A Different Sort of Depth

There's a point in brain development when most kids (of course there are many exceptions!) figure out that other people have minds. Up until that point, I imagine it's sort of like the whole world is a screen for them, put on for their amusement, characters appearing in relation to their needs, probably ceasing to exist when out of sight, certainly not having thoughts of their own.

As adults, most of us know that other people have private thoughts. We know that when they act in ways that we observe, it's because their brain has made the decision to do so. We should know that the patterns of other people’s thoughts are not necessarily like our own.

We look at a doll and we know it doesn’t have thoughts. We look at a puppet moving in a lifelike manner and we know that it doesn't have thoughts either—that some other brain is deciding how it should move.

And then I think of the uncanny. I theorize that part of what scares us is being not quite sure what has a mind. The inanimate coming to life is an example of a mind in something that should not have one. The uncanny also occurs when someone who once had their own mind is now controlled by someone else's.

The characters we write are always puppets. The author controls them. But most of the time a puppeteer wants to vanish. We want to create the illusion that our characters are not puppets but independent, agented actors. Sometimes, as writers, we even fool ourselves.

So how do we do this? Well, many genres of fiction (though not all) seek to create the illusion that these puppets have their own minds through "depth of character." When a character acts, the writer is careful to make the reader know why. Those motivations are often viewed as better if they are complex or conflicting. And we think a character is deeper if we know that they want more than one thing at the same time. Very often, we get a lot of this anguish and decision making on the page. Because it's a play, Hamlet works through his motivations–and hesitations–out loud. Raskolnikov, as the POV character in a novel, has merely to think obsessively about his tortured indecision. A fiction writer has this incredible tool of interiority and can explicate the strange and twisting inner workings of a mind.

But what about about characters who are purposeful and gloriously flat? What about fairy tales? (I told you I wasn’t done talking about them!)

Despite every workshop's annoying tirade, it's not only deep characters that trick us into thinking they have minds; flat characters do it too.

They do it through something I call intuitive depth.

In their traditional form, fairy tales almost always have flat characters. That means we don't get to learn much of their thoughts or background or complexity. Fairy tales also use intuitive logic, which essentially means that strange things happen without reason or explanation. (For more on both terms, please see Kate Bernheimer's illuminative essay "Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale.")

My belief is that when you combine flatness with intuitive logic, you get intuitive depth–a more mysterious magic that activates the reader's theory of mind. It means that when a character does something unexpected or surprising, the reader wonders why. And that wondering is what makes us feel that the character is alive. In contrast, if a character only does what we expect them to do, they are more likely to feel like a puppet, controlled by the writer or narrator of the story. When they act outside of expectations, they prove their own will.

If everything a character does is fully understood, then maybe we're all in the same mind–the world of the story becomes like that screen for small children, people only exist when they are visible, and only the visible parts of them exist. But when characters speak or act in ways that are strange to us, they gesture to their own fuller existence and parts of their life and mind that the reader can't know.

It's not just fairy tales that can use intuitive depth.

When any non-POV character surprises the reader with an unexpected action or maybe just new information, it evokes theory of mind and makes them seem more alive. And if the action is also surprising to the POV character, it opens up not just the idea that the secondary character has unseen depth, but helps us feel that the world and the POV character are not the same.

I've written previously about a couple great examples of this:

• What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (by Leslie Nneka Arimah) and Puncturing a Closed World

• An Unkindness of Ghosts (by Rivers Solomon) and the Unexpected Action

Intuitive depth can also enrich a traditionally complex POV character. Just because we have access to a character's thoughts, it doesn’t mean we get their full brain. When a character keeps a secret, perhaps hinting there is more to the story or mentioning a strangeness that is never explained, it gestures to an even richer inner life. Because we don't have complete access to this richness, we might wonder about it more expansively and the character feels even more alive.

For Your Consideration:

Some characters even keep secrets from the writer–and I think that's a good thing. I don't know everything about the real people in my life. I don't know how they deliberate about each decision. They frequently puzzle me. They frequently surprise me. Embracing that aspect of humanity and all the mystery in other people's brains can be a productive strategy for fiction.

Try This:

Write a scene in which a minor character does something that the major character does not expect. Let the major character be surprised by it. Let the reader be surprised by it, too. And if you're feeling lucky, go ahead and let yourself be surprised by it.

Talk to Us:

What don’t you know about a character you have written?