In the Academy courses this week we built towards a better understanding in two areas: how to create characters with compelling backgrounds, and what honesty and truth look like in life writing—the balance a writer must find between accuracy, precision, and the feel of sincerity.
These two topics are wonderfully complementary, as so many are in the study of literature and writing. In visualising the construction of a character, it can be useful to imagine the iceberg, often used as an analogy for Freud’s vision of repression versus visibility—the Superego set against the Id. A character arrives fully formed on the page. The writer has given them a backstory and made decisions. Some of these choices are aesthetic, seemingly inconsequential: eye colour, favourite ice cream, the names of friends. Others are deeper, shaping how the character acts and responds to events: whether they were loved as children, whether they are still raw from heartbreak, whether they live with envy at the success of others.
For Carl Jung, whom we also addressed this week, those feelings of envy and vulnerability constitute the character’s Shadow. For Freud, they belong to the repressed Id. Terminology aside—and setting aside the theoretical rupture that led to Freud and Jung’s acrimonious split in 1913—for the writer the lesson is clear: a compelling character requires inner depth, where conflict and tension between what the character does and what they secretly desire can leak onto the page.
It is the writer’s task to decide when to reveal this information. Too much too soon, and the character holds no secrets; there is no tension for the reader. The “What if” becomes a matter of “when,” or risks being artificially heightened by illogical narrative twists. Yet, by holding secrets—by revealing only so much of a character’s Freudian ego and only the Jungian persona, that provisional facet of a greater Self—a level of curiosity in the reader can be cultivated.
Truth, therefore, is not raw and unbridled. It is parcelled and delivered with care, and the timing and manner of delivery is what elevates a character in a story.
This applies equally to life writing—autobiography, memoir, diary, or any form addressed to an audience. Some, like Philippe Lejeune, argue for sincerity as part of an “autobiographical pact” between writer and reader. Others, such as Vivian Gornick, insist on a level of detachment and an authorial voice distinct from the Self being presented. Both recognise, however, that honesty is indispensable and also profoundly difficult to achieve. Cultural context, language, memory, power structures, race, and gender all shape how truth is recorded and received.
What binds them, and Lauren Berlant besides—another theorist we studied this week—is the recognition that the writer must be present and honest in the moment of writing, especially when addressing moments in the past. To withhold that presence is to risk alienating the reader, who will no longer trust you. And trust is fundamental to life writing. Without it, the reader’s motivation to pursue your narrative collapses, because the character—your constructed version of you—ceases to feel real.
The character of autobiography or memoir is therefore reliant not on perfect accuracy but on honesty and a sense of reality. It is acceptable for our characters to lie or withhold, so long as those deceptions are consistent with the backstory—the repression and shadow—we have created.
Readers of novels, series, or films know the disappointment of watching a character act against their own backstory, making decisions that jar with established desires. Such moves feel like the demands of plot overriding personality. One might argue that a character exists solely to serve the writer’s will, but when the audience disconnects, the plot itself becomes inconsequential.
Every decision a character makes must therefore feel real—consistent with who they are. If their actions are inconsistent (as all humans sometimes are), they must be explainable by external forces that align with their psychological make-up. When Boromir turns on Frodo, it is because of the Ring. When Ron Weasley abandons Harry and Hermione, it is because of the Horcrux. Both objects externalise unconscious tensions: Boromir’s desire to save Gondor, Ron’s sense of inferiority beside his famous friend. Their actions, though surprising, remain intelligible.
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These characters, constructed with backstory and persona, were honest to themselves. Their surprising actions never felt inconsistent. Their sincerity elsewhere made them comprehensible, even when unlikeable. The same is true for life writing. We are all formed of what we hide and what we show. The art lies in knowing how much to reveal, and when—and in remembering that writing for a readership is not about the blunt accuracy of trauma-dumping, but about presence and honesty that invite the reader to believe.
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