I Don’t Do People

I don’t write character-based fiction. I’m not a “people person” – not in the lived world, and certainly not on the page. I prefer people at arm’s length, ideally shrink-wrapped and on mute, where I can manage the terms of engagement.

Yes, my work features characters. I flesh them out just enough to spare readers the Ayn Rand experience, those one-dimensional ideological mannequins masquerading as protagonists. But character isn’t the centrepiece. I write to explore worldviews, metanarratives, and environmental interactions. I’m less interested in what a person feels and more in what their presence means within a broader system.

Audible Irony

At the fitness centre (the irony isn’t lost on me), I listen to audiobooks. Today’s pick: The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass. I’ve just cracked Chapter Four, and already I’ve panned a few glittering nuggets for future consideration.

That said, I found myself wondering: why am I even listening to a book so obsessed with the deep inner life of characters?

Simple. Because it’s still useful – even if I only dose it homeopathically. Just because I don’t write bleeding-heart confessions doesn’t mean I can’t exploit emotional undercurrents when it serves a structural or rhetorical purpose.

Character, Morality, and My Problem with Haidt

One section rubbed me the wrong way: the bit about character morality. Maass references Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology—yes, that Jonathan Haidt, patron saint of middlebrow centrism and moral-sentiment handwaving.

I’m familiar with Haidt. Not a fan. His notion of “moral elevation”—the idea that stories with virtuous themes inspire moral behaviour—strikes me as both quaint and quaintly manipulative. In a sense, I agree with him: morality is curated. But that’s where our Venn diagram becomes a shrug.

I’m a moral non-cognitivist. I won’t bore you here (though feel free to tumble down that rabbit hole over on my philosophical blog). In short, I don’t believe morals are objective truths handed down from Olympus or Enlightenment think-tanks. They’re socio-emotional artefacts – human constructs born from gut feelings, tempered by culture, and ossified into norms. Different contexts yield different values. That’s why I delight in yanking characters out of time and place, disorienting them – and you – to expose just how contingent it all is.

So yes, I understand moral tropes. I even deploy them. But I do so to subvert them – not to reinforce a collective bedtime story about “goodness” or “redemption.” Those are the myths we tell ourselves to stay sane. I’m here to loosen your grip.