writing tips – Caroline Ashley

Why we love morally grey characters: A psychological breakdown

Most of us will have found ourselves rooting for characters who have done terrible things. Walter White. Villanelle. Loki. Kaz Brekker. Jude Duarte. These characters lie, manipulate, even kill — yet we follow them, fascinated, hoping that, somehow, things might work out for them in the end.

Morally grey characters have become increasingly popular in modern media, reflecting a trend towards exploring the complexity of human nature. They straddle the line between right and wrong, breaking rules, working towards their own ends rather than the good of society.

Challenging our own moral code

The psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg theorised that moral reasoning is a skill that people develop over time, largely associated with growing up, although adults may respond to moral choices based on earlier stages of reasoning too. At the lowest level of moral reasoning, our priorities are our own self interest and avoiding punishment from others. Then we move into making choices based on external rules, relying on social norms and societal laws to define what is moral. And then we move into the higher level of reasoning, where we develop our own internal principles. At this level, laws and social norms are not seen as absolute, and we may challenge those rules if they conflict with our own principles.

The morally grey character triggers us to question the moral principles that we live by. If they commit an act that goes against our moral norms, but we can understand why that character has made the decision they have, it then makes us wonder if we would make the same decision in their circumstances. These challenges to our internal moral code are an important part of growing and developing as adults, and doing this through the medium of fictional characters allows for a safe space to mentally experiment with our internal rules, free of real world consequences, much as children will roleplay with their friends.

And often these stories of extremes are fascinating to us. If you don’t belong in society, if you are rejected and unloved, then what is left but to look out for yourself, to give up on complex moral questions and enjoy what you can of the life that you have? Acting without restraint, prioritising our own needs – we stop ourselves from doing this in order to avoid rejection or punishment. We are all part of family or friend units, we are part of the society in which we live, and as a result we make compromises for others in order to continue to fit in with that society. But there is a part of us that can feel excited by the idea of being free to do as we please without consequence, or being strong-willed enough to challenge the parts of society that we disagree with. Morally grey characters don’t compromise. They live the lives that they want to live, damn the consequences, and we will them to succeed, because a part of us wishes we could do the same.

The pleasure of cognitive dissonance

Empathy comes from a neurological process, designed to aid our survival. Our brains are constantly working to understand the intentions of others, and part of that understanding comes from neurologically mirroring their emotional states in ourselves. So when we witness or imagine another person feeling scared, or angry, or hurt, a representation of that state is activated in our own brain, to the point where we can almost feel it in our own bodies. This is also linked with theory of mind – the process by which we try to see the world from the perspective of those around us, in order to aid our understanding both of their actions and of the context around us. Thus, when we read or watch stories about fictional characters, our brains work hard both to try and see what they see and to feel what they feel.

In the case of villains or morally grey characters, this can lead to a feeling of cognitive dissonance, where we can empathise with them and even like them as people, but at the same time we dislike or judge the actions they have engaged in.

Cognitive dissonance can be an uncomfortable feeling, and so our brains seek to resolve it so that we feel better.

We might distance ourselves from our own moral judgement for the sake of the story. We might focus on the mitigating circumstances that could lead a character to act that way. We might compartmentalise, trying to block out the actions that we dislike in order to embrace those that we do. Or we may in fact re-evaluate our definition of good and evil due to our understanding of that character’s choices. But whatever we do – our brains are stimulated by the dilemma. We enjoy being invited to think and feel as we engage with a narrative, and it keeps us paying attention far longer than if the character did not challenge us in this way.The moral complexity of the modern world

Morally grey characters have existed throughout the ages, however, they have increased in popularity in the modern era.

As we have moved into a more secular world, we are less guided by a uniform moral code, dictated to us by those in authority. While governments may prescribe laws to live by, it was previously the realm of religion to speak to morality and ethics. Without religion, society shifts to a more relativistic view of morality, where right and wrong is not always as clear cut as it used to seem, and where we have to look to a range of different sources in order to develop our own internal code.

But also, we now live in a more complex, interconnected world, with access to a wealth of information about other cultures, religions and people. We hear scandals about people in power and are exposed to the grey areas of our societies in ways that we never were before.

So, characters who operate outside of, or conflict with, established and/or corrupt systems resonate with an audience that sees the shades of grey in the world they are living in, where no one is purely good or evil, and the right thing may be dependent on your point of view.

What This Fascination Reveals About Us

At its core, our love for morally grey characters isn’t about rebellion from the social contract, but about recognition. Through them, we see our capacity for contradiction, our potential for harm, and our longing to make sense of a complex world.

They give voice to the parts of us that crave freedom, power, or control — and then make us question what those desires mean.

We learn not just about the characters, but about our own moral elasticity, because deep down, we know: if we’d lived their lives, made their choices, carried their wounds — we might not be that different.

About the author

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She is also an aspiring fantasy writer and this blog is a way for her to integrate her love of fiction with her knowledge of psychology. Her published short stories are available on her website, or follow the links below to read more of her blog posts.

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The Hero’s Journey — and Why It Still Matters Today

Ever since humans began to tell stories, they spoke about heroes. They told tales of epic quests of discovery, where warriors slayed monsters and outsmarted the gods, forever changing their lives. The two earliest examples of a story about the hero’s journey date back to ancient Mesopotamia, more than four thousand years ago, but similar stories can be found across the world. So why are heroes so important to us?

What the Hero’s Journey Really Represents

The writer Joseph Campbell famously proposed a template to the hero’s journey, a narrative pattern that these stories tend to follow. He broke the template down into three parts:

Departure – this is where the hero is called to adventure. They may embrace this call, or they may initially refuse it due to doubt or fear. Once their journey begins, they may receive aid from a mentor, and then they must leave their known world behind and venture into the unknown.
Initiation – the adventure itself, where the hero faces setbacks, temptations and challenges but ultimately finds the strength or skill to achieve their goal.
Return – in order to truly succeed, the hero must also manage to return to their old world, to share their achievements with others. This may involve needing to escape from the place they have journeyed to and can be as difficult as the initial adventure. Ultimately, the hero returns transformed by the journey.

These stages very easily mirror any change that we must go through in our lives. When we grow up, we leave the family home, learning to live life without our parents beside us, and we continue to make choices as adults that lead us into the unknown of, for example, a new home, new job, marriage, or children. Each choice will come with setbacks and obstacles, with the hope of a reward at the end of it all, and the experiences change us, shifting our perspective on the world.

The hero’s journey is ultimately about slaying the dragons inside of us – the fears and doubts and insecurities that might hold us back from becoming who we need or want to be. It’s the story of every human who’s ever outgrown a version of themselves and needed to become someone different. In a timeless, universal and profoundly human process, we all must come to terms with the limits of our own strength and skill – accept what we cannot change, and find the courage to change what we can.

But, much as in life, the narrative of the hero’s journey is often more nuanced than stories about people who defeat their enemies and live happily ever after. Not all heroes who set out on their journey will succeed – sometimes fate simply works against them and sometimes the cost of winning is their own life or wellbeing. Oedipus attempts to avoid his prophesied fate and in the process he ultimately causes it to come to pass. Prometheus brings fire to humanity and is severely punished by Zeus for his actions. Katniss Everdeen helps bring about the downfall of a dystopian society, but is so traumatised that she struggles to enjoy the new world she’s helped to create. Frodo destroys the One Ring and saves Middle Earth, but never fully recovers from the emotional and physical wounds caused by his quest.

The purpose of these stories is about the heroes finding meaning and purpose in their lives, rather than happiness or reward. They tell us that sometimes risks are worth taking for the sake of those around us and that even if we fail, we may have achieved something worthwhile along the way.

Why the Hero’s Journey Feels So Relevant Today

These days, the scripts for our lives are less clear than they used to be. In earlier generations, many people followed predictable life paths, where the expectations were passed to them from their parents and their society, influenced by their gender, their social class, their family circumstances. These days, although these factors will still have an influence, our path contains far more options than it used to and finding our own sense of purpose and meaning in life is a major aspect of the modern world.

The latest statistics suggest that more than 20% of the population in the Western world has experienced mental health difficulties, a rate that has steadily increased over time and is becoming more prevalent with young people, in particular. This has been influenced by the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the challenges of social media and modern technology, and also by increasing socio-economic pressures, that mean that younger people feel less certain in their future than their parents or grandparents might have done.

The hero’s journey offers a template for making meaning from the difficulties that we feel. We have all found ourselves at some point forced to choose between staying the same, sticking with what we know, and making a change that may or may not work out for the best. We have all found ourselves stuck in moments of self doubt or insecurity, feeling trapped by our circumstances or by our own fears, or faced with a loss that we don’t know how to move on from. Heroes are the people who take risks, who escape from the traps they find themselves in, who face danger and uncertainty with the hope of reward at the end. Sometimes they fail, but they always manage to find the courage to try.

We fall in love with stories like K Pop Demon Hunters, The Lord of The Rings, The Hunger Games or Harry Potter because they tell us that there is meaning to the struggles we face. By finding courage in the midst of hardship, these heroes save the world and become better people, finding a sense of purpose through their journey, even if they don’t get to live happily ever after by the end.

When we read or watch stories about these heroes, we feel inspired by them and we aspire to be more like them in our own lives. Their narratives help us to feel more able to face our own challenges, more confident that it can be worth taking risks.

Integrating the Hero’s Journey into new stories

Just because stories about heroes have been told before, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for new interpretations of the template, giving a new sense of meaning to the narrative.

The important part in using this template in stories, is to be aware of the true purpose of the narrative, rather than seeing it as a check-list of plot points. The journey is never just about the events that happen around the heroes – it’s about how those events change them as people and allow them to grow and learn from their experiences.

If the journey is so easy that the hero never struggles or questions their goals, then what is the point of the adventure? But also, if they do struggle and they suffer along the way, then there must be meaning in that suffering, something that allows them to move forward in their lives in a way that they wouldn’t have been able to before. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh loses his best friend after they anger the gods and his fear of death leads him to search for immortality, starting him on a new journey. Heracles kills his family after being driven mad by the goddess Hera, leading him on a quest to atone for his actions. In more modern stories, Katniss Everdeen would never have become a figurehead for a rebellion if she hadn’t had to live through the Hunger Games first. The suffering or loss become a part of the hero’s identity, shaping their future actions.

It’s also important to consider the ‘return’ stage of the journey. Often the victory feels like it’s the end goal, but what does that victory mean for the hero and their world? In Lord of the Rings, Frodo achieved his goal but was so fundamentally changed by his journey that he chose to leave Middle Earth with the elves, unable to return to the way of life he had grown up with. In Ender’s Game, Ender’s unintentional destruction of humanity’s enemies leads him to search for atonement, ultimately starting a new quest to restore those enemies. In Moana, saving Te Fiti allows her people to explore the seas in ways that hadn’t been known for generations.

When done well, the hero’s journey can become a mirror for readers’ own development, with characters that they feel they can relate to. It reminds them that growth and change can hurt, that grief and loss are always painful, that we all make mistakes, but that there is also hope that we can recover from these challenges and find either meaning or happiness along the way.

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Why do we become attached to fictional characters?

The role of empathy in connecting with characters

I’ve previously written about the role of theory of mind in storytelling. This is our ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, to understand their perspective even when it’s different from our own, and use that understanding to explain and predict their behaviour. Using theory of mind allows us to gain new insight into how other people, or society at large, think and feel.

Another related concept, which also influences our social and emotional connection with a story, is empathy. When we empathise with someone, we recognize and understand their emotions, we feel what they feel, and that ability is used when we read stories as well.

There have been various research studies showing that stories with emotional content, or a need to infer a character’s emotions or intent, leads to the activation of similar brain areas as experienced emotion (AbdulSabar et al, 2014; Berthoz et al, 2002; Ferstl et al, 2014; Gallagher et al, 2000). When we read, watch or listen to a story, this can trigger genuine feelings in us as we read it, which will then strengthen our engagement with the narrative.

A low risk relationship

The result of this emotional response to stories is that we can start to feel a connection to the characters within a narrative. This connection can build into what psychologists call a parasocial relationship. This term was originally coined to describe relationships where one person extends emotional energy and interest in a persona, such as a celebrity or media influencer, who isn’t aware of their existence, but it has been extended over time to include a figure who doesn’t exist, like a book or movie character. Our brains are so inclined to build these social connections that we become invested in the future of someone who can never actually reciprocate.

In some ways though, that lack of reciprocity makes it easier to invest in a connection. When we show that we care for a real person, we expect something in return – whether that be rejection or acceptance. When we enter into a friendship or a relationship, there are regular tests of that connection and a need to work to maintain it. Sometimes friendships drift apart or end badly; we can feel like the effort wasn’t worth it or we can be broken-hearted by the loss.

But when we feel attached to fictional character, none of that matters. There are no real life expectations to meet and we can root for their success with no impact on our day to day lives. If they’re a character in a romance, we can imagine living in their world, without having to move on to the reality of a relationship, where managing the bills and the household chores take precedence over the giddy rush of falling in love. If they’re a character in an adventure story, we can imagine taking risks and facing danger, without ever leaving the safety of our home. The characters will never reject us or judge us and we’re always able to go back to the narrative that we fell in love with. They are safe and predictable in the emotions that they make us feel.

Why do we like certain characters more than others?

Our favourite characters are as unique to us as our own personalities, though the most popular characters often have traits that appeal to a wide range of people. Often the characters we like resonate with something about ourselves or our lives. They might have traits that we value and want to emulate, like the superheroes of the MCU; they might behave or think in the ways we look for in a partner, as with many of the love interests in romance stories. Or, they might be villains that we feel empathy for because we understand their point of view or sympathise with the circumstances that led them to their behaviour, such as with Frankenstein’s monster.

When I first read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, I fell a bit in love with Sam Vimes. He was a middle aged guard in the city of Ankh-Morpork, who had become disillusioned by his corrupt home and turned to alcohol to manage his feelings. Over the course of the books, he was inspired to turn things around and work to build a real police force, but he never lost his gruff edge. There was something about the way he wanted to do good and succeeded in his own way that just really appealed to me. No heroics or super powers, just a determination to catch the bad guys and do it by the book.

Another character I’ve always loved is Edward Elric from the Full Metal Alchemist manga series. He and his brother lost their mother and tried to bring her back to life. They failed and instead Ed lost his arm and leg, while his brother lost his whole body. Ed was determined to restore his brother, always looking out for him and never as concerned for his own loss, but he also had a strong moral code and was horrified in their journey at the damage others were willing to do for their own self interest. While his brother was always his priority, Ed was also willing to put himself at risk to help others – ultimately making a big sacrifice in order to save the world and his brother.

I also don’t feel like I can talk about famous characters without bringing up the Harry Potter series, but for the topic at hand, I would argue that Severus Snape is the most memorable character of these books. Some would say that he was poorly written: a cowardly bully who we were supposed to forgive because he helped Harry in the end. Others see him as a misunderstood hero, who sacrificed his reputation for the sake of the greater good. The different view points are what keeps him in our minds – the scenes with him standing out over others as we analyse his behaviour for signs of his underlying intent. This engagement with trying to understand his point of view is what builds our connection with him, even if our conclusion is that we dislike him!

How to create a character that readers connect with

There’s no perfect mix of traits that will make a reader feel attached to a character, just like there is no person who can be friends with everyone. Aspects that appeal to one reader may put another off entirely. But there is one thing that’s likely to help: keeping the reader guessing.

The biggest thing that engages a reader is needing to pay attention to details within the narrative. The more the character makes us think, the more we try to make use of theory of mind and empathy. This can be done either through individual scenes or through the narrative itself.

Most writers are aware of the guidance to ‘show, not tell’ and there’s a good reason for this. Being told that character is scared doesn’t tend to elicit emotion on its own, because it doesn’t give us the contextual clues that we use to make sense of emotions, and it doesn’t make us actively engage with what’s happening.

Take this quote from The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler:

She slammed her glass down so hard that it slopped over on an ivory cushion. She swung her legs to the floor and stood up with her eyes sparking fire and her nostrils wide.

We as readers are forced to picture and interpret the character’s behaviour, activating similar brain areas as if she was in the room with us. This means that we’re more likely to ‘feel’ her anger as we read the book, even though the word anger isn’t used in the text.

The Big Sleep is a crime novel, so the narrative has characters double-crossing each other and revealing secrets, keeping the reader guessing along the way. But mystery within the narrative doesn’t have to be as integral to the story as that. It could be that the character doesn’t show their feelings right away, or they hint at a backstory that’s later revealed in detail. It could be that they go through a journey, developing their confidence or power or changing their perspective on the world, and the reader becomes compelled to see how their journey ends.

The most memorable characters make us work to understand them or connect with them. Their words or actions trigger those brain areas involved in theory of mind or empathy as we try to explain and predict their behaviour. If a character is part of a story arc that arouses our curiosity and they’re written in a way that ‘shows’ us their feelings, then readers are far more likely to connect with them, meaning that they’ll be remembered even after the story is over.

About The Author

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She writes monthly articles on her website about the different aspects of psychology that relate to telling stories. She is also a fantasy writer and is currently working on completing her first novel. If Caroline had any spare time around work, writing and raising her two young children, she would spend it playing board games.

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Let Me Tell You My Story: The First Person Narrative

For the last few posts I’ve been discussing the importance of the point of view that a story uses and how narrarive perspectives can impact the story. We’re now onto the last perspective that can be used in story telling, which is first person.

What is a First Person Narrative?

First person perspective is when the story is written with the narrator as the protagonist who has experienced or is experiencing the events of the narrative. It is an intimate perspective, designed to elicit the experience of the reader being told a first person account of a story, with access to the narrator’s thoughts and feelings throughout.

One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense. They could kill me, but they couldn’t have me. I was my own.

Ghost Story – Jim Butcher

To imagine a book as a real life scenario, in first person narratives you are sitting down next to another person and that person is sharing a piece of their life story, including both the events and their own thoughts and feelings at the time.

Why use a first person perspective

The intimacy of connection

The most obvious advantage of this perspective over others is how closely connected you are with the narrator. This is a far more intimate perspective than even third person limited (which I discuss here) because the narrator has invited you in, they’re actively telling you their story and sharing their experiences. As a reader, you’re not just observing what happens: you’re being asked to share in it.

From a psychological perspective, humans are profoundly social species. Our brains are wired to connect to others and experiencing that connection has been shown to activate brain areas associated with physical safety and warmth.

A first person narrative is an extreme in human connection. A person who is willing to share every little detail of their experience with you, right down to their personal thoughts and feelings. As a social animal, we’re likely to find this highly rewarding – provided we see something in the story that we’re interested in connecting with.

Detailed Character Development

First person narratives allow for a detailed exploration of the narrator’s character, in a way that no other perspective does.

There are several examples where the first person perspective exposes us to detailed elements of the narrator’s thinking style and personality that we wouldn’t really have access to otherwise.

One would be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which is narrated by an autistic teenager and gives unique insights into his perspective of the world around him.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

The premise of the book stems in part from his own unique viewpoint – when he finds a dead dog, he sees it as a murder and sets out to investigate and find the killer. Even the way in which the narrative is presented offers insight into the character that the reader might not otherwise have access to – such as the way that he describes his thoughts and experiences using diagrams.

Of course, the flip side of such a personal account is that it’s inherently biased and potentially unreliable. As far as our social brains are concerned, that’s part of the fun. We love puzzles and gain satisfaction from solving them. Solving social puzzles has the additional benefit of adding to our understanding of other people – so if we distrust an unreliable narrator, we feel rewarded to be proven right; or if they catch us out, we get the buzz from the shock of the surprise.

One well-known example of an unreliable narrator is Pi Patel from The Life of Pi, who recounts his fantastical story of surviving stranded at sea with a tiger named Richard Parker and then presents an alternative, more realistic but also more brutal, version of events and we as readers need to decide which we would prefer to be true.

I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine.

The Life of Pi – Yann Martel

Only in a first person narrative could a story be called into question to such a degree. Most other perspectives lead to an assumption that the story is being observed in some way by the reader, albeit with a potentially biased filter imposed by the narrator. Whereas in first person, we’re living in someone’s mind – and we all know how inaccurate our own perceptions can sometimes be!

Societal Issues at an Individual Level

Another powerful use of a first person narrative is to use the individual narrator as a way to speak to a wider societal issue, either as a form of analysis or critique.

A wonderful example of this is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. This book explores the lives of Kathy and her friends, who are clones created to be organ donors. In her world, they are seen as less than human. Kathy’s role is to care for and reduce the ‘agitation’ of fellow donors. She is never in a position where she can fight against her place in society but her own first person narrative does that for her – it humanises her and her friends, connecting the reader with them in a way that those in her world refuse to.

Or another example would be Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. An unnamed narrator, who feels disenfranchised from society and its definitions of manhood, turns to Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden starts a fight club and then a cult-like organisation, which engages in increasingly dangerous anti-consumerist attacks. At first, the narrator seems to be just another follower of Durden, until it emerges that he has dissociative identity disorder and he and Durden are the same person.

The first person perspective gives the reader a unique insight into the mind of the narrator, seeing the world as he convinces himself it is, rather than how it really is. We follow along with him, watching Durden grow increasingly out of control. Even once the narrator knows the truth, events have already moved beyond him, leaving him just as helpless in the face of Durden’s actions as he was in the face of the society that he struggled to fit in to.

What first person perspectives can’t do

By definition, this perspective is the story of one person. Everything that the reader sees has to have been seen by them. While events could be shared with them by other characters, if a lot of action happens away from the narrator then this can leave the reader feeling disconnected from the story.

This means that the narrative in a first person story is often narrower in focus than other perspectives. In third person limited, the camera might pick up on details that the protagonist misses. In third person omniscient the narrator can see anything that they need to for the sake of the story. Even second person can take on a more omniscient form when required.

One solution to this is to include multiple first person perspectives, like in Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which relies heavily on both narrators being unreliable and obscuring the reality of the story. This can work well as a way to tell an immersive story from multiple angles, building a wider picture than with a single point of view. However, there is a risk of confusion for the reader in terms of who is speaking and when, which means that in many cases third person is often easier – allowing the narrative to follow the protagonists closely without any confusion around which character is the current focus.

More generally, some people can find a first person perspective to be too immersive and can be put off by the story as a result. They may not connect with the narrator or they may feel frustrated that they aren’t seeing aspects of the other characters’ stories. Therefore it has to be clear why those other aspects are less important to the themes of the story than the mind of the narrator itself, or people may struggle to join the narrator on their journey.

About The Author

Caroline Ashley storytelling blog author

Caroline Ashley is a clinical psychologist who works for the NHS in Scotland. She enjoys all forms of fantasy and is fascinated with the ways in which the fantastical can speak to our everyday lives. If Caroline had any spare time around work, writing and raising her two young children, she would spend it playing board games.