Novelist and comedian Alexei Sayle was interviewed in last Saturday’s Independent. The bit that stood out for me was his musing on characters, stating that he wasn’t convinced by some of what he’d read of late, the writers being consumed by an urge to ’save’ their flawed characters. For Sayle, that doesn’t work: “For me the challenge is to present a bad character who stays bad, but at the same time show their humanity.”

Hmm. That made me think. I remember a friend who’d written a short story in which a character had a physical problem, an emotional problem and a psychological problem, all of which were resolved by the end, and thinking that it was all a bit convenient. Nice as it is for problems to be resolved in a few pages of neat prose, it doesn’t have the stink of life about it. Not if the problems are interesting ones anyway, which are surely the ones you want to be writing about, and reading.

All this, needless to say, applies to screenplays too. And the films they spawn. Especially those dismal offerings wherein a protagonist’s deep-seated issues are resolved merely by familial bonding or the love of a good woman. Bleaagh. Happy as I am for people to experience such catharsis in real life, on screen it tends to raise my blood pressure.

You’ll note my own issue by now. That I don’t want stories to be comforting tales of maladjusted people sorting themselves out. Well, actually, I can stomach such yarns, but only if the problems are really interesting, and the journey to resolving them compelling, and not just a case of treading water for 80 minutes until union with a significant other is reached.

If you’re looking for someone to blame for all this, Freud isn’t a bad place to start. ‘Sickman Fraud’, as NLP creator Richard Bandler dubs him, isn’t much rated in psychology departments these days, but his sticky influence is all over English courses. Sure, students get a dunking in structuralism and some other theoretical stances (of which I’m equally critical, but let’s save that for another time), but the Freudian worldview remains big in English departments.

See, writers will come up with dramatic situations partly influenced by whatever their paradigms for psychology are. And Freud’s is tiresomely fixated on sex and the family, often at the same time. Which is all well and good, and without which we may not have The Grifters. Mind you, Sophocles wrote Oedipus without having consulted the beardy Viennese cokehead, so that’s another theory out of the window, isn’t it?

Well, no. Freud usefully explored sexuality at a time it was taboo, to be fair. But having done so, it’s all he could see in terms of human motivation. Which is pretty much like the thing that happens when you buy a new car and notice lots of others of the same model on the roads. Only, in Freud’s case, wanting to do weird things to their exhaust pipes.

Which is to say, sex and death is all very well, but there’s a lot more to human experience than that. I developed a psychological thriller earlier this year, and part of the motivation was to do a story that owed nothing to Freudian psychology (of course, Freudians will say I’m suppressing its deeper presence…see how easy this shit is?).

I’ve alluded to NLP in this blog before, and that in turn has led me — among other things — to study hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, systems thinker Gregory Bateson, family therapist Virginia Satir, and do Feldenkrais-influenced bodywork. I’ve also read Jung, and find Tarot an interesting model for exploration. I find all of these approaches useful, but the thing is that my learning is ongoing and dynamic.

It’s that constant refreshing of what goes on in your head, the exploration of new models and data, that keeps you alert to nuances and possibilities that you won’t have been aware of before, and which some simply won’t perceive. And the greater variety of perceptions and concepts you experience, the more interesting the stories you come up with are likely to be. With New Year 2009 coming up, what could you spend some time exploring to keep your noggin noodling in new ways?