Encounters with the imaginary

Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with a dear friend of mine, the wonderful author K. D. McCrite.  (Do yourself a favor and check out her books -- she's written in several different genres, and the one thing that unites them all is that they're fantastic.)  It had to do with how we authors come up with characters -- and how often it feels like we're not inventing them, but discovering them, gradually getting to know some actual person we only recently met.  The result is that they can sometimes seem more real than the real people we encounter every day.

"In my early days of writing, my lead male character was a handsome but rather reclusive country-boy detective," K. D. told me.  "The kind who doesn't realize how good he looks in his jeans.  Anyway, whilst in the middle of bringing this book to life, I saw him in the store looking at shirts.  I was startled, seeing him so unexpectedly that way.  So, like any good delusional person would do, I walked toward him and started to ask, 'Hey, Cody.  What are you doing here?'  Thank God, I came to myself, woke up, or whatever, before I reached him and embarrassed myself into the next realm."

I've never had the experience of meeting someone who was strikingly similar to one of my characters, but I've certainly had them take the keyboard right out of my hands and write themselves a completely different part.  The two strangest examples of this both occurred in my Arc of the Oracles trilogy.  In the first book, In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard literally appeared out of thin air -- the main characters meet her while fleeing for their lives as law and order collapses around them, and she cheerfully tells them, "Well, hello!  I've been waiting for all of you!"

I had to go back and write an entire (chronologically earlier) section of the book to explain who the hell she was and how she'd known they were going to be there, because I honestly hadn't known she was even in the story.

In the third book, The Chains of Orion, the character of Marig Kastella was initially created to be the cautious, hesitant boyfriend of the cheerful, bold, and swashbuckling main character, the astronaut Kallman Dorn.  Then, halfway through, the story took a sharp left-hand turn when Marig decided to become the pivot point of the whole plot -- and ended up becoming one of my favorite characters I've ever... created?  Discovered?  Met?  I honestly don't know what word to use.

That feeling of being the recorder of real people and events, not the designer of fictional ones, can be awfully powerful.

"Another time," K. D. told me, "we had taken a road trip to North Carolina so I could do some research for a huge historical family saga I was writing.  (I was so immersed in the creation of that book that my then-husband was actually jealous of the main character -- I kid you not!)  As we went through Winston-Salem, we drove past a huge cemetery.  I said, 'Oh, let's stop there.  Maybe that's where the Raven boys are buried and I can find their graves.'  And then I remembered.. the Raven boys weren't buried there.  They weren't buried anywhere.  Good grief."

Turns out we're not alone in this.  A 2020 study carried out by some researchers at Durham University, that was the subject of a paper in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, and received a review in The Guardian, involved surveying authors at the International Book Festival in Edinburgh in 2014 and 2018.  The researchers asked a set of curious questions:

1. How do you experience your characters?
2. Do you ever hear your characters’ voices?
3. Do you have visual or other sensory experiences of your characters, or sense their presence?
4. Can you enter into a dialogue with your characters?
5. Do you feel that your characters always do what you tell them to do, or do they act of their own accord?
6. How does the way you experience your characters’ voices feed into your writing practice?  Please tell us about this process.
7. Once a piece of writing or performance is finished, what happens to your characters’ voices?
8. If there are any aspects of your experience of your characters’ voices or your characters more broadly that you would like to elaborate on, please do so here.
9. In contexts other than writing, do you ever have the experience of hearing voices when there is no one around?  If so, please describe these experiences.  How do these experiences differ from the experience of hearing the voice of a character?

Question #9 was obviously thrown in there to identify test subjects who were prone to auditory hallucinations anyway.  But even after you account for these folks, a remarkable percentage of authors -- 63% -- say they hear their characters' voices, with 56% having visual or other sensory experiences of their characters. 62% reported at least some experience of feeling that their characters had agency -- that they could act of their own accord independent of what the author intended.

You might be expecting me, being the perennially dubious type, to scoff at this.  But all I can say is -- whatever is going on here -- this has happened to me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Martin Hricko, Ghosts (16821435), CC BY 3.0]

Here are some examples that came out of the study, and that line up with the exactly the sort of thing both K. D. and I have experienced:

• I have a very vivid, visual picture of them in my head.  I see them in my imagination as if they were on film – I do not see through their eyes, but rather look at them and observe everything they do and say.
• Sometimes, I just get the feeling that they are standing right behind me when I write.  Of course, I turn and no one is there.
• They [the characters' voices] do not belong to me.  They belong to the characters.  They are totally different, in the same way that talking to someone is different from being on one’s own.
• I tend to celebrate the conversations as and when they happen.  To my delight, my characters don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.
• They do their own thing!  I am often astonished by what takes place and it can often be as if I am watching scenes take place and hear their speech despite the fact I am creating it.

"The writers we surveyed definitely weren’t all describing the same experience," said study lead author John Foxwell, "and one way we might make sense of that is to think about how writing relates to inner speech...  Whether or not we’re always aware of it, most of us are trying to anticipate what other people are going to say and do in everyday interactions.  For some of these writers, it might be the case that after a while their characters start to feel independent because the writers developed the same kinds of personality ‘models’ as they’d develop for real people, and these were generating the same kinds of predictions."

Which is kind of fascinating.  When I've done book signings, the single most common question revolves around where my characters and plots come from.  I try to give some kind of semi-cogent response, but the truth is, the most accurate answer is "beats the hell out of me."  They seem to pop into my head completely unannounced, sometimes with such vividness that I have to write the story to discover why they're important.  I often joke that I keep writing because I want to find out how the story ends, and there's a sense in which this is exactly how it seems.

I'm endlessly fascinated with the origins of creativity, and how creatives of all types are driven to their chosen medium to express ideas, images, and feelings they can't explain, and which often seem to come from outside.  Whatever my own experience, I'm still a skeptic, and I am about as certain as I can be that this is only a very convincing illusion, that the imagery and personalities and plots are bubbling up from some part of me that is beneath my conscious awareness.

But the sense that it isn't, that these characters have an independent existence, is really powerful.  So if (as I'm nearly certain) it is an illusion, it's a remarkably intense and persistent one, and seems to be close to ubiquitous in writers of fiction.

And I swear, I didn't have any idea beforehand about Mary Hansard's backstory and what Marig Kastella would ultimately become.  Wherever that information came from, I can assure you that I was as shocked as (I hope) my readers are to find it all out.

****************************************

The name game

This week's Fiction Friday bounces off a question I was asked recently about how I choose names for my characters.  It's an interesting question, and one for which I have no ready answer, which of course won't stop me from burbling on about it for a while.

Most of the time, characters in my stories seem to come with their names pre-assigned.  I know that's not literally true -- but that's what it feels like.  One of the main characters of my work-in-progress, In the Midst of Lions, is named Mary Hansard.  Why?  Beats me. That's just who she is.  It's hard for me to imagine Mary with any other name.

As a brief aside, Mary Hansard is also one of those odd instances when a character kind of waltzes in from offstage and more or less takes over.  She wasn't in my first outlining of the story; but when some of the other characters are walking through a park and run into her, she tells them, "I've been waiting for you."  Why?  Who is she, and how did she know that the others -- who at the point are complete strangers -- would be there?  I was as taken aback by her sudden appearance as (I hope) my readers will be.  I honestly don't know where she came from, but she's turned into one of my favorite characters ever.

Sometimes writing seems more like "channeling" than it does like "inventing."

In any case, back to names.  I think they're pretty critical.  There's no way that the antagonist of C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader could have been quite as weaselly as he was had he not been named Eustace Clarence Scrubb.  Interesting, though, that when his character "reformed" -- and you may recall that he was the protagonist of The Silver Chair, and did quite a commendable job as the good guy -- they started calling him "Scrubb" instead of "Eustace."  "Scrubb," while not a last name I would choose, sounds kind of gruff and hale-fellow-well-met, as opposed to "Eustace," which it's hard to say without whining.  (My apologies to any Eustaces in the studio audience.)

I have only once that I recall completely changed a character's name mid-stream -- in my mytho-fantasy novel The Fifth Day.  The antagonist, who might be one of the most intense, tough-minded hard-asses I've ever written, started out as Tim Spillman.  My writing partner, the wonderful Cly Boehs -- with whom I've been meeting weekly for critique sessions for almost twenty years, and whose judgment I trust implicitly -- said the name just didn't work for the character.  It was too genteel.  And she was right.  Tim Spillman became Jackson Royce, and only when he had that name did he really take off as a character, hard-ass-wise.

Naming conventions in different genres can sometimes engender unintentional humor.  Character names in space-epic type science fiction often contain unpronounceable combinations of consonants, and usually involve apostrophes.  "Ah, my arch-enemy, G'filte of M'nshvitz Five!  It is I, your nemesis, Sh'l'mil of Oy'g'valt!"  Sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels usually rely more on accents, and quasi-Celtic sounding names:  "And then, Lünàavórne drew out the Sacred Sword Gínsü and raised it aloft, praying to Alávúnìël, the God of Random Diacritical Marks."

This cover is not my creation, but I wish it was.  It's from a cover-parody Twitter account called Paperback Paradise who you all must follow immediately.

And then there's romance novels, in which the guys usually have strong names with blatant sexual overtones, such as "Dirk Hardbody," and the women have names that sound like they came from the torrid dreams of a horny seventeenth-century English teenager.  A former member of a writers' group I belonged to was writing a contemporary romance about a perfectly ordinary (although of course drop-dead beautiful) American woman, and the main character was named -- I am not making this up -- "Royalle de Tremontaine."

Which brings up one of the funniest riffs Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever did -- "The Many Names of David Ryder," from the episode "Space Mutiny."  Do not, I repeat, do not try to drink anything while watching this.  You have been warned.

So, you can see that you can go a little off the deep end, character-name-wise.  I tend to keep it simple, unless I'm deliberately shooting for humorous effect.  It helps that I spent 32 years as a teacher, and each year I had about a hundred new sources for names.  (And if you take a look at some of the names of the villains in my novels, it might narrow down the guesses as to which students I disliked the most... heh-heh-heh.)

In any case, this is probably not much help, if you're a writer struggling with name choices.  So here are a few more down-to-earth recommendations:

• Think about what your character's personality is like, and choose accordingly.  First impressions in novels are often formed on the basis of the character's name.  If that name then is at odds with who the character is, like with Tim Spillman/Jackson Royce, it will ring false through the whole story. The bottom line is that readers will respond differently to a Ryan than they will to an Elmer -- as unfair as that may seem to the Elmers of the world.
• Don't go overboard, even if you're writing genre fiction.  The point is to keep your readers immersed in your story, not to have them read the name and snicker -- if that happens, they've been jerked out of the world you're trying to create.  Follow the conventions of the genre, but don't overstep the line, or you'll end up in inadvertent self-parody.
• That said, make your names memorable.  You want people to think about your characters even when they're not reading your book.  Consider some of the most-recognized character names out there -- Bilbo Baggins, Ebenezer Scrooge, Scarlett O'Hara, Dr. River Song, Hercule Poirot, Elinor Dashwood, Jean-Luc Picard, Inigo Montoya, Atticus Finch, Sherlock Holmes, Luke Skywalker... each one of those has something a little different about it that makes it stand out, but is not so odd that it seems ridiculous.  (Contrast that to the protagonist of one of my all-time favorite books, Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.  His name is George Orr, but that is such an unmemorable name that despite having read the book several times, I had to look it up just now because I couldn't remember it.)

So give it some thought.  Think about people you know, look in telephone directories and baby name books, and be creative.  Your characters deserve to have names that match their personalities -- don't underestimate the power that a wonderful, or abysmal, name choice will have on your readers' impressions of your story.

*********************************

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Unexpected depths

A writer friend of mine on social media asked what I thought was a very interesting question, and one that would be a good topic for this week's Fiction Friday: what is the most memorable line you've ever read?  I've read a good many profound books, but the first thing that came to mind was a line not from a book but from a television show.  In the Doctor Who episode "The Face of Evil," the Fourth Doctor remarks, "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they do not alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

The aptness of that quote these days hardly needs to be pointed out.

But there are many others, in books, television, and movies, quotes that somehow stand out for their unexpected depth (sometimes even in otherwise silly settings; the episode "The Face of Evil" was unremarkable in other respects).  Some only gain their punch from the context -- I'm reminded of Eowyn's defiant "I am no man" in Return of the King, immediately before she stabs the King of the Nazgûl right between the eyeballs, and the heartbreaking line at the end of Vanilla Sky when Sofia Serrano says, "I'll see you in the next life, when we both are cats."  Neither has much significance unless you know the story.

But there are a handful of true gems that carry their weight even independent of where they're from.  Here are a few of my choices:

• "Deserves it! I daresay he does.  Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life.  Can you give it to them?  Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.  For even the very wise cannot see all ends." -- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
• "You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do." -- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
• "When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won.  There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall." -- Mohandas Gandhi in Gandhi
• "There is no greater agony than having an untold story inside you." -- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -- Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl
• "Oh, yes, the past can hurt.  But you can either run from it, or learn from it." -- Rafiki in The Lion King
• "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
• "Get busy living, or get busy dying." -- Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption
• "Not important?  Blimey.  That's amazing.  You know, in nine hundred years in time and space, I have never met anyone who wasn't important." -- The Eleventh Doctor, Doctor Who, "A Christmas Carol"
• "Through dangers untold, and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back what you have stolen.  For my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great...  You have no power over me." -- Sarah in Labyrinth
• "Live now; make now always the most precious time.  Now will never come again." -- Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Inner Light"

Nota bene: If you can watch "The Inner Light" and not ugly cry at the end of it, you're made of sterner stuff than I am.  That episode has to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen on television.

So... there are a few of my favorite profound quotes from fiction.  What are yours?

**************************************

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Becoming the character

When I was about fourteen, I read Richard Adams's novel Watership Down.

I had never experienced being completely swallowed up by a book the way this one did.  I couldn't put it down -- read, literally, all day long, including over breakfast and lunch.  (Couldn't get away with reading during dinner.  That was verboten in my family.)  It didn't bother me that it's a story about rabbits; in Adams's hands they are deeply real, compelling characters, while never losing their core rabbit-ness.  Their adventure is one of the most gripping, exciting stories I've ever read, and it's still in my top ten favorite books ever.

One of the primary reasons for this is the main character, Hazel.  Hazel is a true leader, bringing his intrepid band through one danger after another to get to a new and safe home, and he accomplishes this without being some kind of high-flung hero.  He's determined, smart, and loyal, but other than that quite ordinary; his main skill is in using all the talents of his friends to their utmost, leading through cooperation and respect rather than through fear.  (And if that point wasn't clear enough, when you meet his opposite, the terrifying General Woundwort, the contrast is obvious -- as is why Hazel and his friends ultimately win the day.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons CSIRO, CSIRO ScienceImage 1369 European rabbit, CC BY 3.0]

We love Hazel because we can be him, you know?  He's not an archetypical warrior whose feats are beyond the ability of just about all of us.  I loved (and still love) a lot of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, but it's never the Lords and Ladies of the Elves, the ones always featured on the book covers, whom I identify with.  It's the Samwise Gamgees that capture my heart every time.  Maybe King Aragorn is the hero of Lord of the Rings, but even he told Sam, "You kneel before no one."

In a passage that is kind of a meta-representation of my own absorption in the story, about a third of the way through Watership Down, Hazel and his friends meet two other rabbits from their home warren, and find out that those two are the only other survivors left after the warren was destroyed by humans so the property could be developed for residences.  Adams's description of the characters listening to the horrific account of their escape -- and of their friends who were not so lucky -- parallels what we feel reading the larger story:

Hazel and his companions had suffered extremes of grief and horror during the telling of Holly's tale.  Pipkin had cried and trembled piteously at the death of Scabious, and Acorn and Speedwell had been seized with convulsive choking as Bluebell told of the poisonous gas that murdered underground...  [But] the very strength and vividness of their sympathy brought with it a true release.  Their feelings were not false or assumed.  While the story was being told, they heard it without any of the reserve or detachment that the kindest of civilized humans retains as he reads the newspaper.  To themselves, they seemed to struggle in the poisoned runs...  This was their way of honoring the dead.  The story over, the demands of their own hard, rough lives began to reassert themselves in their hearts, in their nerves, their blood and appetites.

The reason I thought of Watership Down, and this passage in particular, is because of a paper I read in the journal Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience a couple of days ago.  In "Becoming the King in the North: Identification with Fictional Characters is Associated with Greater Self/Other Neural Overlap," by Timothy Broom and Dylan Wagner (Ohio State University) and Robert Chavez (University of Oregon), participants were asked to evaluate how closely they identified with fictional characters -- in this case, from Game of Thrones -- and then the researchers looked at the volunteers' brain activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), an area associated with our perception of self, when thinking about the various characters in the story.

When thinking about the characters the test subjects liked best, there was much stronger activity in the vMPFC, suggesting that the participants weren't only experiencing enjoyment or appreciation, they were -- like Hazel's friends -- becoming the character.  The authors write, "These results suggest that identification with fictional characters leads people to incorporate these characters into their self-concept: the greater the immersion into experiences of ‘becoming’ characters, the more accessing knowledge about characters resembles accessing knowledge about the self."

"For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds though others’ eyes and return from those experiences changed," study co-author Dylan Wagner said, in a press release from Ohio State University.  "What previous studies have found is that when people experience stories as if they were one of the characters, a connection is made with that character, and the character becomes intwined with the self.  In our study, we see evidence of that in their brains."

"People who are high in trait identification not only get absorbed into a story, they also are really absorbed into a particular character," co-author Timothy Broom explained.  "They report matching the thoughts of the character, they are thinking what the character is thinking, they are feeling what the character is feeling.  They are inhabiting the role of that character."

So there's a neurological underpinning to our absorption into a truly fine story -- or, more specifically, a character we care about deeply.  It's what I hope for when people read my own books; that they will not just appreciate the plot but form an emotional connection to the characters.  My contention is that however plot-driven a genre is, all stories are character stories.  The plot and scene-setting can be brilliant, but if we don't care about the characters, none of that matters.

It's fascinating that we can be so transported by fiction, and suggests that we've been storytellers for a very long time.  When reading or hearing a profoundly moving story, we are able to drop the veneer of what Adams describes as our "reserve and detachment... [while reading] the newspaper."  We get swallowed up, and our brain activity reflects the fact that on some level, we're actually there experiencing what the character experiences.

Even if that character is "just a rabbit."

***************************************

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The heart of the story

As a fiction writer, I am constantly working to make sure my writing is engaging.  What writers want, after all, is to keep readers turning the page, and when "The End" is reached, for them to go immediately to Amazon and order another.

I'm a "genre writer" -- paranormal/speculative fiction, with occasional forays into science fiction or horror -- and a lot of the writing in that realm is highly plot-driven.  Keep things moving, don't dawdle too much on setting and description, make every page exciting and every chapter ending a cliffhanger.  But some new research out of McMaster University has illustrated something I've always believed -- however plot-dense it is, all stories are, at their heart, character stories.

What the researchers did is hook people up to an fMRI machine, presented them with a brief prompt -- things like, "A fisherman rescues a boy from a freezing lake" -- and asked them to express the story behind the prompt in spoken word, written word, or drawings.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The results are fascinating.  In each case, and no matter what the prompt, the test subjects' brains responded the same way.  The network called "theory-of-mind" -- which responds to other people's motivations, personalities, beliefs, motives, and actions -- was the primary area that fired during the activity.  In spite of the fact that these characters were entirely fictional, and had not even been considered prior to the assignment of the prompt, the brain responded to their stories as if they were real people.

"We tell stories in conversation each and every day," said Steven Brown, associate professor of psychology, neuroscience, and behavior at McMaster, who was lead author of the study.  "Very much like literary stories, we engage with the characters and are wired to make stories people-oriented...  Aristotle proposed 2,300 years ago that plot is the most important aspect of narrative, and that character is secondary.  Our brain results show that people approach narrative in a strongly character-centered and psychological manner, focused on the mental states of the protagonist of the story."

Which I find absolutely fascinating, and which squares with my experience both as a writer and as a reader.  There have been times I've read books -- won't mention any names, out of courtesy to my fellow authors -- in which I've found the concept intriguing, but I have either not cared about the main characters or else actively disliked them.  And no matter how fascinating the plot, if I don't give a damn about the characters, why would I care enough to read to the end of the book?

I try my hardest to keep this in mind when I'm writing, and especially apropos of the characters who aren't likable.  It's easy enough to form an emotional attachment to the Good Guys, but a pet peeve of mine is Bad Guys who are one-dimensional.  Much as I love The Lord of the Rings, why was Sauron so damned nasty?  Did he actually like living in a wretched wasteland, and palling around with Orcs and Trolls and Giant Spiders and the like?  Did he finish his morning cup of coffee, and immediately look around for someone to torture?

Bad Guys -- even, in the case of Really Bad Guys like Sauron -- have to have some sort of motivation other than just being evil 'cuz they're evil.  In my own books, I had a striking experience with writing a character who is truly awful; Jackson Royce in this summer's release, The Fifth Day.  He is not a nice man.  But along the way (no spoilers intended) you begin to find out why he acts the way he does, and by the end, he's pitiable.  Still not likable, but pitiable.  I had one reader tell me, "Man, you had me hating Jackson and feeling terribly sorry for him at the same time.  I didn't think that was possible."

To me, that says that at least on that level, the story succeeded.

So it's fascinating that neuroscience has given us a first approximation to why we respond this way.  Humans are social primates; we're wired to react to the people around us, to parse their actions as if we could see inside their minds.  In other words, to put ourselves in their place, think whether we would have done the same, and try to ascribe motives to what they've done.

This tendency is so powerful that it activates even in the case of fictional characters.  Which, perhaps, explains why humans have been storytellers as long as there's been an audience of listeners and a campfire to sit around.

******************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]