Abstract
Writers often report vivid experiences of hearing characters talking to them, talking back to them, and exhibiting independence and autonomy. However, systematic empirical studies of this phenomenon are almost non-existent, and as a result little is known about its cause, extent, or phenomenology. Here we present the results of a survey of professional writers (n=181) run in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Participants provided detailed descriptions of their experiences of their characters in response to a phenomenological questionnaire, and also reported on imaginary companions, inner speech and hallucination-proneness. Qualitative analysis indicated that the phenomenology of the experience of agentive characters varied in terms of the characters' separateness from the writer's self and the kinds of interaction this did or did not allow for. We argue that these variations can be understood in relation to accounts of mindreading and agency tracking which adopt intuitive as opposed to inferential models.
Highlights
Engaging with fictional characters is a complex cognitive act which involves the interaction of a range of psychological processes, from mental imagery, to empathy, to theory of mind (Waugh, 2015; Oatley, 2012; Keen, 2006; Zunshine, 2006)
We did not exclude poets and non-fiction writers as several responded to the survey in relation to fiction they had written, or responded in a way that clearly demonstrated the relevance of the questions to poetry and non-fiction writing
We explored how the codes attributed for inner speech and characters’ voices picked out different patterns of experience
Summary
Engaging with fictional characters is a complex cognitive act which involves the interaction of a range of psychological processes, from mental imagery, to empathy, to theory of mind (Waugh, 2015; Oatley, 2012; Keen, 2006; Zunshine, 2006). Intriguing – and difficult to account for – is the experience which frequently emerges from the creation of fictional characters. We would sit wherever I was, and talk. They were very obliging, engaging, and jolly. They were, at the end of their story but were telling it to me from the beginning. We got through that; don’t pull such a long face, they’d say (Alice Walker, 1983, p. 359)
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