One of the first techniques we master in creating sympathetic characters is knowing that characters have to have problems. And they have to be major problems—something that they’ll really struggle with, things that appear insurmountable.

The temptation, then, can be to take that to the extreme. If some suffering makes our characters sympathetic, doesn’t a lot of suffering make them even more sympathetic?

Not always. Sometimes, as they say, more is just more.

One of the ways we try to show characters suffering to help build sympathy is through their backstory. We show them growing up, or use flashbacks and memories to show the injustices they’ve suffered. His father was always at work, his mother denied him jelly on his peanut butter sandwiches, his first girlfriend dumped him for a jerk, his first wife cheated on him, his boss doesn’t recognize his work, even his dog doesn’t appreciate him.

But this simply isn’t enough. In How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey puts it strongly:

A character can be fully-rounded yet be too passive, too mamby-pamby. Characters who can’t act in the face of their dilemmas, who run away from conflict who retreat and suffer without struggling, are not useful to you [as a writer]. They are static, and most of them should die an untimely death before they ever appear in the pages of your novel and ruin everything. (6)

“A passive victim doesn’t struggle– just suffers,” as Alicia Rasley puts it. “Defeat isn’t sympathetic. It’s pathetic. . . . While we want to sympathize with the characters, we don’t want them to be victims so battered by past events that they don’t actually live in the present.”

So it’s not really just that our characters struggle—with past or present events. What really matters is how the characters react. They’re not indifferent to their struggles—they definitely need to feel the pain. But they’re also not self-pitying or whining about them—or, worst of all, passively dwelling on and submitting to them and even more injustice for no apparent reason. As Frey puts it:

Whenever a reader experiences profound empathy with a character, it is because the character is in the throes of intense inner conflict. A character may be in the most pathetic straits in the history of literature, but if he has no inner conflict, the only emotional response the writer can expect from the reader is pity. (36-37)

And pity is not our goal! Our characters have to show that inner strength that we’ve admired from the first. They have to be able to lift their heads after the wickedest defeat and say “I’ll never go hungry again!” (Or, you know, something original and pertinent to your story 😉 .)

At what point do you say too many struggles are just too much? Have you ever stopped reading a book because the hero/ine was too fixated with the past, or too passive, or just an all-around sad sack?

Photo by Margarit Ralev