Top products from r/storyandstyle
We found 5 product mentions on r/storyandstyle. We ranked the 5 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
1. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
Sentiment score: 1
Number of reviews: 1
Basic Books AZ
2. Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life
Sentiment score: -1
Number of reviews: 1
While I like the care you give to the subject, I would just like to fill in some cracks with a few resources. I have a background in AbPsych and one of my mentors did a lot of interesting work with real life psychopaths.
The baseline for psychopathy was first and best (so far) laid out by Robert Hare. This site has a nice explanation.
Two great books on the subject (non-fiction) are: The Anatomy of Evil and The Science of Evil. Something more in the popsci vein would also be Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, though I have some personal qualms with Ronson’s view.
For fiction, there’s of course any of the works mentioned in the original post, as well as American Psycho and We Need to Talk about Kevin.
To add to this list I highly recommend the work of Dan McAdams, especially his Stories We Live By. McAdams is psychologist who has spent decades collecting the life stories of Americans and analyzing the patterns of their characters and arcs. This book and his work are not direct tips for writing per se, but I’ve found them really helpful for both grounding characters in more life-like archetypes and thinking about how people conceptualize themselves through internal stories. It might seem like a tall order when you’re just getting your grounding in developing characters, but for more interesting or layered stories it can be really powerful to think about how they’re all trying to enact their own story within the narrative (especially when the “reality” of the author doesn’t match their self-perception)
Anyways I can write a longer post on the specific framework of personality types McAdams develops if there’s any interest.
Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life https://www.amazon.com/dp/0472067745/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Zk5RBbJVW2S7B