How to portray a character who has mood swings?
The protagonist of my trilogy-in-progress suffers from a serve case of Borderline Personality Disorder. Among his symptoms are continually splitting, unstable self-image, chronic feelings of emptiness, promiscuity, distrust of others, impulsivity and body dysmorphia (worsened by the fact that he's ashamed by magical markings all over his body and his (TV Tropes link warning!) lacking stature, even though many characters (TV Tropes link warning!) find him attractive in spite of them.
However, one aspect of BPD I'm struggling to portray in believable light is the intense emotional outbursts that the protagonist experiences through the story without him coming across as an inconsistently written character. I fear many readers unfamiliar with BPD's many nuances will simply write off my protagonist as a histrionic arsehole, or that I may get dinged for demonizeing mental illness.
How do I portray the thoughts and feelings of a mood-swing character with BPD in an accurate and sensitive manner?
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Diagnosis is hard; mirror mood with style
Even with the increased sensibility of our times towards these conditions, I would still have a hard time discerning a person with BPD from a random attention-seeking drama queen. Unless you clearly state that your character has a medical condition, or mention such a possibility at some point, a medically untrained reader like me may completely miss this point.
That being said, there are some stylistic tools that can help you portray the situation. The idea is that the narrator changes both the style and the depiction of the world to reflect the character's mood. You do it subtly, but it will give the reader the unconscious cue that will help relate to the MC. Note that this works for first person POV as well as third person.
My suggestion is to adapt the choice of words to the mood that the character is in at that moment of the narration. If MC is happy, use positive sentences, remark positive elements in the surroundings. If the MC is thoughtful, lengthen your sentences, focus on the inner thoughts of the characters, ignore what happens around then. If MC is angry, use superlatives, short sentences, rough words, a raw and uncouth style.
In this way you will not need to always show what the MC is doing or saying:
(happy) it was a bright and warm morning. Birds were chirping from the magnolia trees. The flowers were a lovely pink vault against the sky, like a fragrant monument to spring. And the bees were bathing in pollen. (Sudden change to angry) The ugly buzzing stingers. Roaming free. Dangerous and unrepentant. MC hated them. Hated their noise. Their look. Their squishy juices.
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You portray the mood-swings of a character with BPD believably in the same way that you portray any other emotion of any other character believably –
by motivating the emotions.
The mood-swings of persons with BPD aren't random but triggered by outside events and motivated by internal thoughts, memories, needs, fears, and so on. For example, when a person with BPD reacts to their loved one wanting to go to a party with a dramatic outburst of jealousy, hatred, and self-degradation, this is caused by that person's fear of loss, ambivalence towards their loved one, and their low self-esteem.
How exactly the internal process works in your character is something you will have to make up (depending on the needs of your story) or research (looking at case studies in psychological publications) and write in whatever way fits your narrative style and target audience.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47180. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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