Why I Won’t Write Normal Characters
Everyman is Not Every Man
There are no normal people. There is no normal interior life or thinking. There are no normal attitudes. There is no weird. There is no “most people”. There is no “people in general”. All of these are biases that protect our sense of self more than they help us perceive. If we’re not careful, those biases bully our characters into homogeneity.
End of categorical statements.
I couldn’t write decent fiction until I stopped using the concept of “most people” or “people in general.” I used to be pretty sure about most people, and as a corollary, most of my characters were versions of each other. They were essentially “most people” as though there were only two kinds of people — “most” and “everyone else.” I had to break the assumption that there exists a stable, inferable interior life shared by a majority.
At some point, in a school, work, or religious context, we are presented with the notion that on one side of a line are the majority of people, who have a shared set of thought processes, feelings, or responses to stimuli going on inside them, and on the other side are the outliers who don’t fit that mold.
This perception is poison to fiction writing. It results in characters with merely superficial or stylistic differences, not fundamental ones, or who become clichés of deviation rather than distinct interior lives.
Harlow, your main character, walks into a tavern and orders a beer at the bar. He looks around. There’s nobody at the pool table, so he goes over to it and grabs the rack. Just then a sandy-haired guy with a full beard and coveralls comes out of the toilet. “Hey buddy, that’s my game. Wait your turn, why don’t you?” Fine. Harlow puts a quarter down on the edge of the table and goes back to the bar. Bartender says, “That’s the Calloway boy. Be careful with that one,” and goes in the back for some stock. Harlow watches Calloway casually. Calloway’s cue slips on the final shot of his solo game, jumping the cue ball onto the floor. Calloway looks around, recovers the cue ball, knocks the eight ball into a pocket with his hand, and slams his cue back in the rack. Harlow walks over, picks up his quarter, and starts to feed it into the slot. “That don’t count,” says Calloway. “Shit game. Still my turn.”
Question: is Calloway an asshole?
If you have a confident answer, you probably aren’t writing much fiction. You may be as frustrated as I was.
More data points are required. We need to see how he treats people across situations, pressures, relationships, and incentives before any stable inference about character becomes credible. Any number of people may decide, based on what we have, “That’s reasonable,” or “He’s having a bad day,” or “He’s territorial,” or “He’s insecure,” or “He’s an asshole.” There is no “most people” response to Calloway.
There aren’t two kinds of people, and the reader is an aggregate of minorities of all kinds. We are never building a character most people will regard a certain way. We are building one that another character in the story regards that way. Whether we agree with the assessment depends on how many and how resonant the opportunities we are given to interpret the character’s behavior.
Even a simple story with a villain and a hero collapses this way, because we must allow for the fact that the two foils don’t agree with each other’s assessments of themselves. The villain thinks he is the hero. The hero doesn’t think of himself as a hero. The ambiguity over self-interpretation and other-interpretation is one of the drivers of storytelling. Dramatic irony, in fact, arises from our perception being at variance with that of the characters.
For Calloway or characters like him, we must create enough differing behaviors across contexts that alternative interpretations become constrained by accumulating evidence. Even then, someone will say, “I like people like that,” or “I am like that,” or “That seems right to me.” Similarly, a man who feeds a stray cat is not universally perceived as good. He is sentimental, naive, admirable, foolish, kind, weak, compassionate, distracted, indulgent, humane. There is no stable majority interpretation we can reliably infer.
Social science begins with the recognition that we are poor judges of how representative our own experience is. We generalize from small samples and call the result reality. I do not know what is going on inside “most people,” and neither does anyone else without disciplined empirical method. To assume otherwise introduces bias into both art and observation. It’s a delusion the author can’t afford.
That does not mean nothing is knowable. It means that claims about interior universals require extraordinary evidence. Fiction depends upon resisting premature generalization about what people think or feel.
Well-crafted characters are never a static or fixed quantity. They’re in motion. They have an arc. The reason we read stories is to vicariously arrive at our own answers to ultimate questions, those of meaning, and to questions of character motivation, to which we get to apply our own values, or perhaps challenge those values. Defining those things a priori takes the story out of the hands of the reader, even as it paints the writer into a corner.
Shortcuts about, but heuristics are also poison to great narrative. In fiction, a cliché method for cementing an understanding of a character is to show a crowd reacting to him. Twenty people say some version of “Why don’t you just shut up?” Strength in numbers. But group reaction does not reveal shared interior meaning. Individuals in crowds respond for different reasons, under different pressures, with different interpretations of what is happening. Groupthink produces uniform expression, not uniform perception.
My primary interest is psychological realism: understanding interior life well enough to portray characters whose motivations generate behavior that feels irreducible to type. What feels real, in story, is the unquantifiable. It lets the characters live—go on. And all things that live evolve.
The premise of storytelling is the same as what C.S. Lewis called the premise of Christianity. People can change. Without that, in both contexts, the narrative has no meaning. In that sense, there is one story, and we have been telling it since we climbed down from the trees. We are people who change.
Psychological realism requires more work than assuming shared reactions. It requires knowing more about a character’s motivations than we will ever know about a living person, and then allowing those motivations to produce behavior that surprises us. When characters become real, they cease behaving on command. I exhale in relief when I say those words.
Three things pushed me away from the idea of normal people and fixed, universal evaluations. A friend once said, “For an artist and rebel, you’re surprisingly conventional.” A colleague said, “Quit trying to be normal or not weird. You’re not normal. You’re an artist.” And long study of logic and sociology revealed how fragile our assumptions about shared interior life really are.
A small cluster of cognitive biases reinforces the illusion that “most people” exist as a stable psychological category:
False Consensus Effect: we assume our preferences and reactions are widely shared and therefore normal.
Egocentric Bias: we rely heavily on our own experience when evaluating what others are like.
Social Projection / Projection Bias: we project our attitudes and responses onto others and mistake familiarity for universality.
Biased Sample Fallacy: we assume the people we know constitute a representative sample of humanity.
Illusion of Asymmetric Insight: we believe we understand others’ internal states more accurately than they understand ours.
Curse of Knowledge: once we know something, we lose the ability to imagine not knowing it and assume others see what we see.
Group Attribution Error and Out-group Homogeneity Bias: we assume individuals share traits of the groups to which we assign them and underestimate variation within those groups.
Together, these biases create the persistent illusion that there exists a typical person whose interior life we can reliably infer. That illusion is extremely powerful and extremely misleading.
I used to write like that. I wrote articles, had philosophical discussions, and the phrase “most people” kept cropping up. For me, it was a defensive posture. I was trying to define myself and protect my individuality in the context of a parochial culture that had no place for me. Psychologists call that persistence “psychological integrity.” I had it in spades.
I positioned myself as a conscientious outsider. I made being ‘other’ my identity. Except that’s not a complete identity. I’m not entirely so ‘other’ when I’m in communities of enduring artists. There is shared identity.
The pattern stayed with me long after the context had fallen away. That was my undoing when it came to writing meaningful characters who felt alive. It was only after I went to work on how to remain whole in relationships with other people who were not trying to diminish me that I began to find the cracks in my persona, and that exposed the weaknesses of my earliest characters.
It did wonders, because I hadn’t only made myself ‘other’—I had made other people a monolithic ‘other’. I had accepted normalcy as beyond me, rather than noticing the absence of normality when one explores other people deeply. The variation and wonder became curiosity, expressed as an ongoing practice of crafting characters I remain interested in precisely because they’re not all the same.
Once we adopt the concept of normalcy, we unconsciously begin constructing characters whose internal responses resemble our own expectations. They become interchangeable. Different scars, names, and addictions layered onto the same interior architecture.
Characters written this way feel predictable even when placed in exotic situations. Their arcs feel superficial because there is no basis for transformation. When interior life is assumed to be typical, change becomes cosmetic.
Human beings are not interchangeable. To treat them as interchangeable is to treat them as replaceable. Our similarities are less visible than our differences when we are observing interior life carefully.
When I abandoned the concept of normal people, my characters stopped behaving as versions of each other. They wanted different things. They interpreted the same situation differently. They noticed different details. They did not see what I saw when they looked at the world.
When we can see through their eyes even briefly, fiction has done its work. It replaces typology with encounter. And instead of one interior world, we encounter many.
