Crouching Ego, Hidden Hell
Design by Drake: please check out his site by clicking on the image.
I hate people with big egos. Let me put this plainly: I really hate, loathe, detest and am repulsed by people whose confidence in their own awesomeness is so great, you itch to bring them down to bitter reality. (For the good of their own mental health, of course!) I’ve worked with a few people like that. It never ends well.
The other character trait which grinds down my patience is people who are abrasive. They just don’t come across as warm, friendly; or at times, even glad to share their planet with any other living being. I am not the sort of person that wants to love and hug everyone, but I do appreciate a certain level of civilised interaction when I have to work alongside someone. Is that too much to ask?
In my early twenties, one of the key figures of our social group was a guy who was Mr Confidence! (Super ego on stilts…) He was moderately good looking; incredibly ambitious; a financial snob in a low paying job; judgemental and he was Going Someplace Important and Lucrative! He boasted he worked eighty hour weeks, including volunteer time. The older generation around us were heard to remark, that he would burn-out by the time he was thirty. He did. I wanted to strangle him many times, but alas, he was tall, I was short… it could never be.
I learnt something critical about human behaviour in the time I spent around him. His confidence, in actuality, was as thin and transparent as cellophane. He was a bundle of complex insecurities. He had a background of childhood abuse and other family complications which he was clearly, going to transcend! However, he was trying to achieve it by following the wrong image of a successful man. He worked so hard at being strong, that his behaviour worked like a magnet: his negativity repulsed the positive people and the opportunities he needed the most. I started to feel sad for him. His behaviour bothered me less; it became, “what are we going to do about Mr Confidence? He needs help, but he won’t open up!”
Working as a professional, I have come across so many arrogant, abrasive and egotistical doctors, lawyers and managers, I can’t count them all. Only that I had that early, formative, experience, I’d write them all off as a pack of time wasters. But now, I look deeper. The angry doctor in the Emergency Room was frustrated with a medical system that stopped him from really helping his patients. He came back and made sure I was as comfortable as I could be. I looked past the anger and saw a big heart. The manager who had atrocious people skills and barked at everyone became a friend. I talked to him quietly; told him how much I appreciated his skills and what he was doing. He too had an amazing passion for his work and he was as soft as marshmallow under the gruff voice.
The more responsibility I see placed on people, often, the tougher I see them act. It is a defence mechanism to enable them to cope with the demands on them. So the question I am asking is, when you are constructing characters who are rough, ridiculous and deserve a good slap, what terrors can you write in that lie deep underneath? What private hell are they compensating for? The legacy of abuse? Being worn down by failure, or simple bad luck? Dig deeper to reveal the real story underneath. That will be the pivotal point on which you can turn a bad character into a reformed, flesh and blood human.
I searched for a Copyright notice on Drake’s site and couldn’t find one, but the photo is his work, so please respect that and don’t claim it as your own.
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Filed under: Writing Tagged: abrasive, abuse, ambition, biography, challenge, characterisation, compensation, conflict, ego, failure, fiction, growth, ideas, Indie publishing, inspiration, motivation, over confidence, passion, personality, plot, problem solving, psychology, stress, writer, writing
