Can women write authentic male characters?

t-shirt from trouble x

Have you ever tried passing yourself off as another gender, online or otherwise? How did you get on?

I dressed up as a bloke once, for a ‘reverse party’. I was working at a summer camp in Essex. I was told I had the body language down pat.

I haven’t tried it since.

I have tried writing a few short stories with male protagonists, however. Not for the challenge of it, but because they just came out that way. Some of those have since been published — one was chosen by a male editor and, for that reason, I consider that story my best achievement to date. (It’s here, if you’re interested. Here’s another one, now I think a bit harder.)

When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.

- James Baldwin

As a simple writing exercise, there’s merit in writing someone completely different from yourself, but if you’re writing another gender and expect that other gender to get something out of it, then you have to be able to offer some extra insight. This is really hard.

But should it really be that hard for a woman to imagine what it is to be a man?

What are the immutable differences — really — between men and women? The truth is, humans are all very similar to each other. Yo mommy said you was special… but that’s only because we make a big deal out of minuscule variations, not just between the sexes but between people of different ethnicities:

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

- H.L.Mencken

It’s a remarkable fact that, despite our huge population, humans are one of the most genetically uniform of mammal species, there being more genetic diversity in a random sample of about fifty chimpanzees from west Africa than in all seven billion of us.

- from Here On Earth by Tim Flannery

Whichever way you look at it, there’s limited use in making distinctions between male and female. Any generalised difference between sexes will likely be smaller than differences between any two random individuals plucked off the street.

That said…

There are definite gender differences, aren’t there – we all know there are – and whether we’re born like it or bred like it, by the time we reach early childhood, there are already significant differences between boys and girls.

A note on nature vs nurture:

I have been listening to interviews with Cordelia Fine (here and here), who wrote Delusions of Gender after taking a critical look at landmark research into sex differences. She thinks men and women differ mainly by nurture. On the landmark studies that have ‘proven’ innate sex differences, she points out fatal flaws. It’s fascinating stuff.

Whatever. We’re different.

When writing teachers say, ‘Write what you know’ does that mean we’re always safer writing the gender and sexuality with which we are most familiar?

As always, we’re better off looking at our favourite books for advice rather than turning to well-worn snippets of advice to writers.

There are many, many examples of men who have written women, and of women who have written men; straight men who have written gay men and every other variation.

First…

CAN MEN WRITE AUTHENTIC WOMEN?

Does any woman here know a wonderful example of a male author able to depict the female experience with insight?

I put this question to my book club a few months back. The women in book club are all voracious readers (who out-read me by a country mile).

None of them has come up with anyone, but Penny’s trying to think of the name of one male author who impressed her in that respect. (She hasn’t had her lightbulb moment.)

I admit it’s an impossible question.

Because how do any of us know what it’s really like to be someone else, regardless of gender? When we read about a character’s particular circumstances in fiction, it either rings true or it does not, but if we could magically step into someone else’s head for a moment in real life, and for that moment experience what it is like to have someone else’s memories and someone else’s body, would we have that experience of: “If this were fiction no one would believe it”? (I often think that about real life, particularly when encountering unlikely coincidences.)

Caitlin Moran talked about this with a gay male friend who said:

‘I mean, think of all those films or TV shows where there’s one woman, or one gay, in a script otherwise full of straight men, wirtten by a straight man? Or a book? Fiction and film is full of these imaginary gay men and straight women, saying what straight men imagine we would say, and doing what straight men imagine we would do. Every gay I eer see has an ex-lover dying of AIDS. Fucking Philadelphia. I’ve started to think I should get an AIDS boyfriend, just to be normal.’

‘Yeah – and all the women are always just really “good” and sensible, and keep putting the men, with their crazy ideas, and their boyish idealism, into check,’ I say mournfully. ‘And they’re never funny. WHY CAN’T I EVER SEE A FUNNY LADY?’

- from How To Be A Woman

And I sometimes wonder, when men try writing about women — which is not often, granted — if they have got it terribly wrong when I can’t identify with their woman at all. Or perhaps I have got it terribly wrong, assuming that simply because I’m a woman, I should be able to identify with all women, everywhere. If that’s my assumption, I’ve just contradicted myself horribly.

Maybe I’m harder on male writers trying to depict women than on female writers trying to depict women, because I assume there are certain things men will just never understand. After all, a male description of menstruation, sex and childbirth must by its nature come to him second hand.

But again, is secondhand summary necessarily a flawed one? Ain’t necessarily so. If authors required firsthand experience of everything the entire genre of high fantasy just wouldn’t fly.

And my view of what it means to be a woman is not universal, let’s be honest. I am an expert on me, myself and I. And not even on that, some days. No Man Or Woman Represents An Entire Gender.

While many women ask specifically for female GPs, I have several female friends who prefer male ones, especially when they have a specifically female complaint. Their reasoning: women can have far less sympathy for menstrual pain and difficult childbirths. Unless they, themselves, have suffered from awful cramping and birth complications they assume all other women — with ostensibly the same, homogenous female physicalities — are suffering from hypochondria or similar.

Male doctors, if they’re wise, make no such assumptions and can be more compassionate as a result.

I wonder how many men prefer female doctors for the same reason.

Back to literature, it’s interesting to hear men speak about depictions of themselves in fiction.

Can women write authentic men?

What Women Need To Know About Writing Male Characters.

In that article, Dave Farland makes a clear distinction between

1. male characters meant for a female audience and
2. male characters meant for a male audience.

I agree that this is a significant distinction.

But I’m not convinced we should be preserving it. I’m no fan of segregated reading in the first place; the sexes have a lot to learn from each other, including from literature. There’s also this: If a male reader can sniff an inauthentic male character, surely a female reader can too. We all live in the same world.

I’m also interested in his point that women don’t seem to get just how attractive men find them.

My response: Do men know just how attractive women find them? Some do, but many don’t. I assume that’s why I get so many spam emails trying to flog penis enlargement onto me. Let’s not push that old myth that women just aren’t as interested in sex as men are.

Here is another list of pointers for women writers, from the perspective of a man. Jay Kristoff makes some great points and his list is worth a read though, again, I take issue with the generalisation in point 5: that men and women differ in the way they sum each other up sexually.

I asked my friends: What do you notice first in an attractive member of the sex to which you are attracted?

(Badly worded, I know. I was trying to be inclusive.)

I came up with a variety of interesting responses, but I could not make any generalisation about sex differences. Women look at men just as much as men look at women. (Maybe women are a little more discreet…)

Also, women know that men find women attractive. Men don’t exactly make a secret of it. I think what bothers men most, about young women in particular, is that no matter how much a man appreciates a woman’s body, she’s still likely to have insecurities about it. This is how young women are cultured in the West, and it would pay for men to understand that their own appreciation of female beauty has a limited amount to do with how she is going to feel about herself. Unfortunately. (Unless you’re her father. Fortunately.)

As for the assertion that men shouldn’t cry in fiction:

Do men really know how often other men cry?

Women would have a better idea about that, because when men cry, I reckon they’re more likely to do it in front of a woman than in front of their male friends. Again, I’ve done an informal vox pop among friends, and we concluded that it depends on the person more than the biological sex. Women tend to cry more in public, but probably because it’s more socially acceptable for us to do so.

Does this really mean female authors should avoid writing scenes in which men crying, thereby enforcing the (I think harmful) myth that real men don’t cry? If male readers feel a little uncomfortable with versions of themselves sobbing, that doesn’t mean anyone should be making writing rules about it. Let’s knock that myth on its head.

The upshot: Since men are different in front of women, might women writers know things about men that men couldn’t possibly know about themselves, as a group?

And vice versa, of course.

*

The main thing that concerns me about all this: the accepted wisdom that women will read books written by men, but not necessarily the other way around.

Not everyone will come right out and say this, which is why it’s refreshing to hear it put plainly:

If you are a female author, it is going to be especially hard for you to target men (Nora Roberts had to change her entire persona down to her name [J.D. Robb] to target men, so did J.K. Rowling).

- from Six Steps To Finding Your Target Market.

In May, Esquire released a list of 75 books ‘every man should read’. You can find the slideshow here, and you’ll probably agree the list is excellent. But only one of the authors on that list of 75 is a woman: Flannery O’Connor. I’m reminded of the Smurfs, in that one female is thrown in to represent the Other.

It strikes me (and a lot of other people) as odd that there aren’t more female authors on any modern reading list, regardless of whether that list is exclusively for men or for women.

So… why do men generally avoid buying books written by women? Are women really making such a hash job of depicting the male experience?

Related Links: Why you can’t ever truly know someone else; Do Guys Talk About Their Problems?

I am neither a man nor a woman but an author.

- CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Related Article: Real Boys Cry from Kheryn Casey

Tics, Flaws and Irritating Habits

Earlier this year I read a book by Mary Gaitskill. I’ve since forgotten the name of the protagonists, and would struggle to give you a plot breakdown.

What I’m left with are the character details.

I remember one character whose habit was to stroke the fine hairs on the inside of one nostril when thinking deeply. I have no idea why this has lodged itself in my brain; perhaps because it’s such a strong image. Strong images are borne of specificity.

Reader identification is a big one, too.

The nose hair stroking reminded me of a classmate in my IT class who used to pick his nose whenever he was deep in thought. He seemed normal in every other sense*, and I wondered if he even knew he was doing it.

Not this guy. This is a different but identical guy, snapped by srcurran

 

I didn’t say anything to him but I made sure to avoid whichever keyboard he had last been seen at.

What are your character flaws? Do you think you know about them? Here are some from Fabulously Broke.

What about those of the fictional characters you create?

*It’s all relative.

 

Computers in Fiction

ON TV, EVERYONE OWNS A MAC: one of the most glaring tropes in modern fiction. The more I notice it, the more I notice it.

Despite the prevalence of PCs in real life, most fictional characters — in novels as well as on TV and movies — are banging away on an Apple Mac. It’s completely disproportionate. I suspect it’s to do with the fact that arty types prefer Macs, and arty types are the ones sitting around creating fictional characters. On their Macs, I don’t doubt.

pic by bending light

I admit PCs don’t look quite as pretty as the Mac on screen but:

THERE’S A CHARACTERISATION PROBLEM HERE, PEOPLE.

Some characters just wouldn’t be using a Mac. They would not.

I wonder if I’m falling prey to Apple’s marketing hype, absorbing the idea that Mac users really are different from the average PC user:

Apple’s popular commercials have painted the picture in stark terms: There are two types of people, Mac people and PC people. And if the marketing is to be believed, the former is a hip, sport-coat-and-sneakers-­wearing type of guy who uses his computer for video chatting, music mash-ups and other cool, creative pursuits that starchy, business-suited PC users could never really appreciate unless they tried them on the slick Apple interface.

- Popular Mechanics

This advertising campaign hasn’t really done a lot for those PC users who are by now well and truly sick of all those Mac Evangelists out there. (Have you seen them? They come knocking door to door, arriving on bicycles, carrying satchels with wholemeal sandwiches ‘buttered’ with hummus.)

Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui. [THE MAC USER IS] a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn’t really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

- Charlie Brooker

Stereotypes are indeed useful, at least when it comes to painting a character in fiction. There are actual figures on the difference between Mac and PC users. Yes. There are actually people engaged in such meaningful research:

Mac users are more educated, eat more hummus, prefer modern art over impressionist art, and are 21% more likely than PC users to say that two random people are more alike than different.

- Mashable

Some more statistically  likely assumptions about Mac users, from Mashable’s infographic:

Mac users are likely to…

• be younger
• value being different and unique
• be vegetarian
• consider themselves pretty savvy with technology
• watch indie films

On the other hand, if your fictional character is a 45 year old accountant who seldom throws parties, likes to fit in, would rather ride a Harley than a Vespa, snacks on sweets rather than salty chips, eats tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, watches Hollywood films and the History Channel on weekends, after consulting the TV Guide, then you’re stretching credibility when you have him typing away on an APPLE MAC.

Statistically speaking, this character needs to be on a PC.

STEREOTYPES, SCHMEEREOTYPES

Stereotypes can be challenged in good fiction, but Mac still only have round about 10 percent of the market share. So Macs are appearing way too much in fiction, whichever way I see it.

RANDOM EXAMPLES OF MACS IN FICTION

“…Vivi announced she wanted an outdoor party this year, so we need to have it before it gets cold. I’m doing the invitations on my Macintosh.”

- Caro, from Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Would Caro be using a Mac? Possibly. It’s prudent that this elderly woman calls it a ‘Macintosh’, feeling perhaps that ‘Mac’ implies too much familiarity (and familiar with technology she is not).

When Apple Macs – indeed, when any brand names — pervade a book, it gets to feeling like paid product placement, even if it isn’t. I got to feeling like this reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, in which both main characters own a variety of computers, with obvious preference for the Apple products:

In the second week of February Salander’s laptop fell victim to an accident… The rucksack tontained her white Apple iBook 600 with a twenty-five gig hard drive and 420 megs of R.A.M., manufactured in January 2002 and equipped with a thirty-five centimeter screen. At the time she bought it, it was Apple’s state-of-the-art laptop.

- Stieg Larsson

This obviously comes from an author who is into the latest computers himself, and who finds such detail fascinating, but there’s nothing quite like offering up specs of the latest computer to date your work. A kinder interpretation would be to say, ‘There’s nothing like offering up specs of the latest computer to place your work firmly in a particular year’. Which it does.

(I would also bet Stieg Larsson was a coffee lover. I’ve recently given up coffee myself, and noticed it mentioned on every second page. Perhaps the Swedes just love their coffee.)

As for my own computer preferences, any character assumptions will have to go on hold. I have a PC, a Linux running on an old laptop, and I’m currently typing on the Mac which lives beside the fire. I do love Macs, but PCs have their own advantages. They’re cheaper, for starters. And yes yes yes, you do still have to buy all the software, but you can build your own out of parts and use open source software. If it weren’t for the PC fewer people would be able to own a modern computer.

The Myth of Classlessness in Apple’s “Get a Mac” Campaign 

I’d like to see more fictional characters making use of a PC, or simply a ‘computer’, because I’m left scratching my head when I see certain unlikely characters making use of an Apple Mac.

On Villainy

Tom Hardy playing Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist

(Be GOOD or be EVIL, but don’t just be A LITTLE BIT OF A WEASEL.)

- @maureenjohnson

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

- Stephen King

What puzzled me about villains was why, when they were masquerading as respectable citizens, their essential no-goodness wasn’t as obvious to people on the screen as it was to me in the stalls. How could Pinnochio be so stupid as to be led astray by the patently wicked Fox, or Snow White not know the Queen was up to no good? Had the Queen been flesh and blood and not a cartoon she might well have been played by Joan Crawford, who was always something of an enigma to me. I never liked her, and with her gaunt face, protruding eyes and instinct for melodrama she seemed the embodiment of evil, yet she was often cast in the role of heroine… Claude Rains was another puzzle. He was determinedly silky and seldom unsmiling, sure signs that he was a baddy, though not always.

…

Banal though the general fun of films was, I learned, as one learned in fairy stories, about good and evil and how to spot them: the good where one would expect only degradation and squalor, and treachery and cowardice to be traced in the haunts of respectability. I learned about the occasional kindness of villains an the regular intransigence of saints but the abiding lesson had to do with the perils of prominence… Films taught you to be happy that you were ordinary.

- Alan Bennett, from Untold Stories

People have a need to believe that bad things are done by bad people. And what is bad? Isn’t this defined as anything outside the common good, which is further defined as whatever the majority see as good? Why must the villain wear a black hat? Because if he didn’t, how would we know he was the villain?

- Stephen Dobyn, from The Church Of Dead Girls

Related Link: Women Are Attracted To Men Who Scowl

A new study reveals that, given a choice, people will stare longer at the faces of people they’ve heard bad things about.

from Why you are mesmerised by people you’ve heard bad things about

Related Links: 5 Authors More Badass Then The Badass Character They Created; 50 Great Villains In Literature; Roald Dahl’s Best Villains from Flavorwire; 9 Villains In Literature And Film, And How To Make Yours Better from The Write Practice; Almost-Great Bad Guys For Almost-Adult Readers from Literacy Journal

The Depiction of Modern Schools in Fiction

Have you seen The History Boys (film or play), written by Alan Bennett?

Bennett went to school a long time before the 1980s, which is when this play is set. He writes in his 2004 diaries of some issues faced when depicting a modern(ish) school.

First he had to take out a gymnasium scene, because by the 1980s sixth formers wouldn’t have been enrolled in physical education.

(What a huge, huge shame for the health of the British Nation, I do feel, since the English kids I saw a few years ago were far less fit than their Australasian counterparts.)

LOCKERS

As part of his research, Bennett visited the London Nautical School to avoid outdated clangers.

My main impression is how burdened the boys are, humping all their possessions with them wherever they go so that they’re slung round with coats, togs, books and bags, none of them seemingly having their own locker or desk.

This is true in my experience too (both as student and teacher). This was to do with theft and vandalism, and no doubt also to do with the tendency for students to leave uneaten food in their lockers, to rot the wood and attract rodents.

I wonder how many schools still have lockers, compared to how many fictional students still have lockers. In American school dramas we always see scenes involving lockers. The lockers themselves are often used as a plot device, with plantings of drugs and offensive graffiti emblazoned across them, and love notes pushed through the cracks, and timid boys being locked inside… In fact, everything I know about lockers comes from fiction:

Now, it is possible to slip a note into a locked locker through the vents. Even, with some pushing, a pencil. Once, Tiny Cooper slipped a Happy Bunny book into my locker. But I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine how Jane, who, after all, is not the world’s strongest individual, managed to stuff an entire winter coat through the tiny slits in my locker.

- from Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan.

But I have no idea how many North American schools still provide lockers for their students. (Perhaps one of you will enlighten me.) In New Zealand, as in England (like Bennett observed), most students lump around a bag full of textbooks all day. This can’t be good for the back. I think at some schools parents are starting to complain about this, and lockers may be making a comeback.

SARCASM

Bennett writes:

Nicholas Hytner has shown the script of The History Boys to one of his former teachers at Manchester Grammar School, who says that teaching these days is so circumscribed that many traditional tools of the trade are now impermissible. Sarcasm, for instance, is out, pupils are never touched and there are often viewing panels in the doors.

Each of these observations is very true, and it does frustrate me when I see sarcastic dialogue from teachers in modern fictional schools. We were taught firmly at teachers’ college that sarcasm is a no-no — and the objection doesn’t just come from above; today’s students detect sarcasm in a second, and will pull you up on it. I remember filling in for another teacher, turning up to anarchy and saying, ‘Some quiet would be nice.’

One of the students was listening, at least. She turned to me and said, ‘Watch the sarcasm, Miss.’

And if I hadn’t been so busy with the humdrum, time-consuming and dreary job of calling a class of unknown students to attention, I might have delivered a lesson on what ‘sarcasm’ actually means, and how it compares to ‘understatement’ but this was a maths lesson. (I also remember later in the hour being asked how to do quadratic equations, and I was of no help whatsoever with that.)

Yet authors of fictional teachers are still making heavy use of sarcasm in lessons, and this lacks authenticity to me… Which is problematic if authenticity is what they are going for.

PHYSICAL CONTACT

Regarding the touchy issue of touching, in every school you’ll probably find at one point in staff history:

• a teacher who gets away with quite a bit of physical contact because they have a wonderful rapport with all of their students, and it never gets them into trouble
• at least one teacher who crosses the line, and who seems to get a certain titillation out of mildly through wildly inappropriate touching of students. This is my own experience of schools.

But most teachers never, ever touch students, not even in kindness. So when I see a teacher in a fictional drama touching a student, even on the shoulder, even to gain attention, I notice.

I also notice when a teacher keeps a student behind after class for a talking to. Even if this is innocent — like ‘Where’s your homework?’ — I always think how unlikely it is, that a teacher would keep a student behind after class. Teachers know to keep their classroom doors open, and when speaking to an individual student, keep their friends along too, or just outside the door, within earshot. Isn’t every modern teacher ever-aware of fictional claims of sexual abuse and harassment? Even fictional characters? I get the impression that authors of fictional teachers underestimate this unfortunate and lingering anxiety.

BEFORE THE BELL

So often in American dramas the bell rings; students snap their books shut, stand up, walk out.

I have never seen this scenario (except with one teacher who, it was widely acknowledged, had major problems controlling her classes).

What usually happens is this:

1. The teacher is keeping an eye on the clock about every five minutes. (You don’t see this much in dramatised classrooms either.) The teacher is often more cognizant of the end of class than the students, and it is the teacher who orchestrates the wind-up of a lesson.

2. About ten minutes before the end, a good teacher will ask the class to contribute to a recap of the day’s learning material. There’s usually some boring admin stuff, like homework, but I can forgive a scriptwriter for leaving that stuff out.

3. A tidy teacher will ask students to pick up any litter on the floor, and if it’s the last lesson of the day, the chairs will go up onto the desks. (Can you think of a single time you’ve seen this on the screen?)

4. If students start packing up before they are requested, any teacher with middling management skills still knows to put the kybosh on that, or else students soon learn that they can pack up a good 20 mins before the end of each class and battle for position near the exit, ready to burst out the door with the first tinkle of the bell. Any teacher who lets this happen is not on top of things.

So why, in fiction, do students pack up and leave taking their cue from the bell, not their teachers, with ‘good’ teachers shouting over top of the ruckus in order to finish their sentence?

STUDENT CENTERED LESSONS

In modern classrooms, students have far more to say than in the classrooms of yesteryear. The teacher is no longer a lecturer; rather a facilitator. Students are frequently divided into groups, set to work on a task (often on a computer), then present to their peers.

What I see in fictional classrooms: The teacher yaks. Students listen. This is a particularly vexing scenario when the class is supposed to be ‘difficult’.

I can tell you for a fact, modern students have little tolerance for lengthy lectures. There are still lessons during which teachers do a goodly proportion of the talking, but they are not met with the bright and alert faces which are seen so often on TV and movies. What you definitely get during a high school lecture lesson is a teacher who is telling Amy to stop talking, Corey to refrain from tapping the desk with his pencil, Riley to quit rustling with whatever is in that plastic bag yadda yadda yadda.

The most realistic depiction of a fictional classroom that I have seen is Summer Heights High (Australia), closely followed by Seven Periods With Mr Gormsby (New Zealand). Matt Lucas as Vicky Pollard and Catherine Tate’s ‘am I bovvered’ are also scarily accurate. That, of course, is exactly why they’re funny. These are all parodies, yet they achieve a realism that serious drama can’t seem to match.

These depictions get a bit closer to what really happens in a modern high school lesson, at least in Australia, NZ and England. The Catherine Tate sketch is scarily accurate… A VERY similar thing happened when I went to teach English to the English with a New Zealand accent. I almost think Catherine Tate was a fly on the wall that day, especially since my main sparring partner was called Lauren.

Related Links: High School Hierarchy in YA Fiction; The Most Realistic TV Shows About High School, like, ever, from Flavorwire.

Narcissists in Fiction

I watched an Insight documentary on narcissism – a fascinating topic. (Transcript here.) What I learned:

• Narcissism is the opposite of empathy.
• Psychopathy is the malignant form of narcissism. Psychopaths, like narcissists, lack empathy, but also get a sadistic  pleasure out of inflicting pain upon others.
• Narcissism is part of a developmental stage, and is not necessarily clinical. For example, two year olds are about as narcissistic as you can get. Narcissism – meaning self-promotion and care of self image – continues to be very important during the partnership forming years. (Teens and twenties.) I’m quite sure this is part of what makes some young drivers so dangerous on the road: the delusion that they are better drivers than older people.
• Clinical narcissism is seen more often in men than in women, in the same way psychopathy is seen more often in men.
• Corporations tend to reward narcissists, so narcissists often get promoted. But those same behaviours are very hard to live with, so narcissists have turbulent home lives unless they learn to adapt according to the situation. In relationships they are referred to as ‘emotional vampires’ in pop culture.
• Narcissism doesn’t necessarily respond well to therapy, because therapy can reinforce undesirable narcissistic behaviour in much the same way psychopathic behaviour can be inadvertently validated by therapy. (Think Tony Soprano.)
• Narcissists have a sense of self-entitlement. They genuinely think they’re more special than other people. They don’t believe they need to do the work to get the reward (they deserve early career promotion, say), and in a relationship narcissists think they are the more important half. Unfortunately, they tend to see all their own negative qualities in the other person. Narcissists can’t see that they are no better than other people. They don’t see themselves realistically. They genuinely think they’re more beautiful/talented/funny than other people.
• The worst thing that can happen to a narcissist is that their true self is revealed to themselves. If a narcissist’s ‘balloon’ is pricked – if they have an epiphany of sorts – depression often follows. Sometimes this happens some time around middle age. (Midlife crisis?)
• Not all heavy users of Facebook/Twitter are narcissists, but narcissists are more likely than non-narcissists to be heavy users of such platforms. The usage habits of narcissists also tend to be different: posting lots of pictures, frequent status updates, aiming to gather many ‘friends’ and garner attention. Non-narcissists are more likely to sit back and observe what others are doing on Facebook, or to message privately.

No doubt about it: narcissists make fascinating fictional characters – probably because they feel so real to us.

1. angela hayes – AMERICAN BEAUTY – FILM DIRECTED BY SAM MENDES

Narcissism is a major theme in American Beauty. Every character is a large part narcissistic: Lester and Carolyn Burnham, Angela, Colonel Frank Fitts. The characters with the most realistic view of themselves and others are Jane Burnham and Ricky Fitts.

Ricky understands that the worst thing he can tell Angela is that she is not special:

Angela Hayes: Yeah? Well, at least I’m not ugly!
Ricky Fitts: Yes, you are. And you’re boring, and you’re totally ordinary, and you know it.

Sure enough, in the car with Jane she confides:

Angela Hayes: I don’t think that there’s anything worse than being ordinary.

2. BERTHA YOUNG – BLISS – SHORT STORY BY KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Many of Mansfield’s characters were narcissistic – always wondering what others are thinking about them rather than thinking about other characters. I suspect Katherine Mansfield herself never really got through the narcissistic phase. She died young. Her last stories, however, show a shift towards bigger themes such as death, and whether some people really are more important than others (eg. The Garden Party).

3. BRASS IN POCKET BY THE PRETENDERS

‘CAUSE I GONNA MAKE YOU SEE
THERE’S NOBODY ELSE HERE
NO ONE LIKE ME
I’M SPECIAL, SO SPECIAL
I GOTTA HAVE SOME OF YOUR ATTENTION
GIVE IT TO ME
‘CAUSE I GONNA MAKE YOU SEE
THERE’S NOBODY ELSE HERE
NO ONE LIKE ME
I’M SPECIAL, SO SPECIAL
I GOTTA HAVE SOME OF YOUR ATTENTION

GIVE IT TO ME

4. don draper – mad men

The classic corporate narcissist.

Two types of parenting lead to narcissism – the overindulgent type and the cold, distant type, where the child is only noticed if they do something the parents consider worthy. Don Draper’s flashbacks tell us he falls into the latter category.

Deep down, Don Draper feels like he is nothing — the most terrifying prospect for a narcissist. But he has found the perfect environment in which to behave this way: an advertising corporation, where he is almost expected to take full credit for group effort, and to be dismissive of others who are beneath him in the pecking order.

This same behaviour doesn’t work in his personal life, however, and in that part of his life he’ll keep going from disaster to disaster.

Don Draper can be charming and persuasive, but he lacks true empathy. This works to his advantage because it allows him not to care. This aspect of Don was demonstrated most clearly in his treatment of Faye Miller in season four, but was foreshadowed in his long relationship with Betty.

Every now and then Don Draper catches a glimpse of his real self and this always coincides with a downfall.

5. I’M TOO SEXY – RIGHT SAID FRED

Vanity is different from narcissism. But vanity is a component of narcissism. Also, body image and self image are two different things. It seems vanity is mistaken for narcissism, and self-consciousness mistaken for vanity. Is it vain if a teenaged girl refuses to leave the house without mascara and heavy foundation, or is it self-consciousness?

As a psychologist said on the Insight discussion, narcissism is a poorly understood condition. Everyone knows about mental disorders like depression and anxiety but few are able to pick a narcissist upon first meeting one – unless you’ve had a lot to do with one personally, of course. Narcissism is more than vanity, and this does come through in the myth:

Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae, renowned for his beauty. He was exceptionally proud and disdained those who loved him. Nemesis saw this and attracted Narcissus to a pool. In the water, Narcissis saw his own reflection and fell in love with it, not realising it was merely an image. Unable to leave the beauty of his reflection, Narcissus died.

6. Edie Britt – Desperate Housewives

That series is full of narcissism and you could easily argue that Edie isn’t a standout case but I’m thinking of the scene where she says to Carlos:

I’m hot, you’re hot. On paper we should be having great sex.

7. TRUMAN CAPOTE

Now I’m cheating, because Truman Capote was a real man who wrote a real book. Sometimes I think narcissists are their own best creations, and Truman Capote is therefore one hair’s breadth away from existing in our memories as a character of fiction.

Bill Bryson nicely encapsulated both the man and his book in The Lost Continent:

Fifty miles beyond Dodge City is Holcomb, Kansas, which gained a small notoriety as the scene of the murders described with lavish detail in the Truman Capote book In Cold Blood. In 1959, two small-time crooks broke into the house of a wealthy Holcomb rancher named Herb Clutter because they had heard he had a safe full of money. In fact he didn’t. So, chagrined, they tied Clutter’s wife and two teenaged children to their beds and took Clutter down to the basement and killed them all. They slit Clutter’s throat (Capote described his gurglings with a disturbing relish) and shot the others in the head at point-blank range. Because Clutter had been prominent in state politics, the New York Times ran a small story about the murders. Capote saw the story, became intrigued and spent five years interviewing all the main participants – friends, neighbours, relatives, police investigators and the murderers themselves. The book, when it came out in 1965, was considered an instant classic, largely because Capote told everyone it was.

There has since been a movie made about Capote’s obsession with this murder… and about his obsession with himself, I might add.

I have 94 per cent recall of all conversation. I tested it myself.

Sometimes when I think of how good my book is going to be, I can’t breathe.

I wonder if you agree that Truman Capote was a narcissist. I also wonder if Capote would’ve spent five years researching for In Cold Blood had he not been so sure of his own abilities and the book’s success.

Alan Bennett had this to say about Truman Capote (and homophobia) in a diary entry from 21 March, 2000:

Read the hitherto unpublished extracts from Sylvia Plath’s diaries without much interest. I hadn’t known about Hughes’s homophobia — though I’m not sure that antipathy to Truman Capote can be so subsumed, Capote really deserving a phobia to himself.

The Truman Capote Insult Quiz

8. ALAN BENNETT’S AUNT KATHLEEN

Speaking of Alan Bennett, and real narcissists: Alan Bennett’s Aunt Kathleen was a real person. Bennett describes her in senility — a state which perhaps amplifies our true selves in the same way alcohol can:

Surrounded by the senile and by the wrecks of women as hopelessly, though differently, demented as she is, she still clings to the notion that she is somehow different and superior. Corseted in her immutable gentilities she still contrives to make something special out of her situation and her role in it.

‘He’ll always give me a smile,’ she says of an impassive nurse who is handing out the tea. ‘I’m his favourite.’

‘This is my chair. They’ll always put me here because this corner’s that bit more select.’

Her life had been made meaningful by frail, fabricated connnections, and now, when the proper connections in her brain are beginning to break down, it is this flimsy tissue of social niceties that still holds firm.

- Alan Bennett, from Untold Stories

Bennett has a genius for human insight, and I think he has encapsulated in that character sketch how the demented elderly can slip back into that narcissistic state otherwise common to two-year-olds.

9. HUD

This is a great classic movie from 1963 which hasn’t really dated. I love the honesty of it. Hud is a bastard at the start, and a bastard at the finish, and there’s no character arc. There is a character arc with Lonny, his young nephew who realises what an asshole he has for an uncle, and who leaves the family farm to find his own way in life. But we know when Hud slams the door on the camera in the final scene of this film that Hud will continue to live in exactly the same fashion, and end up a lonely old man.

Hud is an example of a teenage narcissist who never grew up – even in his thirties he ‘doesn’t give a damn’ about anyone except himself. He completely lacks empathy for others, which makes this character an unambiguous narcissist.

This is a great film, and I think stories get away with nasty characters when they’re surrounded by such empathetic characters. The grandfather is truly noble and lovable. We warm to the nephew. It’s when every character in a film is unlikable that I wonder what I’m doing, trapped in a room with all these people.

ANYONE THINK OF ANY OTHERS?

Related Links

1. How to stop checking yourself out, from The Hairpin

2. Evolution of Narcissism – Why we’re overconfident and why it works, from National Geographic.

3. Narcissism Has Higher Health Costs For Men from Freethought Blogs

4. Five Ways Narcissists Screw Everything Up from Jezebel

5. Why They Can’t Feel Joy: Narcissistic Shallow Emotions from Psychology Today

Characters Are People Too

If I were to pick the most common mistake that writers make, I would say it’s simply that they forget their characters are real people.

Does every detective, arriving at the scene of a murder, ask their junior colleague, ‘Okay, what’ve we got?’ I’m sure someone has at some time, but I suspect that line is heard in drama much more often than it’s said in life. Every policeman is no more nor less than a human being doing a job, and their response to any situation will be as individual as that of any other human being, yet we often feel compelled to write in ‘cop speak’ – a vernacular derived mainly from other police shows – as though the job defines the character. I was once lucky enough to have a serving policewoman as a student in one of my writing courses, and when I read her work I was astounded to discover exactly how far real police idiom is from what we’re presented with on the screen. (In fact, sometimes the terminology was so thick I could hardly follow it.)

- Nick Parsons, playwright, from the NSW Writers’ Centre Newsletter

What I Like In A Fictional Character

More on character likability, something I’ve been giving much thought to since few of last year’s favourite books featured a protagonist I’d go to tea with.

Now, aren’t you glad I type more often than I write?

Character Empathy In The ‘Breaking Bad’ Pilot

This is  a spoiler alert, for anyone who hasn’t seen the first episode of Breaking Bad.

Read no further.

When a character in fiction  is required to do something very bad – something which any reasonable person would find morally reprehensible – and if the audience is required to empathise with that character (due to spending an entire series with them, say), then it’s necessary in the set-up for the audience to understand the reasons for the character’s actions. The audience must empathise, or else everything feels pointless.

CASE IN POINT: Breaking Bad, THE AMC TV SERIES

Walter White is one such protagonist. An ordinary guy starts cooking up meth for money. Yet we side with him.

For starters, he looks like the actual human incarnation of Ned Flanders. ie Mr Harmless-And-Well-Meaning. (Walt has none of the annoying personality traits of Ned Flanders, which would turn him into an unsympathetic caricature.) Even Mr White’s name is allegorical: bland and ordinary and reasonably common. Even the W-alliteration of ‘Walt White’ is ever so slightly comical and emasculating.

WHAT MAKES us take walt’s side?

The Whites have a disabled but smart-mouthed teenage son and a new baby on the way. In other words, Walt has more than himself to worry about. It’s easier to identify with unselfish characters than selfish ones.

Walter’s brother-in-law is a good contrast because, unlike Walt, who would be happy with the simple things in life, the brother-in-law is a police officer who craves action and excitement. He is not compassionate. He takes Walter along to a drug raid to ‘get some excitement in his life’ but unlike Walter, who sits in the back seat with an emasculating white bullet-proof vest over top of his jersey and a worried look on his face, the brother-in-law is hopped up on adrenaline at the thought of catching crooks. The brother-in-law and his police partner even make bets on the nationality of the criminals. For them, drug busts are a game. They don’t seem to look any further than that. In contrast, Walt thinks things through intelligently, and the audience is guided through his thought processes.

On the morning of Walt’s fiftieth birthday, his wife dishes up vege bacon. Walt’s fiftieth is not cause for celebration so much as reason to watch his health. Walt doesn’t complain about the bacon. He understands that he is being looked after.

The son, in contrast, is vocal about it, complaining that it ‘smells like band-aids’. He then makes a wisecrack about his father’s age. The audience empathises with Walt because all of us worry about getting older (if we’re lucky enough to ever get old) and all of us feel we should be looking after our cholesterol (or something – there’s always something).

Walt is a high school chemistry teacher, demeaning because of the poor pay – and although he knows his subject matter very well, he is jaded after many years of uninterested, disrespectful students. The shot of the bunsen burner flame licking Walt’s face as Walt drones on to the class is symbolic of his later demise. The audience watches this scene rather than listening to what Walt says about the importance of chemistry; the fact is, Walt is not an engaging teacher. He has somehow ended up in the wrong profession. Walt does care about his students. This redeems him. In fiction, teacher characters can be in the wrong job and yet retain empathy with their audience, but they must basically care. (Mr Holland’s Opus springs to mind.) Many empathetic characters are in the wrong job. (Peter Gibbons from Office Space, Elaine from Seinfeld - constantly – not to mention many people in real life who wonder what it would be like to have chosen a different job.)

Poor teacher remuneration, and a wife who spends too much time on eBay, mean that Walt  must wash cars to supplement the family income. He suffers humiliation after two of his disrespectful senior students witness him polishing the tyres of another student’s expensive car. When the girl takes a picture of him on her phone, we suspect she’ll send it round the entire school, or upload it to the internet. We know Walt’s humiliation won’t stop there. (Not like the good old days.) Humiliation elicits strong reactions in both the sufferer and onlookers, so even when a fictional character suffers a humiliation, the audience cringes in empathy.

Walt’s ordinary life and ordinary expectations are apparent when his idea of a pleasant birthday weekend is to take a drive to see an exhibition of photos from Mars. We also understand from this scene that Walt has a genuine interest in science. We suspect (and later find out) that he is very good at his (science) work. The audience can easily respect someone who is intelligent.

Walt’s wife is inclined to puts the screws on. I suspect many men would empathise. Skyler White displays many unreasonable expectations – common to wives in fiction – that enable audience empathy with the husband.

For example, Skyler chides Walt for being late home, even though he wasn’t expecting the surprise party. (How many times have you seen a fictional wife scrape a perfectly good – microwaveable - meal scraped into a rubbish bin?)

Unlike Skyler, the audience was there with Walt when the boss wheedled him into staying on at work after five. Next, Skyler gently but surely puts the screws on about painting the baby’s bedroom. (Room-painting seems to be a common source of antenatal angst in fiction – I’m thinking Juno now.) She’d do it herself except he ‘doesn’t want her standing on ladders’. This low level guilt-trip takes place in bed, and then she wonders why he’s not aroused. Skyler makes a thing of this. Another common trope: Lack of sexual arousal* is linked with general hopelessness, marital difficulties and loss of masculine purpose in life. (This situation is reversed in the final scene of the pilot episode to symbolise a reincarnation of sorts.)

*Is it just me, or is this trope used far more frequently with male characters than with female characters? Even in modern stories, lack of sexual motivation is not commonly utilised as a symbol for hopelessness and malaise in women.

But Walt does not feel sorry for himself even when things are bad. He collapses at work and taken away by ambulance, but still wants the medic to let him out on the corner. He doesn’t have good health insurance. Many could relate to this feeling, I’m sure. For those without good insurance, the prospect of getting an ambulance bill is almost as scary as the illness itself.

Then the kicker: Walt White is diagnosed with lung cancer, even though he’s never smoked in his life. We all know people who smoke like chimneys and live til a ripe old age. But Walt has just two years to live. This now seems the ultimate unfairness, and marks the turning point. Whatever Walt is about to do, the audience can now accept. We’re with Walt all the way as the straight guy ‘breaks bad’.

Will he tell his wife?

So many storylines would be stymied, if people only talked to their spouses. But no. The audience knows that Walt can’t tell his pregnant wife. In fiction as in real life, there is never a good time to break bad news. When Walt gets home, Skyler is on the phone with a credit company. They are in financial difficulty, as usual:

Skyler to Walt: Did you use the mastercard last month? Ah, fifteen eighty-eight at Staples?

Walt: Um, oh we needed printer paper. (It’s not like Walt is careless and extravagant with his money – this is a guy doing his genuine best, yet still, ends don’t meet.)

Skyler: Well the mastercard’s the one we don’t use. (Slightly patronising tone.) So, how was your day?

Walt: Oh. Fine. (The words themselves don’t do justice to this perfectly judged bit of acting from Bryan Cranston.)

Although Skyler’s eBay habit and her constant wheedling expose weak character flaws, it is also important that the audience empathises with her. And I do. How was this bit of storytelling engineering achieved?

Enter the sister.

Evil sisters are oft-used in fiction to highlight the good points in another woman. Skyler’s sister, Marie, is unpleasant in a low-grade but constant way. She is in competition with Skyler. Marie does not take pleasure in any of Skyler’s happiness (the baby) or success (the writing hobby). When Skyler says she’s writing a collection of short stories, Marie asks why she isn’t writing a novel. (Short story collections ‘don’t sell’ – another unwelcome reminder that the Whites are short on money.) Yet Skyler accepts her sister’s bitchiness, refusing to take the bait. This trait in a character almost always engenders empathy. Thus, as Walt highlights Skyler’s less attractive traits, the sister highlights her best points. Now we have a deftly portrayed, rounded female character in Skyler. We want the best for her.

And Walt’s multi-layered reasons for breaking bad have now been set up. So he gets on with the job of cooking up some meth. But even when Walt engages in something morally reprehensible, he demonstrates good basic principles when negotiating with his partner in crime, ex-student Jesse Pinkman:

“You and I will not make garbage. We will produce a chemically pure and stable product that performs as advertised.”

Endearingly, and ironically – given the actual danger – Walt will also set up an emergency eye-wash station, and wants them each to wear protective coats. He knows nothing about the criminal world, and thinks they just can rent one of those self-storage sheds. (The police are onto that, apparently, so they buy a Winnebago.) So Walter is a hapless criminal, which endears him to a largely non-criminal audience. How many of us would know where to start, if we suddenly decided to take to the underworld?

Walt’s incompetence is demonstrated later in the episode as we watch him trying to douse a rapidly spreading grass fire with a single lab apron, and later again when he can’t even manage to shoot himself with the gun. (I’m reminded of Llewelyn Moss of No Country For Old Men. Moss is another small time crook who engenders empathy by getting in trouble with criminals far harder than himself.)

COMIC RELIEF

When an ordinary guy turns bad, it is appropriate that heavy/dangerous/violent scenes are interspersed with lighter ones. In Breaking Bad the musical score lightens up and the audience is encouraged to take some scenes less seriously than others. This is a little heavy handed for my taste.

The ultimate in relief comes at the end of the pilot episode, just as we realise (along with Walt) that it’s not the cops who are after him – it’s simply a cavalcade of fire engines, and they’re screaming right past him as he stands on the side of the road in nothing but underpants and shirt. The engines are off to put out that fire he made.

This comical scene happens right after a scene of heightened tension, when Walt tries to kill himself (and fails). When we realise there is no imminent danger, we are almost as relieved as Walter himself.

Yet when we first met Walter, we saw a crazy man in a gas mask driving a Winnebago with dead bodies in the back. He could have been a psychopathic mass murderer, and all those movies about psychopathic mass murderers have primed us to think he might be. But the pilot episode of Breaking Bad makes use of the bookends structural technique, and now we’re back to the opening scene. This time, though, we’re on the side of the drug cook.

For me, the writers/actors/directors of Breaking Bad achieved character empathy in Walter White. And what a stunning example it is too. I never thought I’d be rooting for a meth cook.

Adult Characters in Young Adult Stories

“I was in England back [in the 80s and 90s] and you’d get these books for review, and they’re all about this 15-year-old boy who lived in this tower block in London, and his older brother was using drugs, probably heroin. But there was a teacher who believed in him, and even though things weren’t going very well, it was kind of bleak and miserable, but because the teacher believed in him, maybe by the end he was going to be okay, we sort of hoped … And if I read that book once, I must have read it 30 times.”

- Neil Gaiman, in this interview

The To Sir, With Love stories are a bit overdone, to be sure.

Has YA literature gone too far in the other direction? Here’s what makes me groan a bit.

1. UNPLEASANT Foster Carers

Foster care is a disproportionately common device in children’s and YA stories because it’s a good method for getting caring adults out of the way so that the young people can get on and exert some independence. Perhaps this is why, so often, the adults who work as foster parents are cruel and unfair. Even more evil are the people in charge of placing children in foster care. In reality, I think the proportion of warm people working in foster care would be higher than in real life. I’d like to see some well-rounded and caring foster parents in stories.

2. 2D Teachers

So often, teacher characters are either goodies or baddies: Miss Honeys or Trunchbulls. This is fine in Matilda, because Matilda is a children’s book and children see the world in black and white.

But surely young adults are capable of seeing shades of grey in their teachers? And if they can’t – okay, many teenagers can’t see their teachers as real people – is it because teachers are given an unfair treatment in most novels and TV programs?

To make a story, I don’t believe all characters have to be rounded and fully-fleshed. There is a time and place for a cliche/trope/caricature. But I would like to see teacher tropes developed into full characters more often than I do – and not just the young, good-looking teachers, Home and Away style – all teachers have a life outside the classroom.

3. Evil step-parents

I see lots of step-mothers, much younger than the character’s own mother, trying hard (and failing) to bond with the protagonist. Step-fathers are often abusive.

One thing I really liked about the film Juno (script by Diablo Cody, starring Ellen Page) was the character of Juno’s step-mother. Because of all the stories done before, the audience expects Juno’s step-mother to be tyrannical when finding out Juno is up the duff, but it’s the step-mother who gets out her sewing machine and resizes all of Juno’s jeans. It’s the step-mother who sticks up for Juno at the ultrasound appointment.

This is refreshing, because there are so many blended families around, and not all of them involve evil, uncaring, distant, incompetent or malicious step-parents. There are all sorts. Many step-parents play a very big role in the lives of other people’s children.