A lot of people think of character and plot as separate categories. That’s never a view that’s made much sense to me. We know people by their actions, the choices they make, and it’s those actions that create a sense of what kind of people they are.

The pilot episode of Six Feet Under features the death of the family’s undertaker father. The death itself is a revelation of character: he throws a cigarette out of the vehicle window after being chastised by his wife over the phone for smoking, then almost instantly lights another one. As he bends to ignite it, he misses the bus that’s headed towards his hearse, which sends it spinning and him dead. Character is incident.

Next, we get to see his family and their response to this catastrophic event. One son is having sex with a stranger in an airport when he hears the news, and his obvious sorrow leads to a significant story development as the woman he’s banging, who up until now wouldn’t even share her name, agrees to drive him home. The other son is stoic as he takes the news on board, but then lits rip at someone when it all gets too much for him, causing upset. The daughter has just smoked crystal meth for the first time, making it even more difficult to process what’s going on. All choices that reveal character.

People don’t have a consistent character. We change according to context: who we’re with, what we’re doing. Some things may remain consistent, but other facets will become apparent over time. I make full use of this obvious observation in the pilot episode I’ve written for a tv series I’ve devised: one particular character is shown and talked about in a way that suggests she’s ineffective, but it’s just the same character who — barely stopping to think about it — defuses a dangerous situation spontaneously when she’s seen later. Is she a flake? Is she capable? Or does she exhibit different traits at different times?

As well as his LSD exploits, psychologist Timothy Leary devised a very interesting way of looking at people through a model that he described as ‘neurological circuits’. He proposed that there are 8 such circuits, each of which can be distinctively imprinted by formative experiences through our lives. The first governs our perception of the world as safe or dangerous. The second, our relative degree of submission or dominance. The third, our capacity to process logical and symbolic thinking. The fourth, our morality and sexuality. The remaining four circuits are associated with experiences that not everyone recognises, including relationship with time, and capacity to override the ’settings’ of previous circuits.

I find the 8 circuit model a fascinating way of exploring what makes people tick, devoid of the simplistic assumptions of Freudian thinking, overly concerned as they are with sexuality. It’s not ‘true’, but it’s certainly useful, and Leary’s collaborator Robert Anton Wilson writes interestingly — and with practical exercises to bring the model to life — in books including Quantum Psychology and Prometheus Rising.

The beauty of the 8 circuit model is it is a model of character based on behaviour, and not theory. Never mind that your mother took the spoon away, that teacher made you stand outside the staff room: what are you doing and what does that suggest about the interaction of your neurological circuitry? It’s a model that is refreshingly free of value judgment, unlike many other psychological frameworks. As such, I believe it to be a great asset to writers: it’s our job to create convincing characters, not moralise about them…as far as I’m concerned anyway. (A lot more interesting to present a character and their actions in a rounded and honest way, than to paint a halo or horns on them from the word go, I believe: I like characters it’s not easy to pin down, not obvious cyphers for the writer’s preferred worldview.)

Go to a cafe, a bar, or somewhere else you can watch people. What do you see and hear them doing that fits with previous things they’ve done? What does that say about them? What do you see and hear them doing that confounds your expectations? How do you have to update your model to take this new data into account, and what does it suggest about them? It’s in this relationship with your perceptions and models of how people operate that you can see characterisation at work, and the better you get at experiencing people in this way, the more interesting your characters will become, to write and to watch.