The Storyteller's Curse

How Learning How to Craft Compelling Characters Has Affected How I Interact With the World

There are many perks to being a professional storyteller. The skill of storytelling makes us better at communicating ideas, public speaking, and it makes us rather popular at dinner parties. There’s a dark side to storytelling, however. Crafting compelling characters for our stories requires us to dive deep into the human psyche to understand what makes people tick, what drives us, and what makes us…us. What we find therein is hard to unsee, affecting how we interact with the world.

Allow me to explain.

A few years ago, I worked as a salesperson for a local and well-respected painting contractor. Part of my training involved working as a painter on a crew for two weeks. I learned everything there was to know about painting houses, inside and out. The crew leader, a quiet, stoic retired army man named Tommy, showed me exceptional patience as I fumbled through the motions of masking, prepping, and painting.

To show Tommy my appreciation for his mentorship, I took him and his crew to pizza on our last day together. While sitting at a table in the far corner of the pizza shop, I glanced at the window sill. I noticed that the caulking and paint had failed, and I pointed out to Tommy why it had failed based on what he had taught me.

“That’s a bad paint job,” I said.

Tommy nodded and replied, “Now you have the painter’s curse. You’ll always see the flaws in every paint job.”

The painter’s curse amounts to the inability not to see poor workmanship on contracting work after having worked in the business for some time. The company I worked for prided itself on exceptional quality, and they delivered, which further skewed my point of view. Over the next few years, I gathered more and more knowledge as an estimator, and I became exceptionally proficient in spotting problems to better sell projects.

To my wife’s chagrin, the painter’s curse also turned me into a disagreeable person with whom to shop for homes. One glance at a home, and I can tell you what all the maintenance problems will be and what they will cost. Because most contractors are just plain bad (and that’s not hyperbole), we struggled to find a home that didn’t scare me financially. I can’t walk into a home without noticing all the problems. I just can’t ignore them.

Similarly, I have found that developing the skill of storytelling, especially in regards to character development, has affected how I interact with and respond to the world. Having delved into the works of Jung, Freud, Piagé, Vygotsky, and by extension, Campbell, Watts, Becker, Bly, and many others, I have reached an understanding of my own self and others that has allowed me to create complex characters with wants and needs and wounds of their own—and the behavior to match.

Like the painter’s curse, the storyteller’s curse is the tendency for me to notice flaws others don’t, except rather than find fault in houses, I find them in people.

When I used to meet people, I would behave the usual way by shaking hands, smiling, and starting with a bit of friendly small talk. These days, unless I am at a large function with little time to get to know anyone, I dive right into their dark side. Why? Because I can see it, and as a storyteller, I can’t help but explore it. Curiosity does get me into trouble. I often come off as "studying" people, even though my motives are genuine and good.

Being a storyteller has made me a kind of outcast. It’s unsurprising, given the historical precedent. Storytellers, such as bards, poets, and skalds, have always lived on the fringes of society, observing. They traditionally have helped their communities make sense of the world and carry out the processes of change inherent in the human condition. I suppose that’s where I have landed, though I hesitate to overstate my importance. My stories are not great literature; they’re just good fun.

You can learn more about ancient storytellers and storytelling in the podcast Terri Barnes and I recorded with Dr. Judith Jesch on Skaldic Poetry.

The Bard (c. 1817), by John Martin

Between you and me is air, but between me and me is 36 years of self-justification and self-centeredness that have made me blind to the flaws I wish I never had. Jung called it the shadow: the parts of ourselves we have disowned. However, just because we’ve disowned them does not mean they have gone away. We merely stop being able to see them for ourselves. Everyone else can still see them. Especially storytellers (and, I suppose, therapists).

When I create a character, I approximate a natural person as much as possible. To do so, I make a brief backstory that includes a specific physical or psychological wound that creates an inner need that the character either acknowledges or, more interesting for character development, does not. Once I determine the character’s internal needs, I decide which character strengths and weaknesses that person will possess. My characters always speak to, try to act in accordance with (keyword: “try”), and flaunt their strengths. They always ignore or try to hide their defects. The cherry on top is giving them an external desire that opposes their internal need. In literature, we call this Narrative Motivation. In psychology, we call this the separation of ego and shadow.

The psychologist Robert Bly called the shadow “The Long Bag We Drag Behind” and likened it to a bag we carry behind us where we put all those parts of ourselves we wish we could remove. Those things, however, boil to the surface when the external world presents us with a situation that triggers our inner wounds, and our defects come barreling out. This explains those odd behaviors we all occasionally exhibit that run opposite to the image we put out to the world.

I like to think of it in these terms: if you were a business, think of your ego as your personal PR and marketing mouthpiece, advertising how you wish to appear to the world, and your shadow the operational shit-show that can’t quite get its act together to turn a profit. Problems arise when marketing promises one thing, but operations deliver something different. And we’re all overpromising and underdelivering.

As a storyteller, I am intrinsically interested in honing my craft, and nothing sharpens crafting compelling characters as much as interacting with and learning about other people. Human interaction is a tremendous opportunity to learn more about others and myself, and that craving for authenticity, while perhaps noble on the surface, has a flip side. Many will say they wished the people around them took a more selfless, genuine interest in them, but will tend not to want to talk about their past traumas over coffee. Most people are too guarded for that and for good reason. The ego will quite literally fight to the death to maintain self-image.

And that’s the storyteller’s curse. It has made me one of those strange people who asks probing personal questions because I want to know who you are, what drives you, and what you still have to learn. I have little patience for idle conversation, such as the weather (there’s an app for that), nor do I find superficiality worth entertaining. I don’t make fast friends—fast friends are superficial. But when I make friends, we tend to stick together because our interactions bear meaning.

The storyteller’s curse also carries a tendency to want to help others grow precisely because I can see their internal needs. However, unsolicited advice is never the answer. So, I cannot do anything other than observe unless explicitly solicited. Even then, I have to be careful. I have faults, too, and I don’t always see them coming.

It’s a bit like watching someone hire a disreputable painting contractor—nothing I can say or do will change their mind, and by then, the damage is done.

On the positive side, observing humans being human with my academic background helps me craft better, more compelling characters. This journey has also allowed me to take a greater interest in my fellows, and my personal relationships are deeper and more meaningful than ever before. Becoming a storyteller has given me a yearning for authenticity with others and set me on a path to bring to light my flaws and, as my characters are all made to do, learn something fundamental about myself.

In the end, not a curse but a blessing.

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