A significant difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is that a sociopath still has a conscience. They are much more fun to write about because you can let their conscience torment them. On the other hand, a psychopath views everything and everyone as just a thing for him or her to play with for their entertainment. You can all too easily overwhelm your reader with gruesome details, and they’ll stop reading. I remember when I was getting my MFA seeing that happen. We would submit our writings in a workshop setting in one week, and then the next week, the rest of the workshop would critique your writing. One of the students in the workshop was a mental health professional. She wrote a scene of a young person killing kittens. I had to force myself to read it and was surprised that everyone reacted to it. The writing was excellent, but it made you sick to your stomach to read. The moderator of the workshop was a professional writer, and he asked the critical question, “How could she have let the reader know this young person was a psychopath without detailing the killings?”
Someone asked the mental health professional why she had written the scene. She said it was because a psychopath who kills animals can turn into a person who kills people. She wanted the reader forewarned about this character. The solution the workshop came up with took only one sentence. Another character could ask the psychopath who killed the kittens. The psychopath could answer, “I did it just to listen to their tiny meows stop.” It would show the character had no conscience and viewed everything as a plaything for him or her. Some felt even that single sentence would turn the reader off.
The workshop decided that psychopaths are very difficult to write about without losing your reader. If there’s a series of brutal murders, someone else can mention they are looking for someone with no conscience. The psychopath can reveal themselves by something as simple as a lie with no feeling of remorse. Psychopaths can be too brutal to detail their most egregious acts on the page.
