I want to thank all of those people who have helped me put this book together: Emily Lambert from Forbes magazine for her hours of editing, Emily Younker always encouraging me to keep trying and always believing in me, Ria Mendoza from OrangeJar.com who created the amazing cover, my mom who encouraged and edited and finally my amazing wife April who has always read the first drafts and still tells me Im a great writer.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Think of your favorite character, the one that changed your life and made you look at people and the world differently. What did the author do in order to bring that character to life? Most likely the author used a combination of techniques in order to make that particular character seem real. Creating this character took many hours of thought and effort -- and probably a few sleepless nights, as the author dreamed of and wrestled with the characters personality and evolution throughout the book.

Smagol is one of my favorite characters because I empathize with his plight. In order to get a reader to empathize with a creature such as Smagol, Tolkien needed to create a character that had characteristics shared by everyday people. Tolkien did this by allowing Smagol to change and struggle, in his case with an outside force that entered his life in the form of a ring. As Tolkien showed the reader Smagols struggles, we saw and continue to see -- that Smeagle was not evil, just couldnt overcome the evil around him. Smeagles character also provided insights into Frodos behavior when he tried to overcome the ring and when he failed to follow through in the end. Tolkien truly mastered the art of character development.

Creating believable characters requires that writers master the principles of human behavior. We accomplish this by understanding how people react, change, and make decisions. In essence, we must learn to diagnose our characters just as psychologists diagnose people.

This book combines two passions of mine: writing and psychology. Ive studied psychology over the past six years, both through formal education and experience in the field. This has helped me to better understand the human condition. Ive worked with disorders in every age group, ranging from complex cases such as schizophrenia and depression to more mild disorders, such as feeling unfulfilled in the office. Working with individuals to change their destructive beliefs and behaviors gives me glimpses into their motivations and thinking. Studying, observing, and ultimately helping people has helped me better understand the ins and outs of individuals and social environments.

These real life experiences, plus years of schooling, have helped inform my writing, especially by helping me create unique and genuine characters. In this book, I share both the knowledge (e.g. psychological studies, terms, and explanations) and valuable exercises (e.g. people watching, observing our own senses, and functional assessments) that can help create complicated and authentic characters that can withstand the scrutiny of readers and critics alike. Readers should empathize with characters. And whether they hate or love those characters, readers should become engrossed in those characters stories.

Of course, if we as writers spent all our time trying to understand the characters we write about, we would never write. Not all characters require in-depth study. If a character only appears in a book for a few sentences, we dont need to know everything he would ever think or do, only what is important to drive the story forward. On the other hand, we need to understand our main characters well enough to understand their motives, beliefs, and weaknesses. And we can use many aspects of psychology to make characters believable and enjoyable to follow.

When looking at what makes up a person, the who, what, where, and when of a person -- i.e. his or her psychology -- we quickly discover that easy answers are hard to find. Exploring this idea of psychology on my own for a couple of weeks, I came up with a list: spirituality, physical, IQ, mind, core beliefs/schemas, behavior, emotions, conditioning, personality, and psychopathologies. Later I asked a colleague about her thoughts on psychology and got a blank stare. When I gave her a few prompts she contributed several possibilities: beliefs, environment, history, family, culture, thoughts, actions, awareness, and energy. I was struck by her inclusion of energy. She explained her interpretation of energy as how a person connects to the rest of the world, including the people nearby.

You can imagine why it takes years of studying to answer the question of psychology. I wont delve into every aspect of psychology, but Ill provide an overview of theories and studies most pertinent in creating a credible character with the depth needed to capture your audience. Ive arranged this book in six chapters that are arranged around different concepts of psychology. Each concept includes aspects that make up a person or character. Also, each chapter contains exercises to review and enhance what we learn from psychology, giving us experiences that will develop our understanding of how people work and behave. Such experiences, in turn, give us the tools needed to create believable characters. At the end of each chapter, we will develop a sample character using what was learned in the chapter. By the end, you should have a complete, sample character formed using the tools, knowledge, and experience gained from the book.

Chapter 1

Physical Characteristics and Functional Analysis

Characterization creates a fictitious character portrayed as if in reality. Interestingly, one reason characterization emerged in 19th century literature was due to the rise of studies in psychology. This makes sense considering psychology studies the human mind and behavior - as well as the study of animal behavior- so why wouldnt it influence how we develop and create our characters? For us to then make believable and complicated characters we need to understand the basics of psychology.

Two ways exist in which a character can be brought to life on the written page: the direct and indirect method. In the direct method the author tells the audience exactly who and what the character is. The man named Phil was exactly five foot three with dusty blonde hair and a big round nose. The indirect method shows the audience the character through thoughts and actions of the character and through the reactions of supporting characters. That must be Phil, Sandra thought as she walked up to him. Even with her short stature, she stood a head taller than him. His nose protruded from his face like a tangerine, making it hard to ignore. Today, more than ever, we present our characters in a more indirect method; we show our audience the characters rather than telling the reader about them.

A well-developed character in our stories not only keeps the audiences attention, but an agent's attention. Agents look for good characterization, and they expect to see characters developing throughout the story.

Physical Characteristics

When we introduce a character we give a little at a time; we dont bog down the story with extraneous details. Introduce what wed notice first about a person: hair, skin, weight, height, etc. Note that when we see a person we generally dont say, oh they are 62 and weigh 210 lbs. Our brain automatically registers something about an individual when we first see them, for example, he must have played basketball in high school or wow she needs a vegetable or two. This paints a better picture without giving numbers. Also, we often point out a characters eyes in the beginning, but think back to the eye color of the last person we met. We usually dont remember. Later on, if the character evolves into a key player in the story, then we can introduce the eye color somehow if the detail proves important to the character and the scene. However, as authors, we need to know these details about our characters. We may never write them in our stories, but we need to know them so we can portray them to our reader.

Next page

1234567...23

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «How to Diagnose Your Character: Using Psychology to Create an In-Depth Character»

Look at similar books to How to Diagnose Your Character: Using Psychology to Create an In-Depth Character. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Kevin TEMBOURET

How to draw a character: Method of drawing with the anatomy of the human body

Tasha L. Harrison

The Basic Character Creation Workbook

Mark Boutros

The Craft of Character: How to create deep and engaging characters your audience will never forget

TB Choi

Design Your Own Anime and Manga Characters: Step-by-Step Lessons for Creating and Drawing Unique Characters - Learn Anatomy, Poses, Expressions, Costumes, and More

Paul Tomlinson

Character Creation: A Guide to Archetypes, Motivation and Emotion for Writers and Actors

Holly Lisle

Create A Character Clinic: A Step-By Step Course in Creating Deeper, Better Fictional People

David Corbett

The Compass of Character: Creating Complex Motivation for Compelling Characters in Fiction, Film, and TV

Wisehart

How to Write Great Characters: The Key to Your Heros Growth and Transformation

Lauther

Creating characters : a writers reference to the personality traits that bring fictional people to life

Victoria Lynn Schmidt

45 Master Characters. Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters

Student Life

Character. Old Testament People - Encounters with God

Dr. Linda Edelstein

Writers Guide to Character Traits

Discussion, reviews of the book How to Diagnose Your Character: Using Psychology to Create an In-Depth Character and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.