What’s fascinating is how sincerely people believe the stories they tell themselves.
Charlie Levin recently sat down with Dr. Jim Kleiger for a podcast conversation that got us thinking about this. Jim spent nearly 50 years as a clinical psychologist before becoming a psychological thriller author, and his understanding of human behavior comes through in the characters he creates.
We talked about what makes people tick, why we sometimes act against our own best interests, and how those contradictions make fictional characters feel so real.
One of the more interesting things from our conversation was that, after decades of studying real people, Jim created a fictional woman he couldn’t seem to let go of.
After 50 years studying people, he created one he couldn’t figure out
Kleiger spent nearly 50 years as a clinical psychologist, working with people navigating trauma, mental illness, and the complicated ways our minds protect us from painful realities.
Then he started writing fiction.
His first novel, Tears Are Only Water, introduced Nicola Kitts, a decorated Marine turned sheriff’s deputy. She’s competent, exceptionally tough, and skilled at managing situations that would send most people running.
She’s also deeply troubled.
Nicola carries unresolved trauma, shame, and grief. She drinks too much, struggles with self-destructive behavior, and has an impressive ability to avoid confronting the very problems that are slowly consuming her.
Kleiger expected her to appear in one book. Instead, she followed him through 3 novels, including Whispers and his newly released thriller Pareidolia: Illusions, Deceptions, and Murder.
Eventually, he wrote an essay titled Nicola Kitts, Why Can’t I Let You Be?
There’s something wonderfully ironic about a psychologist who spent decades studying real people finding himself unable to let go of someone he invented.
But it says something interesting about how we understand human behavior.
The longer we spend trying to understand someone, the more complicated they often become. What initially looks like a straightforward personality trait can turn out to be a defense mechanism. What appears to be confidence can conceal insecurity. And the behavior that makes the least sense from the outside may have a perfectly understandable explanation once you know the person’s history.
Nicola is a good example.
The people who look the strongest are sometimes the best at avoiding themselves
Nicola can face danger without hesitation. She’s been trained to make decisions under pressure, handle violence, and keep functioning when most people would fall apart.
But ask her to examine her own emotional wounds, and things get considerably more difficult.
She wants to leave law enforcement and become a social worker. It’s a career that appeals to her compassion and her desire to help people who’ve suffered.
The problem is that social work would force her to examine some of the very issues she’s spent years trying to avoid. It’s an interesting contradiction, and one I suspect a lot of people would recognize.
Think about the person who’s always helping everyone else solve their problems but never seems able to get their own life together. Or the person who’s remarkably successful professionally but makes consistently terrible decisions in relationships.
Sometimes being competent in one area makes it easier to avoid confronting what isn’t working somewhere else.
We’re good at using our strengths to compensate for our weaknesses. Occasionally, we’re so good at it that we manage to avoid addressing those weaknesses for decades.
For a writer, that tension creates an interesting character. For the rest of us, it might explain a few people we’ve known.
Possibly ourselves.
Our brains would rather have an explanation than admit we’re guessing
Kleiger’s latest novel takes its title from a fascinating psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.
It’s the reason you can see a face in a cloud, a person in the shadows, or a vaguely annoyed expression on the front of your car.
Our brains are constantly searching for recognizable patterns, even when we’re looking at random information.
It’s a useful ability. We depend on it to make sense of the world quickly. But our minds can also become remarkably confident about interpretations built on very little evidence. Think Jesus in a slice of toast.
Now consider how often we do something similar with people.
Someone doesn’t respond to a text, and we decide they’re upset. A colleague seems unusually quiet, and we assume something happened at work. A friend cancels plans, and we start wondering whether there’s something wrong with the friendship.
Sometimes those interpretations are accurate. Other times, we’ve built an entire explanation around something as unremarkable as a dead phone battery. We do this constantly.
And once we’ve decided what something means, we often start collecting evidence to support our interpretation.
Psychologists have a name for that tendency, too: confirmation bias.
It’s one reason two people can experience the same conversation and walk away with completely different versions of what happened. Each remembers the details that fit the story they already believe.
Now consider how useful that is to a thriller writer.
A detective finds a clue and forms a theory. The reader sees the same evidence and agrees. Every new detail appears to confirm what they already suspect.
Until one piece of information makes the entire theory fall apart.
A good psychological thriller takes advantage of how eager we are to trust our own conclusions.
The uncomfortable part is recognizing how often we do the same thing outside a book.
The most believable villains rarely think they’re villains
Think about the characters who have made you genuinely uncomfortable.
Amy Dunne in Gone Girl. Walter White in Breaking Bad. Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
What makes them disturbing is how convincingly they explain their behavior.
”The villain is the hero of his own story.”
Walter White can justify almost anything by telling himself he’s doing it for his family. Amy Dunne builds an elaborate narrative around betrayal and revenge. Tom Ripley moves through the world with a remarkable ability to accommodate his own dishonesty.
Their choices become increasingly indefensible, but the psychological reasoning behind them remains recognizable.
Someone who repeatedly hurts others may genuinely believe they’re the victim. Someone who manipulates a situation may see themselves as simply protecting their interests.
And sometimes the most unsettling moment in a story comes when you realize you understand their reasoning better than you’d like.
The question that gets people to tell you what really scares them
Kleiger’s writing process has another interesting element.
He consults experts who understand the situations he’s writing about. For Whispers, he worked with a mathematics professor to develop equations tied to a serial killer. He’s also sought help from people familiar with police investigations, military operations, and the practical realities of physical confrontations.
Charlie Levin asks a question I think more writers should borrow:
“What is your greatest fear?”
It’s a deceptively good question.
Ask a homicide detective what scares them most, and you’re likely to hear about a problem that never occurred to you. Ask someone who works in cybersecurity, and they may describe a vulnerability most of us wouldn’t even know to worry about.
People who have spent years working in a field understand its hidden risks.
But the question is useful well beyond researching a novel.
If you want to understand someone, ask what they’re afraid might happen. Their answer can tell you quite a bit about what matters to them, what they feel responsible for, and what they believe they stand to lose.
Why fictional people can feel more understandable than real ones
I think one reason we get so attached to fictional characters is that we have access to information we’d never have in real life.
We know their private thoughts. We know what happened to them when they were children. We know what they’re ashamed of, what they regret, and what they’re afraid to admit.
We understand the complicated chain of events that led them to become who they are.
In real life, we’re working with whatever someone chooses to show us. We can know a person for 20 years and still have surprisingly little understanding of why they behave the way they do.
Sometimes we don’t even fully understand our own motivations.
Fiction gives us the opportunity to see what happens beneath the surface, to understand how someone can sincerely believe something that’s obviously untrue or continue making decisions that are slowly destroying their life. And occasionally, we recognize a little of ourselves in the process.
That’s what makes the relationship between psychology and storytelling so interesting. Dr. Kleiger spent decades studying real people before creating Nicola Kitts. After 3 novels, he’s still exploring what makes her tick.
I suspect that’s part of why certain characters stay with us. We become invested in understanding them, even when their stories are finished.
And every so often, a character makes us reconsider something we thought we understood about the people around us.
Maybe even ourselves.
🎧 Listen to the full episode of The Munn Avenue Muse Featuring Dr. Jim Kleiger on your favorite podcast platform.
📘 Pareidolia is available at:
🌐 Connect with Dr. Kleiger through his official website.
📖 Pareidolia by J. Herman Kleiger is available in eBook, paperback, and hardcover through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.
✍️ If you’re working on a book of your own, whether fiction, memoir, or nonfiction, Munn Avenue Press can help you shape your manuscript and bring it to readers. Visit MunnAvenuePress.com to learn more.
👉 Subscribe below for more conversations with authors, publishing advice, and behind-the-scenes stories from The Munn Avenue Muse.
🎙 Ask Siri or Alexa to “Play The Munn Avenue Muse podcast!”
This post is public. Feel free to share.
Happy Writing,
Charles Levin, Publisher & Founder
What’s the one object in your home that you could never part with? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!
