The Craft in Writing Characters with Messy Psychology
Thoughts on the value of embracing irresolution and inconsistency on the page.
By Suzanne Berne
March 16, 2023
In the fall of 1973, just as the country finished watching the Watergate hearings, my mother enrolled in classes to become a psychologist. Watergate wasn’t why she decided to go to graduate school—my mother has always been interested in anxiety—but the national atmosphere it created certainly helped. At that time, we were living in Washington, DC, and she couldn’t run to the deli for a jar of pickles without getting caught in conversations about cover-ups and wiretapping and CIA conspiracies.
As part of her studies, my mother sometimes used my younger sisters and me as practice subjects. She gave us batteries of IQ tests and asked us to interpret inkblots. We answered questions on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to determine our personality types and whether we were introverts or extroverts. For our participation, we were rewarded with peanut M&Ms and, most meaningfully, her attention, which was hard to come by in a household with three children, three dogs, and my unhappy father, who was even more demanding than the rest of us.…. Read more
Suzanne Berne Asks Us, Why Write a Novel, Why Read a Novel, and Why Now?
“I believe in the capacity of the novel, in its formal demonstration of the possibility for greater insight and compassion over time.”
January 10, 2023
To describe what it can be like to write a novel, I’ll offer a bit of my own experience: My first published novel, which began almost thirty years ago with a grudge. You would be amazed by how many novels are inspired by complaint; the advice “start small” has many applications.
I had written another first novel that had been rejected everywhere, usually with polite notes from editors that said something like, “Nice writing, but nothing happens.” One summer afternoon I was sitting on my porch, brooding over these rejections, at the same time watching my neighbor mow his lawn with a push mower, wondering why he bothered to wear his toupee while mowing his lawn on such a hot day, and feeling irritated by his push mower, which was making a pointed clattering noise, as if in rebuke to my own unmown lawn…. Read more