In this article I am going to give a brief outline of some the conclusions of Peter Stockwell’s work in his book Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh:2009) pp134-144. Please do not be afraid. We will be comfortably in layman’s terms.
Specifically, we will talk about how we use “mind-modelling” to create an idea of how other people exist as independent to ourselves – a process as true in real life as in literature. Then we will explore two approaches, a “universal” approach that focuses on archetypes and a “cognitive” approach that focus on objectives and strategies.
I will argue that taking a cognitive approach to creating characters will result in greater empathy and a more enjoyable reading experience. Essentially, if you focus on the what, why and how of a character rather than an arbitrary “who”, you will write better books. This article, with a lot of help from Peter Stockwell’s research, explains why.
Mind-modelling and Cognitive Poetics
Mind modelling is a principle within the discipline of cognitive poetics. Cognitive Poetics is a school of literary criticism that applies principles of cognitive psychology to interpreting how we read and understand stories. Cognitive psychology, in turn, is the study of how we think: he we remember, perceive things, solve problems, apply creativity, and use language.
This makes cognitive poetics an unusually scientific and empirical field within literary criticism, which for me is a large part of the appeal. People like Peter Stockwell do not just theorise about how or why people understand and respond to literature, but also perform experiments and tests to see how changing stories changes the reader’s emotional response. This research means we have an increasingly accurate understanding of exactly how and why people read the way that they do. It should be obvious why this is useful to authors.
What is Mind-Modelling and why is it so crucial to literature?
Mind modelling is the process by which we figure out how something else thinks. I say “something” rather than “someone” because we don’t only produce mind-models for people: we model animals, inanimate objects, objects like my computer which should be inanimate but I strongly suspect has a malevolent personality of its own, and, crucially in our case, literary figures. We model characters in stories the same way we model real people.
The essential quality of mind modelling is it allows us to understand that other people have beliefs that are different from our own. We start building a theory of mind, unsurprisingly, with our own mind. We then look at what the “other” is doing and compare it to how we would behave ourselves. If the behaviour is different, we update our theory: we now have a model of the other person (thing/animal/evil computer) that is similar to us except for certain key areas where we know they behave differently. As our knowledge of this other grows, so our model becomes more sophisticated.
This has a crucial side-effect. The more time we spend developing this mind-model, the more we empathise with the subject: the more they become a real “person” rather than just an inanimate entity. We empathise because we have built this character from ourselves.
Ever find yourself missing a character from a book you have finished reading? Or feeling like they were someone you knew from your real life? That is because the process by which we have understood that literary character is exactly the same as the one we use for real people. On a certain level, characters in literature are real people.
A generic or “unified” approach to mind modelling.
So, we have encountered another entity and we are trying to model how they think. One popular way of mind modelling is a generic or “unified” approach. This proposes that people come in types: star signs, demographic, archetypes, whatever you like really. How about Tarot arcana – the fool, the tower, death? Or let us go to the dark side – single mothers, black teenagers, homosexual men. There are any number of ways we can generically characterise someone, from the useful to the actively harmful.
Using archetypes lets us shortcut a lot of the hard work of mind-modelling. Instead of starting from ourselves and carefully working outwards, we attach character actions to our idea of the archetypes: cool and calm, masking a fierce interior? Typical Scorpio.
Unfortunately, the generic approach is exactly that – generic. It does not give us a great deal of depth or accuracy. Horoscopes are written the way they are for precisely one reason: so that they can be read as applying to everyone. If the generic model we select for our mind model could apply to everyone, can it really be called a useful model at all?
I will give you a practical example from my writing. Some time ago I attempted to write a story where each character was modelled on a cognitive behavioural disorder: anxiety about health, or anger when people disagreed with them. This seemed to be going great – after all, it gave me a clue as to how my characters would act – but I ran out of meat very quickly. A generic simply is not sophisticated enough to describe a real person. They weren’t characters, they were disorders. If your mind-model does not generate a recognisably “real” person, then the literary character does not generate empathy.
What is the cognitive theory of personality?
The cognitive theory of personality states that personalities are fluctuating and inconsistent, based around plans, goals, and judgements.[i] This should sound very familiar to anyone who has read books on how to write a screenplay: a character is developed on the basis of what they want, what is stopping them achieving this thing they want, and what they do to attempt to overcome this obstacle (then, in turn, how they have to change in order to get what they want).
The crucial part of the cognitive theory of personality is recognising that what we want and what we are trying to achieve is constantly changing from moment to moment, leading to potentially “out of character” behaviour if we take a generic approach. We are a mixture of who we have been, who we are and who we would like to be. “Personality is adaptive to the conditions at hand.”
How do we take a cognitive approach to mind-modelling?
So, we have picked up a book and are introduced to the protagonist.
Instead of trying to fit the person in the box, we start by figuring our what they want and what they are doing about it. We compare it to ourselves and look for similarities and differences. Then we try to explain the differences through their actions. How would we be changed if we asked out the girl upon whom we had a secret crush and were refused in front of all her laughing friends? If the character responds differently, how does that change our understanding of them?
Funnily enough, the CBT models I tried to use as archetypes can be quite useful if we come at if from this way around. Let us say if I (the reader) was embarrassed in this way, I would try to play it down by telling jokes, then have a good cry when nobody could see. Our character, however, gets angry and starts shouting at them all, saying that they are no good. Could it be that they are anxious about losing status? Being seen as a loser? Our mind-model of the character develops as a web of developing hypotheses about what they want, what they are doing about it, and why they choose this strategy, changing both as our understanding grows but also as the character themselves develops. The point is that we do not impose theories before actions: we develop theories from actions. What do they want, how to they try to get it, and what was it about them that led to the result?
Thus, how do we take a cognitive approach to writing?
Now that we know how to make a cognitive reading, cognitive writing is just the same thing but the other way around. We have to know what the character’s want and how they will try to get them. We have to know why the character will try one way instead of another. This is how you build a strong, empathetic character: by understanding them as a constantly shifting web of desires that they are on an eternal quest to comprehend and actualise.
If we do not build cognitively realistic characters, we risk reader resistance. When a reader encounters character actions that they cannot fit into a mind model, that stray too far from what they themselves would do or what they understand the characters would do, then they are broken from the world of the novel and, in the worst case, simply put the book down.
The ultimate result is empathy, and thus compelling writing.
If we write characters who think and act the same way that we ourselves think and act, then the reader will have a much more satisfying and complete experience building the mind model of that character. Books belong to the reader – the reader creates not only the characters, through the process of mind modelling, but also builds an “implied author” (Booth(1961)) – a model of who the author is just the same as the model of the characters.
I will throw in here that this does, from time to time, create problems from authors like myself – who write anti-heroes in dystopias. Because the reader builds an implied author, they may assume that the opinions and values expressed in the book are the same as those as an author. This is something of a catch 22 – if the reader has become so engaged as to create implied author as character it means they have become significantly involved in the book. Yet it is not a lot of fun to be accused of being, say, a misogynist, because you write a character who is a misogynist. I believe GRR Martin gets this problem a lot, so I indulge myself in thinking I am in good company.
To write a good book it has to have real characters. It has to have a storyteller that the reader relates to and understands (even if that storyteller, effectively a character themselves, is nothing like the actual author). For the reader to experience the characters and the storyteller as being real, they have to build empathy through a model in their head of how and why that character behaves the way the do based upon what that character wants. So that, there, is the first thing you have to do with any (all of) your characters. What do they want? How do they try to get it? Why do they do it that way?[ii]
References[iii]
Booth, Wayne C, A Rhetoric of Fiction, University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 1961)
Stockwell, Peter, Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading, Edinburgh University Press, (Edinburg: 2009)) pp134-144
Zunshine, Lisa “Theory of mind and experimental representations of fictional consciousness”, Narrative (11) 270-291 (2003)
Zunshine, Lisa, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Ohio State University Press (Columbus: 2006)
Image by John Hain from Pixabay
[i] I do not have this line properly in my notes, but I suspect this sentence is a direct quote from the section of Stockwell’s book cited i. Should this prove to be the case, my apologies, it is somewhere between pp134-144, but I can’t find it.
[ii] Because their quiet and reserved, but underneath it all deeply ferocious. Typical Scorpio.
[iii] The fact that I have references should in no way lead you to confuse this blog post with an academic article: I am just trying to learn about cognitive poetics. If you want academia, check out the references. They are good.
