Nobody Thinks They’re the Villain: What Social Work Taught Me About Writing Characters

You would think that working as a child welfare social worker and counsellor for over a decade has very little to do with storytelling.

But I have come to believe that, at its core, it has everything to do with it.

A large part of my work has involved entering people's lives at moments when those lives no longer make sense to them. Families in crisis. Children trying to understand the adults and the world around them. Parents attempting to reconcile who they believe themselves to be with choices they have made, things that have happened to them, or circumstances they can no longer control.

People are constantly constructing narratives about themselves. We all do it. We select certain memories, assign meaning to particular events, minimise some things and magnify others. We create causal chains. We decide who hurt us, why we behaved as we did, what kind of person we are, and what the story says about us.

Sometimes those narratives protect us. Sometimes they trap us.

My job has often been to listen closely enough to begin taking those stories apart. Not to disprove them, but to understand what lies underneath them. To make sense of someone's most intimate and painful experiences, identify where the wound may have begun, and then work out what kind of support, language or strategy might actually help.

That process has profoundly shaped the way I write.

What social work taught me about storytelling

• People rarely experience their lives as facts. They experience them as narratives. The event itself is rarely the whole story. What matters is what it means to the person living through it.
• Contradiction is often more truthful than consistency. People can love someone and fear them, resent someone and protect them, hurt others while still believing themselves to be decent.
• What people do not say matters. Omissions, repetitions, deflections and sudden silences can reveal as much as the story being spoken aloud.
• Very few people believe they are the villain. Most of us build an internal logic around what we do. Understanding that logic is not the same as excusing it, but it is essential if you want to understand behaviour.

Across radically different lives, the same forces recur: betrayal, grief, shame, desire, fear, abandonment, jealousy, guilt, love, the need to belong, the need to be forgiven, the need to remain the good person in our own story.

One person's defining betrayal might be an abusive relative. Another's might be a parent who quietly chose someone else over them. For someone else, the central grief may be the death of a friend, the collapse of a marriage, or the loss of a childhood they only later realised they never really had.

The circumstances differ enormously.

The emotional architecture does not.

Working so closely with people at their most vulnerable moments has made me less interested in judging characters and much more interested in understanding the internal logic by which they justify themselves.

That is where I tend to find my characters too.

Writing as excavation

I have spent years doing professionally something writers attempt to do imaginatively: entering complicated lives, identifying the emotional logic beneath behaviour, separating what is essential from what is incidental, and understanding how people make sense of what has happened to them.

For me, writing is partly an act of excavation.

You strip away the explanation a character gives you, then the explanation beneath that, until you reach the thing they are actually protecting.

Working in social care has given me an unusual window into that process in real life. And perhaps more than anything, it has taught me that beneath radically different circumstances, we tend to orbit the same few human wounds.

And that, to me, is where stories begin.