What Do Your Characters Falsely Believe?

Last year, I wrote a series of posts about a fabulous presentation by Michael Hauge on “Using Inner Conflict to Create Powerful Love Stories.” But the teachings I picked up from the presentation went far beyond being applicable only to romance.

Blogger extraordinaire Janice Hardy was in the workshop with me, and she wrote a fantastic blog post about how to apply Michael Hauge’s insights to non-romance stories. Any character in any genre can complete an inner journey from “living in fear to living courageously.”

If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a character’s emotional arc,” you’d be right. *smile* Janice’s post does a great job of summarizing the elements of Hauge’s inner conflict arc, so I’m not going to repeat all the details here, but the four main elements are:

• Longing or Need: What the character longs for or needs (inner goal).
• Wound: A past hurt that’s a current unhealed source of pain (backstory).
• False Belief: What the character falsely believes due to the wound (character’s worldview).
• Fear: What terrifies the character, often a fear of experiencing the wound’s pain again (stakes).

One of Those Things Is Not Like the Others

We read blog posts all the time about characters’ inner goals or backstory wounds or stakes, but what’s this about a False Belief? And how does it fit in with the other elements?

In my post about applying those concepts to romances, I explained:

“Michael talked about characters’ wounds, an unhealed source of pain from their past. That wound causes them to have an untrue—but logical—belief about how the world works. The character then fears experiencing the pain of that wound again.

On a simplistic level, this insight into characters would look like: Character wants to be loved (Deep Longing or Need), but the last girlfriend they had cheated on them (Wound). Now, it’s easier to think all women cheat (Belief) than to risk being hurt like that again (Fear).”

How Can We Integrate False Beliefs into Our Stories?

False beliefs are things the characters believe that we, as the author, know not to be true. They’re not really unlovable, a loser, unworthy, deserving of their pain, etc. However, their Wound makes them believe so, and more importantly, it makes them think they’ve reached this conclusion logically. They don’t think they’re being delusional.

The question then becomes, how can we show those beliefs? It’s not as simple as we might think.

While readers might occasionally see evidence of the character’s False Belief through dialogue, that method of getting information across would often be too “on the nose.” Normal people don’t usually state aloud, “Such-and-such happened because I’m unlovable.”

On the other hand, normal people might think or feel such things. Or those thoughts and feelings might color their perception of situations and interactions. Same with our writing. Readers will pick up on these false beliefs primarily through characters’ point of view/worldview (what they pay attention to) and internalizations (what they think or feel).

A Trick for Showing These Internal Beliefs

Even if we stick just to internalizations and descriptions, they can still be too “on the nose” if they’re not triggered by something in the story. Characters who think negative thoughts out of nowhere could be seen as (at best) a too-mentally-unhealthy character or (at worst) a victim of clunky, non-organic storytelling.

Instead, we need to follow the action-reaction chain of our story. A plot event can cause a character to react in a way that exposes their false belief to the reader. Now we merely need ideas for how their reactions can show their false belief.

Fortunately, I came across an article on PsychCentral about cognitive distortions, which is when our mind tricks us into believing something is true even though it really isn’t. Ooo, doesn’t that sound like “false beliefs”?

Let’s take a look at these common ways for inaccurate thoughts to take hold and see how we can apply them to our characters and our stories.

15 Ways to Show False Beliefs in Our Characters

(Note that these cognitive distortions are not exclusive. We can use multiple methods to show characters’ false beliefs throughout a story, so we don’t have to choose just one.)

If characters believe X about themselves (e.g., they’re unlovable), they might react in one or more of the following ways:

1. Filtering: Magnifying the negative and ignoring the positive
   They’ll dwell on plot events that prove their belief right and they’ll gloss over those that prove them wrong.
2. Polarized Thinking: Seeing things in black-or-white
   They’ll deem any attempt to overcome that flaw a failure if it doesn’t turn out perfectly.
3. Overgeneralization: Basing conclusions on single piece of evidence
   They’ll pick out a single word, act, or event to reinforce their belief.
4. Jumping to Conclusions: Assuming others’ feelings or motivations
   They’ll assume others’ actions are driven by their flaw.
5. Catastrophizing: Expecting disaster to strike
   They’ll worry a minor mistake due to their flaw will cause great tragedy.
6. Personalization: Taking everything as a direct reaction to them
   They’ll see themselves and their flaw as the cause for everything others do or say.
7. Control Fallacies: Seeing themselves as a victim
   They’ll either think fate forces them to be a victim of their flaw, or they’ll make themselves into victims by accepting blame for everything because of their flaw.
8. Fallacy of Fairness: Judging life by “fairness”
   They’ll expect things to turn out positively to make up for the pain “life” inflicted with their Wound.
9. Blaming: Blaming others for troubles
   They’ll think others are responsible for the pain of their Wound.
10. Shoulds: Prioritizing “rules”
    They’ll set up rules for how to deal with situations caused by their belief and feel guilty when they violate those rules.
11. Emotional Reasoning: Believing feelings automatically true
    They’ll trust their feelings about their belief above all other evidence.
12. Fallacy of Change: Expecting others to change
    They’ll expect others to change to accommodate their belief and think their happiness depends on meeting that goal.
13. Global Labeling: Extreme and emotional mislabeling
    They’ll exaggerate and overgeneralize their flaw to the point of creating unhealthy emotions.
14. Always Being Right: Being right is most important trait
    They’ll argue about their belief with the insistence that they’re right—no matter the costs (including to others’ emotions).
15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy: Expecting actions to “pay off”
    They’ll expect life to reward their sacrifice in the name of their belief.

How Can We Include These Methods in Our Writing?

In Michael Hauge’s teachings, characters start in their Identity, the false self they present to the world to protect themselves from their Fear (created by that False Belief). Over the course of the story, characters move two steps forward and one step back in their journey to overcome that False Belief and Fear.

It’s that “one step back” that brings out a character’s False Belief. When the arc calls for a retreat to their Identity or a return of their Fear, we can trigger it first with a reaction based on their False Belief. (My character arc beat sheet, based on Michael Hauge’s teachings, gives ideas on how to match the emotional arc to the plot arc.)

In the middle of the story (what Michael Hauge calls Act Two, Stage Three), the character wavers, doing the two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance. At the crisis point (what he calls Turning Point Four), the character fully retreats into their Identity. At each of those points, plot events can force the character to react in one or more of those cognitively distorted ways above.

(For example, in one of my stories, the crisis point of “boy loses girl” makes the hero jump to conclusions (#4) and personalize events (#6) even though the event has nothing to do with him and everything to do with the antagonistic forces working against the heroine. Regardless, he’s freshly convinced his False Belief is true and retreats into his Fear.)

Finally, in the climax of the story, a plot event that would normally trigger a character’s False Belief doesn’t, and furthermore, the character rejects their former belief, often stating for the sake of the theme or the antagonist that they now know it not to be true. Ta-da! The reader sees the character change and the emotional arc is complete. *smile*

Registration is currently open for my workshop on how to do just enough story development to write faster, while not giving our pantsing muse hives. Interested? Sign up for “Lost Your Pants? The Impatient Writers Guide to Plotting a Story.” (Blog readers: Use Promo Code “savethepants” to save $15 on registration.)

Do your characters have false beliefs? Have you struggled with how to show this element of character arcs? Have you studied cognitive distortions before? Can you think of how some of them might apply to your characters? (Or to yourself? *raises hand*) Do you have other suggestions for how to implement characters’ false beliefs?