I was never the kid who confirmed to the norm. I never sought someone that I could relate to in books and TV shows, I sought for exactly the opposite in fact.
I've always been interested in exploring people's minds, inside and out, learning how different people think and why. But as I watch TV shows, I find that I don't worry about why the characters themselves are doing things, I wonder why the writer has written the character to do this. Because part of being a writer, is first creating a character that could be real and then entering their mind and doing everything as they would do. And try as they may, writers always put pieces of themselves in their characters. And finding those pieces that show up time and again in each episode is extremely satisfying, making me want to predict their next move based on what I've learned.
I think because of my view, I tend to connect to characters whose psychology interests me. In series like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Divergent, the protagonists' drive is pretty clear, it's the right thing to do and it's for the greater good. And while I'm all for the greater good, when the character is someone I hate, psychoanalyzing them and the writers' choices in writing them becomes all the more interesting.
In Orange is the New Black, for example, I despise Piper, the main character. I find everything she does to be extremely agitating and backwards of what a logical person would do. At the beginning, Piper, we get a glimpse of her normal life and then she heads straight for prison. It is clear that Piper is not going to belong here and she quickly learns that the rules on the inside are very different than out. From Piper's first few lines, she manages to both offend the most powerful woman in the prison and establishes herself as a clueless know-it-all. Piper's psychological journey in the show is an extremely intriguing one; she has been forced into a whole new universe, put in close quarters with people she would have never met on the outside, and the only thing that isn't controlled is her social life. The longer that Piper lives in this new world, the more her oxymoronic characteristics show. Jenji Kohan, the show's creator and writer, has manufacture a gold mine of psychological depth with Piper's character, and so far she has explored many possibilities that lay in Piper's mind as she enters this uncharted territory.
Recently, I've started reading scripts of the shows that I've been watching on repeat. With every read the scripts reveal a sentence that I never thought twice about when I was watching, a character trait that I never noticed, or an action description that transforms a plain filler scene into the backbone of the episode.
I think that viewing things from the writer's perspective has made me think more of why people do the things they do, in real life. A small glance or a certain word said instead of another can tell an entire story that goes on in someone's heads, both in the real world and the fictional one.
