JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #23
October 22, 2020
This week I want to talk about being psychic. The best fiction writers can read people’s minds. They know what people want and why. They can discern motivations and compulsions. They understand human behavior on a psychic level, able to dig into a person’s mind and pick out what drives them and predict what they will do next.
There is no magic about it. The best fiction writers know that human beings express their inner thoughts in myriad ways, through body posture, small gestures, eye direction, and even through avoidance. We evolved in a social environment where it was necessary for us to make sense of one another’s behavior, to ascertain the thoughts behind the actions of our conspecifics, and so we developed an ability to notice subtle clues about the inner thoughts of those around us. Alone among primates, human beings evolved the sclera, the white part of the eyes, that allows us to immediately ascertain the direction of a person’s gaze and thus infer where their attention is. While much of what we notice is entirely unconscious, good fiction writers, as students of human behavior and motivation, learn to pay conscious attention to such clues. They are practiced at noticing small, revealing details, tells that indicate motive and intention. Then they put those things into their fiction.
Maybe it’s a subtle pulling back that undercuts the force of a promise. Maybe it’s the tension in the jaw that suggests stronger emotions than the character wants to convey. Maybe it’s the flitting gaze that keeps returning to the Minister’s daughter. Without having to tell us exactly what the character is thinking--in a close POV, the character might be trying to suppress it--the writer can convey unconscious desires and motives. These details can likewise help sell later actions. Despite her repeated denials of interest, when she left the party to chase after the boy, it made sense to us because we’d noticed the tells. And the only reason we noticed is because the writer drew our attention to them.
Sol Stein wrote in one of his books on writing that when he was young he used to go with other young writers to watch people in public spaces and to work out their stories. He tried to discern unconscious tells, small details that revealed hidden motives and interests. This exercise sounds like a lot of fun to do with a group of writers, but even if you can’t go out and spend a few hours deliberately studying people, we have to learn to pay close attention to other human beings whenever we can, to take note of how interior thoughts manifest themselves physically. With practice, you can be so good at reading a person’s intentions that you’ll pretty much be psychic.
Next: On Finding the Story