***Wacko Wednesdays: Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology, or perhaps talk about a specific type of research into personality. I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***
Writers don’t write about mothers much. I was at a writing conference where the speaker asked the audience to call out something they’d read that examined the mother-child relationship. No-one spoke up. The speaker had made her point. The mother/child relationship is very complex and close to the heart. Even Disney likes to kill off moms so they don’t have to deal with trying to navigate those murky-mommy-issues waters. Fathers, on the other hand, abound in fiction. Father’s Day is this Sunday. Because we know all psychosis comes from our parents (not!), for today’s Wacko Wednesdays, let’s talk about at writing about the father/child relationship, or writing a character as a father.
For decades, psych research focused on the mother’s parenting as pathology for mental illness in children. More and more, researchers are looking at the father’s influence (especially with the area of girls and eating disorders). The father’s attitudes and behaviors toward parenting would influence your main character (MC). The father’s raising of your MC will probably all be backstory that happens offstage (i.e. not in the novel), but it is perhaps the most important character detail that fuels your MC’s current motivations. Let’s take a look at how some psych research examines how a father’s behaviors influence his children.
In the book, “The Role of the Father in Child Development” (.pdf of intro here), Editor Michael E. Lamb outlines the 3 areas that many researchers concentrate on when researching the father/child relationship: Engagement, Accessibility,andResponsibility.
“Whether and how much time fathers spend with their children are questions at the heart of much research conducted over the past three decades. In the mid-1970s a number of investigators sought to describe—often by detailed observation and sometimes also through detailed maternal and paternal reports—the extent of paternal interactions with children (Pleck & Masciadrelli, this volume; Lamb & Lewis, this volume). Many of these researchers have framed their research around the three types of paternal involvement (engagement, accessibility, responsibility) described by Lamb, Pleck, Charnov, and Levine (1987). As Pleck and Masciadrelli note, researchers have consistently shown that fathers spend much less time with their children than do mothers. In two-parent families in which mothers are unemployed, fathers spend about one-fourth as much time as mothers in direct interaction or engagement with their children, and about a third as much time being accessible to their children. Many fathers assume essentially no responsibility (as defined by participation in key decisions, availability at short notice, involvement in the care of sick children, management and selection of alternative child care, etc.) for their children’s care or rearing, however, and the small subgroup of fathers who assume high degrees of responsibility has not been studied extensively. Average levels of paternal responsibility have increased over time, albeit slowly, and there appear to be small but continuing increases over time in average levels of all types of paternal involvement.”
Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility are the three things you can think about when forming your character.
Engagement: How “hands-on” was your MC’s father when she was small? Was he a good guy but had a job that took him away often? Did he just seem like he was yelling everytime he spoke to his kids, but he was just trying to encourage them?
Accessibility: Could your MC bring any question under the sun to her dad or was she relegated to communicating with him through his secretary? Did he send the MC off to boarding school and say “See ya at Christmas?” Was there always a DO NOT DISTURB sign on his door, but he was very attentive at dinner time?
Responsibility: Did your MC’s father support his family well? Was he a good earner but a fierce disciplinarian? Was he a drinker but loved his family with all his heart? Was he a drifter that constantly told his kids to reach for the stars?
Look for ways you can build in contradictions in each of these areas, then think about how a kid would reconcile those inconsistencies. How we judge people is a lot of our character. A father’s personality greatly influences our sense of judgment. In flat characterizations, fathers are either no-good bums or unsung heroes, drinking louses or quiet loyalists. Usually a main character (MC) comes to acknowledge the father’s cheating ways or learns to appreciate the constant wisdom that they couldn’t recognize before. It’s all so cheesy and cheap. Try to go for some more depth. What kind of roles does the father character in your book play? What kind of parent is he? Is he a stand-offish, everyone-has-to-learn-for-themselves kind of guy or is he a soccer dad that is with his kids every step of the way? How can he be both? What generation is he in? Is he a 70-year-old but a modern diaper-changing/sling-wearing dad? Was he raised to think he’d let the kids grow up before he had any kind of relationship with them, even though he’s just 20 years old?
Take those three aspects of measuring fatherhood, Engagement, Accessibility and Responsibility, and mix and match good and bad characteristics of each. Make the father character a conflicted, true-hearted, complicated being that marked your MC with distinctive world views. Happy Father’s Day, to all of those dads out there!
***After a long hiatus, Wacko Wednesdays are back! Each Wednesday, I’ll outline a human quirk or phenomenon in the study of Personality Psychology. I’ll provide information, links, and my own experiences to help you along in your goals of writing memorable characters.***
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” -United States Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, July 4th 1776.
Happy Muffin!
Happiness research has taken the Psychology world by storm. If you search any book site for the word “Happiness,” you will see a plethora of books written on the subject. Lately I’ve been reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. It’s academic research and theory about attaining happiness and how our judgment about what will make us happy in the future is ridiculously skewed by our present thinking.
This book and the advent of other titles in the positive psychology area have inspired me to think about how we, as writers, paint the picture of our characters’ states of happiness. By looking at your MC and her goals in terms of her motivations and methods of attaining happiness, you can paint a deeper picture of what drives us all.
I’m sure you are familiar with the basic story arc: Main character (MC) starts out with a status quo, then challenges galore are thrown at the MC, lots of roadblocks stand in the way of achieving the new happiness goal, MC overcomes, is a changed person. The end. Today for Wacko Wednesdays I’ll run down two phenomena that researchers, namely David Myers, have identified as influencing a person’s happiness, namely Relative Deprivation and Adaptation.
Phenomenon #1: Relative Deprivation
“when we compare ourselves with those less fortunate, we can, however, increase our satisfaction. As comparing ourselves with those better-off creates envy, so comparing ourselves with those less well-off boosts contentment.” -David Myers
Lately I’ve been reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a classic piece of American literature that portrays a devastatingly poor family and their survival struggles in 1900’s New York. It’s actually making me feel quite good.
Yes I know that sounds bad. But here it is: My husband, my two kids and I live in the smallest house in our neighborhood. We live on my husband’s salary as I’m a full-time mom, but we truly have more than enough. Still, this suburban life and the American consumerism gets to everybody. We are inundated with ads to buy more stuff, we read stories of neighbors’ huge home improvements, we hear kids describing their African safari vacations. It’s an affluent area and it seems, at times, that we aren’t keeping up with the Joneses.
The unfortunate Nolan family portrayed in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, truly has nothing. When they mention clothes, they mean one pair of pants and one shirt for a man and one dress for a woman. Can you imagine? I look at my closet full of plain, solid-colored Old Navy t-shirts and feel loaded (wealthy, not drunk). When the Nolan family mentions meals, they mean oatmeal with no milk or fruit. I open the freezer each morning and lazily wonder which hunk of meat I have to make that night. While they want for decent immune systems, we struggle to fight our ever-expanding waistlines. This book makes me feel so fortunate that I may start it all over again once I’m finished! This is Relative Deprivation at work. How rich you feel is totally dependent on who you are comparing yourself to. Compared to the Nolans (or many real people in this economy), my husband and I are doing great! Compared to our friends the doctors, with their big house and insanely lavish vacations, we’re struggling.
photo by Drawsome on Flickr
What do most good ol’ Amurrricanz do when they feel like they are poorer than everyone else? Apparently they buy lottery tickets. Recent research has shown the Relative Deprivation phenomenon in full-swing in lottery ticket buyers. If people are feeling deprived, they make the trip to the local bodega to pick up their Pick 6’s. If they feel better off than their neighbors, they don’t buy lottery tickets.
Here are the questions you can ask yourself about your MC’s Relative Deprivation feelings: Is she better or worse off than her neighbors, peers, family members? When does she feel better off and when does she feel worse? What makes her feel superior? What kinds of behaviors result from those feelings? How does she make herself feel better in the short term? Does she eat? Does she steal their watches? Does she retreat into her packed charity-ball schedule? How does her current state of feeling deprived influence her dreams for the future? Does she coast when she feels affluent or better off in some other way? Coasting is what most of us do once we achieve a certain goal or milestone. That brings us to Adaptation.
Phenomenon #2. Adaptation
“I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead.” ~Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1958, spoken by the character Holly Golightly
Adaptation is what happens when a person has hit a windfall, achieved a goal, or just plain got lucky when that Good Samaritan pulled him out of the path of that oncoming bus. We adapt to having an inheritance, being a college graduate, or being alive to wander into the bus lane again. The “new” becomes the “same old.” Lottery winners, on average, aren’t significantly happier than the rest of us when they are surveyed 5 years later. We dream about California living but apparently Californians register on the same levels in happiness scales as the rest of us. (See Daniel Gilbert’s book). We adapt to the new status quo.
When my husband and I moved from Center City to the house in the suburbs, we didn’t see it as the smallest one in the neighborhood. We saw it as huge and wondered how we’d ever fill it with furniture. We had just moved from a trinity on Naudain street, banging our heads each time we came down the skinny and treacherous spiral staircase. The kitchen in that all-stacked-on-top-of-each-other house was tiny and there was no room for the baby I was carrying. But that house on Naudain was a palace compared to our 3rd-floor walk-up at 18th and Pine. Now we are here in the suburbs for almost 10 years, we’ve lost our coveted and elusive guest bedroom to a second child, and we’d like to upgrade to a food processor and a breadmaker if we had the space in our now-tiny kitchen. We’ve adapted. I can read a thousand tragic poverty books (Angela’s Ashes is next), but try as I might, I can’t roll back my “want” clock to the days when we were two grad students living in a 1st-floor alley apartment. Since that hole-in-the-wall had no light, I simply dreamed of having a view of the street.
Here are some questions about Adaptation that you can ask yourself about your MC: Has she had a windfall of luck lately (e.g., landed that dream job, attracted a super-hero boyfriend, or inherited large sums from an obscure aunt)? What happens to her after? Does she adapt and want more? Does desire for more turn into a disease that will be her undoing? When is the exact point where she takes her new life for granted? Does she ever grow enough to notice? Does she freak out, donate her lottery winnings to a bald-cat nursing home and flee to the Himalayas to live a life of solitude? Or, like most of us, does she just treat herself to a 1-million-calorie Frappuccino that week?
In their very basic structure, all of the archetypes and character journeys center around some kind of resolution, some little bit of happiness. Characters are going after a goal; the pursuit and the accomplishment will, they think, make them happy in some way. The goal could be revenge, it could be love, it could be fifty-two cents. They achieve the goal. Everything is coming up roses and they are turning up noses. But then they adapt. Showing your character’s general state of happiness before, during and after the accomplishment of her main goal will help to give life to her and her story. In daily life, we may overlook details, but in general we are conscious to our own state of happiness. The pursuit of happiness drives us. It will drive your character, too. Show us her struggles to reach her personal happiness. Be brave and show us what life looks like for her after she gets all she (thought she) wanted. Be honest with yourself and your characters. As writers, we are obligated to speak the unspoken truth, especially in our fiction. Mix in a little rough Relative Deprivation and astonishing Adaptation, and your writing will come alive.
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And of course stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
When idiosyncratic anxieties come to the surface, automatically a character is more interesting. The reader wants to know when and where your main character learned the life-altering fear of deli counters or water balloons. Was she born that way? Was she kidnapped by evil clowns and made to drink through latex?
We’ve all heard of phobias like Arachnophobia (spiders), agoraphobia (being unable to escape), and acrophobia (heights). The Phobia List grows daily. An expert can place a New Latin prefix onto the ending “-phobia” and a new diagnosis is born.
But before you dive in to making your character truly off their rocker, let’s take a minute to look more closely at the difference between mild anxiety and function-freezing fear.
A specific phobia is an extreme fear of a specific object or situation that is out of proportion to the actual danger or threat. In addition, an individual with a specific phobia is distressed about having the fear, or experiences significant interference in his or her day-to-day life because of the fear.
Ok, that’s poorly worded. In layman’s terms, phobias are fears that cause overreactions to the extreme. What’s extreme? Professionals would qualify a reaction as extreme if it interrupts the regular flow of a person’s life. A total wack job would sell a brand new house if he saw a spider got into the kitchen. Most of us who are merely afraid of spiders would yell for someone else to kill it and just avoid the kitchen for a few minutes.
You may want to give your character a mild case of phobia. Mild phobias are believable for any character, e.g., many children are afraid of thunderstorms, but they are willing to come out from under the bed when the storm subsides.
Extreme phobias are more rare, e.g. the child or adult that refuses to ever leave their basement because a thunderstorm may pop up at any minute. Giving your character a phobia this serious will take over the premise of your book. In fact, this type of “phobia-induced shut-in” character is practically an archetype: the shut-in that has to go out on their front stoop or else the world will end, the murderer escapes, their cat will die, etc. The inherent conflict between inner fears and lofty morals is a time-worn (but awesome!) story premise.
Sidenote: Be aware that a lot of the labels for phobias change and disappear as new science and data collection surfaces. Just be prepared to do a lot of research on that particular diagnosis; start with this article, check out the DSM from the local library, look over the APA’s site, and when googling, click on url’s that are from the .edu or .org domains. Read up, then go for it!
Lots of famous characters in literature and media have specific phobias, some justified (behavior learned from a previous bad experience, eg Superman and kryptonite), some irrational (like Tony Shalhoub’s TV character Monk – obsessive compulsive about germs). Real people like Howie Mandell of “Deal or No Deal” admits that he never shakes hands due to his concern about the spread of harmful substances (a.k.a. “germs”!); Howie does the fist touch instead. Holly Hunter’s new show, Saving Grace, has a character who is very afraid of small birds. Small birds? The rest of the fictional police department and all of the viewers are dying to know how that one came about.
Give your main characters a little chink in their superhero armor: give ‘em an irrational fear of stuffed fuzzy bunnies. When the opponents come for them, they won’t be armed with semi-automatics, they’ll have raided the local toy store for enough fluffy cuteness to make even grandma gag. Now there’s a scene I’d love to read!
Please comment! Tell us about your fears *ahem* your character’s fears. We can give each other ideas. With Nanowrimo starting on Thursday, ideas are gold. If you do write something for this meme, please return here and leave a comment with the link to your blog or website where you posted your excerpt. Thanks!
UPDATE: Take2max had the subject of phobias in her Sept. 21st Friday Meme that has one or two links for examples (I discovered her entry after I
had written this post. Just goes to show you, a little wackiness makes for memorable characters!)
My background is in psychology. Now I’m a writer. And I blog. Why not bring those three interests together? Introducing WACKO WEDNESDAYS!
Every Wednesday, I’ll introduce a personality trait/disorder writing meme. Use the info to add interesting facets to your characters. We all have little behaviors/beliefs/superstitions/pathology that make us unique. Your characters are the same way. Make them memorable, give ‘em a small disorder or related personality flaw.
Since it’s raining here on this chilly Fall day, let us start Wacko Wednesdays simply with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).
I’m sure you’ve heard of SAD. In a nutshell, it is depression in the winter months. Experts debate on its causes, origins, treatments and whether or not it should even have a name other than “depression,” but SAD has been publicized enough that you can write it into your novel and assume most readers can follow along (the controversy can help make things interesting, too).
Here is an academic article explaining SAD. The article goes into detail about the symptoms and behaviors of a person with SAD. Here’s a link from that page that leads to an end-user pamphlet explaining SAD, which contains enough information for you to get the gist, including this:
Not everyone with SAD has the same symptoms, but common symptoms of
winter depression include the following:
A change in appetite, especially a craving for sweet or starchy
foods
Weight gain
A heavy feeling in the arms or legs
A drop in energy level
Fatigue
A tendency to oversleep
Difficulty concentrating
Irritability
Increased sensitivity to social rejection
Avoidance of social situations
Symptoms of the summer depression version of SAD are poor appetite,
weight loss and insomnia. Either type of SAD may also include some of the
symptoms that are present in other kinds of depression, such as feelings of
guilt, a loss of interest or pleasure in activities you used to enjoy, ongoing
feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, or physical problems such as
headaches and stomach aches.
Symptoms of SAD keep coming back and tend to come and go at about the
same time every year. The changes in mood are not necessarily related to
obvious seasonal stressors (like being regularly unemployed during the winter).
Simply write these things into a character’s profile, and have the character (and plot) act accordingly. This type of research for personality quirks can be done easily on-line. A developmental or adolescent psychology textbook also has a wealth of information that can help you build believable, “real” characters.
Do you have any questions or suggestions for the WW meme? Please comment here or email me at yahoo(dot)com with username ccp6867.
Come back to PC on Wacko Wednesdays for the next personality quirk meme!
Tags: book, fathers, fiction, how to write a conflicted, how to write about fathers, Right-in, Wacko Wednesdays, write, writing character, Writing Exercises, writing father characters 
We’ve all heard of phobias like Arachnophobia (spiders), agoraphobia (being unable to escape), and acrophobia (heights). The 
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