More than half a century ago, I studied psychology at university. I was fascinated by it, particularly by the questions that are much easier to ask than to answer. Why do people behave as they do? How well do we understand our own motives? Why might two people respond quite differently when faced with apparently similar circumstances?
I didn't become a psychologist. Life took me in another direction, although my fascination with human behaviour never entirely disappeared. History was another longstanding interest, something I pursued through reading, travelling and visiting the places where events had unfolded.
When I began writing historical fiction, I hadn't anticipated just how closely those two interests would become connected, or where the process of creating fictional characters might eventually lead me.
My first novel, Unseen Souls, grew out of the South Wales Valleys where I had grown up and where generations of my family had lived and worked. Writing it became, in part, a journey into a world connected to my own family history, but one that has largely disappeared.
The novel followed ten principal characters whose lives gradually intersected. I was interested not simply in what happened to them, but in how their circumstances influenced the choices they made, how they responded to adversity and what consequences followed. Looking back, I can see that questions about human behaviour were already finding their way into my fiction, although I wasn't consciously returning to the psychology I had studied so many years earlier.
Then, while sitting in the library at University College Bangor, I found myself wondering what intellectual life might have been like there towards the end of the nineteenth century.
It was one of those passing thoughts that could easily have led nowhere. Instead, it eventually gave rise to Professor Owain Morgan, Chair of Mental and Moral Science at the fictional University College Morlan, and the central character in The Silence of the White Shadow.
In Owain, two of my oldest interests had come together.
The late nineteenth century was a particularly interesting period in which to place him. Psychology was beginning to emerge as a discipline in its own right, although it remained closely connected with philosophy, physiology and questions concerning character, conscience and moral responsibility.
I began reading William James, Alexander Bain and G. H. Lewes, alongside philosophers whose ideas continued to influence Victorian thinking. One book suggested another, one question led to the next, and gradually what had begun as research for a fictional character became something I was pursuing for its own sake.
There was an important difference from the last time I had studied psychology. I had no syllabus to follow, no examinations to prepare for and no qualification to obtain. I could spend an afternoon following an idea that might turn out to have little relevance to the novel, simply because I found it interesting.
And the more I read, the more questions I began asking about Owain himself.
Creating a fictional professor was one thing. Understanding the intellectual world that had shaped him was quite another. What would he have been taught? Which thinkers might have influenced him? How would he have approached questions about character and human conduct at a time when psychology was still finding its identity?
Those questions eventually led me to create The History of University College Morlan, complete with its colleges, academics and intellectual traditions. What had begun as the setting for a novel gradually acquired an existence of its own.
But I still wanted to understand Owain more fully.
I had imagined him as a professor whose particular interest was the relationship between character, motive and conduct. Yet I found myself wondering what someone with those interests might actually have written, and how he might have developed his own understanding of human behaviour.
That curiosity led to The Morgan Papers, a collection of fictional lectures, essays, notes and reflections attributed to Owain. Through them, I began exploring questions about the formation of character, the influence of circumstances, the ways people understand or deceive themselves about their motives, and the contradictions that can exist between what we believe and how we behave.
There is something slightly peculiar about writing the unpublished papers of a man who never existed. Yet what began as an exercise in understanding a fictional character became an opportunity to explore ideas I had first encountered as a young man, alongside others I had never encountered at all.
That is something I hadn't anticipated when I began writing fiction. I had assumed that the research would help me tell the stories I wanted to tell, and of course it has. But the stories have also prompted questions that have taken me well beyond anything I originally intended to investigate.
Sometimes a historical detail leads me towards a subject I know very little about. At other times, a character's actions make me question whether I properly understand the motives I've attributed to them. I might begin by looking for something quite specific and find myself, several hours later, absorbed in an entirely different subject.
Not everything I discover finds its way into a novel though. Much of it probably never will. But I've come to enjoy that aspect of writing almost as much as the writing itself. What surprises me most is that an interest I had largely set aside for decades had never entirely disappeared. Other things had taken precedence, but the questions themselves had stayed with me.
I couldn't have known, sitting in psychology lectures more than fifty years ago, that one day I would create a fictional academic living in North Wales in the 1890s, or that understanding him would lead me back to some of the questions I had been asking then, but probably never truly appreciated. Nor am I trying to recover an interest exactly as I left it. I'm older, my perspective is different, and I approach those questions through history, fiction and a lifetime of observing people rather than through a university syllabus.
Owain Morgan didn't teach me to ask these questions. I was asking them long before he existed. What he did, though, was give me a reason to start asking them again.