Stories without Psychology
The less you explain the underlying psychology behind your characters’ actions, the more the audience will engage. So, keep it to yourself.
In 1936, German critic Walter Benjamin wrote The Storyteller, contrasting oral storytelling with the novel’s internal private psychology.
When Benjamin talked about a story’s power, he meant the likelihood it would be retold and become part of a community’s shared culture. And he wasn’t saying no to psychology, he was saying no revealed psychology.
It’s not that stories are more memorable for having less psychology. It’s that they are more memorable when the storyteller doesn’t explain the psychology, leaving it to each listener to provide it from their own experiences and understanding of the world.
Leaving out psychological explanation is especially powerful when the behaviour seems contradictory and illogical, because we have to work harder to find the hidden motivations that might explain these apparently inconsistent actions.
Laughing, a small child runs away from their mother onto a busy street. The mother catches her, smacks her angrily, then hugs her just as fiercely. Contradictory behaviour we can all relate to.
That might seem cliché, but you will find many other opportunities in your story to hide a piece of psychology under contradictory actions, inviting the audience to solve the puzzle – if you can let them. We need to know when to zip it.
When I was directing, actors would sometimes ask to change something ‘…because it isn’t consistent with my character.’
‘But why would we be interested in consistency? Coherent inconsistency is much more intriguing.’
We all do a lot of work on our characters’ backstories: their childhood wounds, the secret hopes and fears. Congratulations. Resist the urge to share your work. Let what you’ve discovered show through the characters’ actions. Especially their contradictory actions.
Stories with strong but unexplained psychological underpinnings invite us to project our own hidden feelings onto others’ behaviour, inviting the audience in. They are more hooked by what is left out than what is included.
The most powerful monologue a screenwriter can write is the character’s unspoken inner monologue. You will have your version in your head.
Leave it there, off the page, and invite the audience rewrite it in their own words.
