do you have any tips for me as somebody who wants to (accurately) write a character with NPD?
My best piece of advice would be to avoid villainizing the characters NPD and more so the actions they commit if they're a more flawed deep rooted character, do some moderate research into NPD as it's a spectrum with everyone's experience being vastly different. I'll provide some resources below:
A very good YouTube channel that I send people in order to understand NPD on less of a superficial level is Heal NPD, by Dr. Ettensohn. It's a channel with a psychologist that focuses on the treatment of NPD and narcissistic traits. He also discusses the way that we can avoid pathologizing NPD and how we can come to better understand it. He also has the Heal NPD website, if you're interested.
Narcissism is different for everyone so not everyone's NPD will look uniform, keep that in mind while writing the character. I'd also recommend reading some testimonials from narcissistic people on the r/NPD subreddit, as there's more stuff there than I'd argue there is on tumblr and the people are very generous and there's some good stuff if you use the search function to answer some of your questions if you need to be more specific.
I hoped this answered your question. Thank you 🫶.
