Just Finished A Novel? You Should Journal About the Characters
I have a weird habit. Sometimes, when I finish a novel, I write down a ranked list of characters from the book which I have judged to have the most admirable outlooks on life.
I don’t know why I started doing this, but it was probably out of a desire to learn from the mistakes of others to improve my own life.
For the longest time, I was deeply suspicious of fiction. I never really read much growing up, and whatever reading I did do was mandated by my English teachers and quickly glossed over for online summaries.
When I got to college, I slowly started picking up non-fiction. I was, for a brief amount of time, hooked on the self-development subculture that preaches the usual suspects: meditate, make a side hustle, journal.
But I discovered that novels have a superpower — the ability to let you step into another person’s shoes and soak up the way they view the world. Anyone, no matter their gender, race, class, or lifestyle is impossible for a reader to empathize with, so long as they were brought to life by a skilled writer.
A few months ago, I picked up an old science fiction gem called The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robison.
It’s about a young man, Jim, who aimlessly wanders a dystopic Los Angeles, where over-development, strip malls, and freeways have turned almost all open spaces into concrete. Jim can’t stand the world he lives in. He craves an escape from his junk job, fake friends, and above all, the consumer culture that has sucked all the life and spirituality out of him.
In my journal, I ranked him as a negative — someone I strive to never become.
An aspiring poet and activist, Jim constantly tells himself he’s going to change the world through his writing. But he never actually puts the pen to the page.
Instead, he sulks in his misery. At parties, he tells people he’s a writer, but with his head to the ground and shame in his voice. He raves against society, eventually vandalizing a bunch of corporate offices in a mad dash to get revenge against society.
In an interview after the book was released, the author said he made Jim largely unlikeable because he was once just like him. Now an accomplished science fiction master, Kim Stanley Robinson was once a listless “writer” who had loads of ideas but no energy to craft them. He was jealous of many of his friends. They weren’t “creatives” like him, but they seemed content in their lives. They worked a variety of low end, meaningless jobs: drug dealing, managing malls, driving trucks, but they embraced what they did and derived happiness from their outside hobbies.
Jim, however, tied his hobby (writing) into his career, but didn’t have the patience to make it work. I wrote him as a negative for this reason, but like Robinson, it was really because I was scared of how much we were alike.
Reading the novel gave more energy to write. It showed me what kind of rabbit hole I could fall in if I don’t start getting serious with my hobby-job. I can’t (won’t) fall into self-loathing if I don’t live up to my own expectations.
I learned from Jim, but only because I took a moment to write in my journal why he resonated with me so poorly.
It’s a habit I think everyone should try. Who knows what kind of insights you can glean from analyzing a character’s psychology?
