Writing irrational characters · 6:36am Jun 19th, 2018
I'm going to be writing some non-pony fiction before I resume any long works that need endings. I'm in the planning stage, and at the end, I'll probably only be able to put ten percent of what I have in the story. But right now I'm doing characters. And I realized I wanted someone a bit crazy, with a goal someone in the know can see clearly won't work, but who's smart anyway. He just has a very specific blind spot.
When I was young, my school had a science fair. The lunch tables had been shifted together to make a continuous surface, and every student had a poster board along with some item to demonstrate their point. We weren't rich; the item could be a clump of grass. Mine was a bag of sand with some water.
Our topics were selected randomly. Mine had to do with global warming. When I went home to work on it, my dad informed me that it wasn't real. It was made up. I accepted that without question. I was young.
The science fair was well underway. I slouched next to my poster board, bored. I was pretty sure there was a leak in my sand and water bag, but it was small enough that I left it. I didn't want to have to get paper towels, and besides, the janitors would get it. I was a lazy kid. Still am, if for different reasons.
Then a teacher came by. She smiled at me, apparently noticing my lack of interest, and asked me what my project was about. I told her. I recited facts about how the Earth was getting hotter, and the water was rising, and the ice caps were melting. I told her all about how it would rise little by little and mess everything up as I snuck peeks at my poster. Then she told me I did a good job, and left.
I felt slightly confused, then. It wasn't real, was it? I'd had to write about how logging was a good thing before, and this assignment seemed like much the same. Then I shrugged it off and forgot about it.
Human brains are weird. When we hear an interesting fact, it first bounces around in short-term memory. Then it goes to the hippocampus. There, all context is stripped from the memory except that which the brain deems relevant, and it reaches long-term storage. It becomes a building block of knowledge. [1]
Every day we place new blocks, and after they settle in they're really, really hard to remove.
My dad told me global warming wasn't real. He didn't offer any evidence to support it; it was just a fact. When confronted with evidence that challenged that, I refused it. Eventually, years later, I had a talk with my science teacher after casually wondering why global warming was always in the news if it wasn't real. She asked me why I believed that. I was...well, stunned, first off. Why did she even ask that? It wasn't, right? That was just a fact. After a few moments, though, I was able to come up with reasons. Well, it got cold now and again. I had to wear a jacket during the winter, after all. And I hadn't heard of global warming creeping up the coastlines and swallowing cities like some leviathan out of the myths of old. My teacher raised an eyebrow and made me an offer. If I could convince her global warming was fake, she would bump up my grade.
I was incredibly lucky to have her as a teacher.
Time passed. I asked the librarian for books on global warming. We didn't have many, but there were some. And I changed my mind.
The news is full of crazy people. Some believe in flying saucers, others worship flowers, and a few think they should give all their money to the local cult. Maybe the flying saucer man had a bad case of sleep paralysis, and the memories went unchallenged for years, or else they were encouraged by friends and family. [2]
There is a reason these people exist. There is a reason for what they believe in, and the cultist is not interchangeable with the flower worshipper. One is self-destructive, the other is delusional but well-meaning.
Pick an event. An idea. Let it fester as your character grows. Encourage it. Plant it into them when they're young, and as they grow make it one of the fundamental building blocks of their character. When they're older, they will be able to reject the evidence of their own eyes if it contradicts that fundamental piece of misinformation.
The key is to make every irrational action stem from that block. Your character can be smarter than Hermione Granger, but he was brought up to believe fortune-tellers dispense valuable advice. When that advice is wrong, well, your character just interpreted it the wrong way. Or maybe this one was a fraud, but fortune-tellers are real, and he just had to find a reliable one.
Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm. You do it instinctively and unconsciously when confronted with attitude-inconsistent information. Just as confirmation bias shields you when you actively seek information, the backfire effect defends you when the information seeks you, when it blindsides you. Coming or going, you stick to your beliefs instead of questioning them. When someone tries to correct you, tries to dilute your misconceptions, it backfires and strengthens them instead. Over time, the backfire effect helps make you less skeptical of those things which allow you to continue seeing your beliefs and attitudes as true and proper.
[3]
Your character may be irrational, but they're consistently irrational. Remember that, and they become more real.
Crossposted to The Writer's Group.
