How to Enrage Your Character
by Randy Ingermanson
Advanced Fiction Writing
How to Enrage Your Character
As I’ve said many times, writing fiction is about giving your reader a powerful emotional experience. And you do that by giving your characters a powerful emotional experience.
The question is how to do that realistically. How do you set up a situation in which the character would naturally feel strong emotions?
That’s a large subject, too big for one column, but I can tackle one piece of it today.
Let’s talk about rage. That’s a powerful emotion for you, and it’s one that some of your characters will feel.
Sometimes rage is justified. Think about the #MeToo hashtag, and you can come up with millions of examples of justified rage. I think we can all understand justified rage.
Unjustified Rage
But sometimes rage is unjustified. That’s a little harder to understand. Why would somebody go into an unjustified rage? Are they bad people, or is there some other explanation?
This is important. If we can’t understand it, we can’t write it.
Let’s do a little thinking on unjustified rage. How do we make sense of it? Or is rage so irrational that we can’t make sense of it?
Think about the last time somebody was enraged at you. Has that happened to you, ever?
If you can’t remember, let me toss out some short phrases that may jog your memory. I got these phrases by going to four popular web sites and scrolling down, looking for controversial topics, and typing them out in the exact order I saw them. It’s kind of a long list, even after I removed the duplicates:
- Guns
- National anthem
- Election districting
- Fundamentalism
- UFOs
- Federal corruption
- Russian investigation
- Climate change
- Environment/conservation
- Trump
- Obama
- Election fraud
- Putin
- Mega pastors
- Immigration
- LGBT
- Economic inequality
- Crime
- Fake news
- Taxes
- Bitcoin
- Euthanasia
- Creationism
What Makes People Angry?
Have you ever had a discussion on one of these topics and gotten angry at somebody? Maybe even enraged?
Were you justifiably enraged, or unjustifiably? That’s actually a bad question. No doubt your rage was justified.
But let’s turn it around. Has anyone ever been unjustifiably enraged at you over one of these topics? I’m guessing they have.
Now let’s ask the hard question—what caused them to be unjustifiably enraged?
That’s tough to answer, because you can’t go inside someone’s head to know what they’re thinking. All you can do is guess.
Here’s my guess, and I know it’s just a partial answer. People get unjustifiably enraged when they have a strong false belief about a current danger that is being ignored by “those other people.”
The rage comes from the strong belief that this terrible danger is being ignored.
If they actually had some expertise on the subject, their rage would probably be justified, because there are real dangers in the world. Ignoring those dangers is wrong. If a danger is high enough, people should be enraged that it’s being ignored.
If you’re on the Titanic and you know there’s an iceberg ahead, you should be enraged when the captain says, “Full speed ahead.”
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
But what if the danger isn’t real? What if the person is misinformed? What if there is no iceberg?
That happens a lot. In that case, the rage is unjustified.
I’ve seen a fair number of cases where it looked to me like the rage-provider was much less informed on the subject than the rage-receiver. I bet you have too.
There’s some rather weird psychology that comes into play here, the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” It has two sides:
- Incompetent people often think they are much more competent than they actually are.
- Very competent people often assume that other people are much more competent than they actually are.
The key point here is that incompetents tend to rate themselves too high. Competents tend to rate other people too high.
Competent people tend to rate themselves fairly accurately. They know what they know and what they don’t know. They have a good understanding of the level of uncertainty in ideas. They know which statements are real facts and can be known with high certainty. They also know which statements are less certain and could be right or could be wrong.
But competent people tend to assume that “if it’s easy for me to understand, it’s easy for other people,” which is why they overrate other people’s level of knowledge. Note that they are overrating “other people” taken all together as a group. Of course, a competent person can easily tell that a particular person is incompetent by talking to them one-on-one.
Incompetent people, on the other hand, tend to lack the knowledge to even recognize what competence is. They don’t realize how much there is to know. So they think they know more than they actually do. As your grandmother told you, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” You might say that incompetent people are logjammed by their own incompetence.
The way to break that logam is for incompetent people to study the subject more. A lot more. Once you get past the beginner stage, you realize how much you don’t know and you stop overrating yourself. Then as you start getting some actual expertise, you begin to rate yourself higher and higher, but now your self-rating is justified.
One advantage of education is that you learn how much you don’t know. When I was 13, I knew pretty much everything. By the time I was 26, I knew pretty much nothing, except on a very few subjects where I had some level of expertise. I like learning, and I know a lot more now than I did at 26. But I’ll never again be as smart as when I was 13.
One disadvantage of education is that there is an endless supply of people who know very little, but think they know more than you.
I’ve found that I can learn something from just about anyone, if only I can find out what subject they’re an expert on. The trick is figuring out if they’re a real expert, or if they just think they are. You can do that by asking questions about how they know that they know what they say they know. Real experts will answer differently than non-experts.
Authentic Unjustifiable Rage
So getting back to the subject of unjustifiable rage, here are my thoughts. Over the years, I’ve had some massive rage directed at me in discussions on certain controversial subjects where I actually have some expertise. Things I’ve spent years studying.
And the rage has come most often from people who didn’t appear to have much knowledge at all on the subject. But they thought they did. And they thought my opinion was not only wrong, it was dangerous. Hence, the rage.
The Dunning-Kruger effect explains this. They have a little knowledge. They see a danger that isn’t real. They get angry because I don’t see the danger.
They’re not necessarily bad people. But they’re still angry and the rage is still toxic. Knowing that can make it easier to deal with toxic people. (Although I wouldn’t advise ever telling anybody, “You’re toxic because you’re ignorant.” There are probably better ways to respond than that!)
And if you want to write fiction with three-dimensional characters, that’s the key thing you’re looking for. You can have nice people go into a terrible, toxic rage attack. The secret is to make them ignorant on the thing they’re angry about. It’s no sin to be ignorant. Everybody is ignorant on something.
Homework
Think about the novel you’re writing right now. Is there any scene where a character goes into a rage? Is that character a bad person? Or just a regular, flawed human? How are you playing that character? What’s the motivation you’re showing for the rage? Is it possible you’ve got a Dunning-Kruger situation? How would you show that to make your character more three-dimensional?
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