Making yourself a character in your story #1

Hello and happy new year! Ever since I started this newsletter the question I’ve been asked most often is: how can a writer make themselves a character in their story in a way that’s compelling and imaginative, as opposed to egotistical and superfluous?

And so over the next few weeks I’ll get very in the weeds about this. For instance: what’s the purpose of putting yourself in there? Do you represent something – and, if so, what? Are you there to be right while your interviewees are wrong? Do you represent proper society? Or are you flawed? Also, is the character of you actually you, or an exaggeration?

I’ll get in the weeds about those things and more over the next few weeks, because while many nonfiction authors have low aspirations about the WAY they write - seeing their books basically as information providing services - this newsletter is about being more ambitious than that. I think our books should be their very own unique thing, like movies, never interchangeable with other people’s books. And the way you include yourself as a character goes a long way toward achieving all that.

So this is a free post. If it interests you there’ll be plenty more in the coming weeks, albeit paywalled.

My heroes growing up were the journalists who experimented with first person narrative in memorably strange and complex ways. Like Hunter S. Thompson, who’d take LSD and gatecrash police conventions.

In the ‘90s EVERYONE wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson. I remember an article in, I think, the NME that basically began, ‘I’ve been up for three nights straight snorting cocaine. Bats are flying around my hotel room or are they hallucinations? My skin is peeling off me, and in three hours I’m supposed to be interviewing Iggy Pop.’

This was a journalist who had read way too much Hunter Thompson but had, I believe, missed the essential point. When Thompson took LSD and crashed a police convention, it was disparate worlds smashing into each other. Thompson represented counterculture waywardness, the opposite of a police convention. It was audacious and thrilling and tense and odd – not least because his character was an uncanny mix of weirdly formal and totally insane. Whereas within the context of interviewing Iggy Pop, taking cocaine for three days straight and hallucinating doesn’t mean anything at all. The stakes could not be lower.

To be clear: you should do whatever you want. I know that some of my subscribers are completely happy to present themselves in their stories as uncomplicated objective authority figures – and I understand why. There’s an impulse to let the reader know that you know what you’re talking about and they’re in safe hands. And if that’s what you want to do, that’s totally fine.

But even if that IS your style, I think you should still consider highlighting your own flaws and biases a little - because it’s fun to write, and to read, you’ll come across as human and relatable, and it can lead you to interesting, unexpected places.

In my book The Psychopath Test – and even more so in the book I’m writing now – I decided to really go for it, in terms of characterizing myself in odd and flawed ways. For instance, there’s a tiny moment at the very beginning of The Psychopath Test where an academic has received a puzzling book in the mail and she wants me to investigate:

“In essence,” she said, “someone is trying to capture specific academics’ attention to something in a very mysterious way and I’m curious to know why. The book is trying to tell us something. But I don’t know what. I would love to know who sent it to me, and why, but I have no investigative talents.”

“Well …” I said.

I fell silent and gravely examined the book. I sipped my coffee.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.

That slightly self-important gravitas at the end, like I was Sam Spade bestowing my brilliance on her. I like that, because it’s setting up the idea that this really will be a pulpy page-turner, a Dashiell Hammett style mystery story – the mystery eventually being whether psychopaths rule the world – but I’m also making fun of myself and my self-seriousness. Which embeds the idea that I won’t be a conventional narrator.

After that, every time I behave in a way that feels a little psychopathic, I draw attention to it. Like when I email a CEO, but instead of asking if I can interview him to find out if he’s a psychopath, I tell him that his ‘amygdala might not shoot the requisite signals of fear to your central nervous system and that’s perhaps why you’ve been so successful and so interested in the predatory spirit, and can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?’ (Conning/Manipulative is an item on the psychopath checklist.)

In the book I’m writing now I do something audacious and surprising on page one. I’m interviewing some people about an unsettling situation they had found themselves in. It feels like a very standard interview. It’s normal, normal, until suddenly, out of nowhere…

I nodded for them to continue, then I let out a scream.

I won’t tell you here WHY I screamed, but I think it works because it sets up the idea that I’m not going to be a bland narrator. Instead, I can go anywhere and do anything in this book.

I sometimes feel annoyed with journalists who work hard to present themselves as representatives of righteous society, scolding or mocking the bad people. It’s performative, unempathetic, and hierarchical. Being aware of your own flaws and biases is a good way of breaking down the hierarchy of journalism. It’s harder to demonize someone if you understand the psychological impulses, the tricks of the brain, that lead people astray.

Actually, I think acquainting yourself with the cognitive biases – so you can spot them in yourself and other people – is a great thing for a writer to do. Confirmation bias. Cognitive dissonance. All these strange psychological tricks we play on ourselves. There’s a book on this topic that I recommend, although I haven’t actually read it, called Mistakes Were Made But Not By Me.

Ok, I have a lot more to say about making yourself a character in your story, and will do so over the next few weeks. If there are any particular aspects of it you’d like me to dig into, please say so in the comments.

And happy new year again!

Jon