Nick's Journal · Craft Decisions
“Sonder: is the profound, often humbling realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid, complex, and real as your own—complete with their own ambitions, friends, routines, and worries. It is the awareness that you are merely a background extra in their story, just as they are in yours.”
If there was a word that best captured my approach to storytelling, to interacting with others in my life and, in a number of ways, to informing my entire worldview, Sonder would be that word.
I often talk about the different stages of one’s life, as I believe this is an observable phenomenon that holds true across the majority of the population. There are exceptions to every rule, but the idea of a childhood, a young adult, a midlife crisis and a distinguished elder all exist for a reason.
And so like many other things that change and grow over time, your views towards others will do the same. Where I hope they will eventually land is on the concept of Sonder, which is essentially the exact opposite of the NPC framing that has become frequently used in modern discourse.
Think of the implications of using one frame versus another on all of your interactions? If you cast someone as a NPC, you will dismiss the feelings that others have, their emotions, their backgrounds and their lives. You will cut yourself off from ever being able to properly understand them and will essentially have created your own self-fulfilling justification that they are a NPC. For if you ignore all of the things that make them unique and shut them off from your perception of others, how could they ever come across as anything other than another generic random person?
If instead you view them for what they truly are, a complete person with a thousand competing demands on their time and attention, with a background and life experience that has uniquely formed their views on the world and how it operates, you will instead begin with a framing that allows for connection. It will allow you to begin to observe how they react to certain behaviors and, as you learn more about them, it will allow you to begin to piece together the why.
Do this enough times, and with enough people, and your understanding of human relationships and cause and effect that drive people to behave a certain way, from the impact of their past experience, their values, and their assumptions, both false and accurate, will develop tremendously and allow you to have a far better toolkit with which to write appropriate character interaction.
This is obviously instrumental in terms of writing high quality fiction, but hopefully it is clear that it is also instrumental to properly navigating life in general. There are damaged people out there, there are people with bad intentions and there are people who are genuinely cooperative and kind. Understanding the full spectrum and the various ways in which they can err and fall from grace will allow you to build and maintain bridges that others simply could not.
Relationships are an absolute key element to a happy and fulfilled life. I won’t dive too deeply into that here, as I do plenty of that in the journal section of the blog, but this is simply to point out that having a proper mindset in this area is a vital ingredient to many facets of life, not simply your writing craft.
Focusing back on the topic at hand though, how then does Sonder translate to the written word? Think of the characters that you write and how you build them out. A writer with a firm grasp of Sonder will have spent their time observing the people around them and imagining all the things that make up that person. They will have spent their conversations with others looking to round out their understanding of them, pushing past surface level questions. They will essentially have done all of the hard work in building out accurate ‘character types’ simply by properly navigating their day to day life.
Those who adopt a NPC mindset on the other hand will essentially be left with a very poor toolkit in which to build out different POVs. Anyone can write from their own mindset, so they will almost undoubtedly write autofiction but then struggle outside of that domain. Autofiction has a place, as it is where an author’s deepest understanding lives and breathes, but it falls apart quickly if the supporting cast are all one-dimensional and lacking the same level of understanding and richness.
The best fiction feels like it flows naturally. As if the people in the novel are simply people picked out of a crowd of real humans, thrust into whatever setting is being portrayed and left to their own devices. Their actions will make sense, their thoughts will be ones you would expect, their backstories, as they are revealed, will seem to fit perfectly into the character that you have observed in action. And none of this is possible without the ability to view people in real life in the same manner.
If you cannot sit across the table from another real life human and be able to slowly understand them and how and why they are the way they are, then you will struggle immensely when trying the same with a fictional person. You will miss the key places in your character arc where an event was needed to trigger the later reaction you require. Or where a part of their history is necessary in order to justify their treatment of another. All of these little decisions that work in great literature, will misfire if you lack the work that was done to facilitate them.
What this means is that you should embrace Sonder as soon as you can. The younger you are, the harder it will be. You are still figuring out yourself when young, so asking you to figure out others as well is a tall task indeed. When the time comes that you have sorted your personal challenges and have some foundation with which to work and grow from, think back to this piece.
That will be the time to make sure you open yourself up to the world as it is, not as how it can sometimes feel. A world full of main characters, of endless stories and sprawling narratives that you could never hope to even scratch the surface of. Of characters with a thousand nuances that inspired the paths that they chose and the ones they left behind. A world that will give you all the fuel you will ever need when you set down the path of building your own.
My best wishes to each of you, wherever you find yourself on your own journey. And should we ever have a chance to share a cup of coffee or a pint, may it be over a conversation that is deep, open and engaging, as those are the only ones worth pursuing.
Much love as always,
Nick