It’s been a long time since we talked about creating sympathetic characters, but one of the timeless techniques for character sympathy came back to me last night. We were watching one of our favorite shows, which happens to be a game show. The opening of the show always features short biographies of the four competitors, wherein they almost always predict their ultimate victory and gloat about how much better they are than the competition (whom they’ve never met).

I was all set to really dislike one of last night’s competitors after the usual boasting in her introduction—and then they asked her what she’d do with the prize money ($50,000). She planned to put a downpayment on a home in Brooklyn.

Okay, so that’s not stunning or anything—owning a home has always been part of the American dream. But she didn’t just want a home for the sake of fulfilling the picket-fences plan that’s been programmed into us—she wanted to be able to buy a home in a good area of Brooklyn so her daughter could go to the best school in the city.

BAM! I was on her side in a flash. I was all ready to root against her—until she had a noble goal.

Note that this goal is still kind of self-centered, and not for the betterment of society or anything. But because it’s focused on another person—especially a child (what can I say? I’m a parent, too)—it still helps that person appear sympathetic.

And if it can work on real people, it should work on fictional people. In How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II, James N. Frey argues that a noble goal is key to developing reader sympathy with characters. We need to have a reason to root for the character and hope for his success. Even a despicable degenerate can win readers over if we can sympathize with his goal.

What do you think? What are some examples (from your books or books you’ve read) of characters you didn’t like but still rooted for?

Photo by Robb North

So we’ve talked about the methods of conveying backstory—but we also need to hit on the purposes of backstory. Generally, I see two main uses for backstory: to explain why the character is the way he is (characterization) and does the things he does (motivation). Personally, I think using backstory for characterization is the weaker of the two reasons—but both come with caveats.

It seems like backstory in characterization is usually used to try to make us feel sympathy with the character. The errors can run either way. In “Sympathy without Saintliness,” editor and author Alicia Rasley lists several common faults in trying to create character sympathy—and backstory is two of them:

4) Giving the protagonist a lot of heroic backstory. Yeah, he was a big hero in the war. Yeah, she saved a lot of lives during that epidemic. But that was then. This is now. Backstory is just background– the character exists right now, and what he/she does now is what’s important. It might work if now he/she is burned out by all the heroics, self-doubting, feeling like an impostor… oops. Now we’re getting into the fun stuff…. hang on to that thought.

5) Giving the protagonist miserable backstory. This is often done in order to excuse some unsympathetic behavior or attitude [and is also a common technique to try to make villains sympathetic]. Yeah, he hates women, but it’s because his mother abandoned him! And his foster mother beat him! And his aunt framed him for murder! And his first girlfriend trapped him into marriage by getting pregnant! And…

Gag me.

Maybe we’re just hitting a nerve here with me, but frankly, I’m so tired of seeing that in fiction that instead of feeling that desired tug at the heart strings, I roll my eyes when I read about how he’s too short and her mother never, ever loved her. I know a lot of people who’ve been through bad times: abuse, living on the street, loss, grief. None of them automatically became fractured protagonists or villains. Geez, if these characters are going to act a certain way, let them take responsibility! Don’t just blame everyone else—that character made a choice somewhere along the way that made them into this person. (Possible exception: the character’s journey is about learning to take responsibility for his/her choices and actions.)

Alicia puts it better than I can: “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. There’s also that ‘authenticity’ problem. If we lose the sense that this is a whole person, if we think the author just layered all these past traumas on, we won’t believe in the protagonist.”

We don’t want our stories or our characters to be trapped in the past. We need to remember to focus on the story. As Mystery Man on Film said:

What happens in the past, off screen, good or bad, does not affect sympathy. It’s what we see the character do in the present that determines how much we will or will not care about that character.

Backstory can definitely influence how our characters are and act—they had to come from somewhere!

But that’s not the only problem with backstory and characterization. If we use backstory as the primary way to build character sympathy, we’ll probably have to stop the present story to wedge in a long story about our character’s terrible childhood. We run the risk of boring our readers right out of caring about our characters. We need to focus on the scene—and story—at hand to find a way to get our readers caring.

What do you think? What’s the right way to use backstory for characterization?

Photo by Margarit Ralev

In the unlikely event that you’re not already reading the masterful blog of literary agent Nathan Bransford, I seriously recommend it. He’s a great resource for learning all about literary agents—what they do, how to get them, how not to annoy them and inadvertently sabotage your writing career with an ill-fated rhetorical question.

And apparently he’s also a wonderful human being, because instead of just being super kind to writers, he’s spending next week volunteering in a South American orphanage. No joke. Since he didn’t want his blog to lie fallow, he called for guest bloggers for next week. Out of over two hundred and fifty entries, guess who was one of the chosen five?

I know, can you believe it? (Um, me, guys. It was me.) So be sure to subscribe to Nathan’s blog and keep an eye out for five award-winning posts next week.

In the meantime, we’ll continue with our series on deep POV (though if my post runs on a Tuesday or Thursday, we’ll rearrange the schedule to accommodate that). And in other news, I’ve assembled our series on creating character sympathy into a free PDF guide.

Many thanks to Nathan, and I’m looking forward to the guest posts there as well as our continuing series here.