Click for free blog updates via RSSCome play!
Tag Archives: characterization
Tapping into your character’s senses
Yesterday (and throughout this series), I mentioned that we have to focus on our characters and what they perceive when we detail the sensory information. We’ve talked about how to get into a character’s head (waaay back when), but sometimes seeing with our character’s eyes (or using their other senses) is a bit more challenging than just understanding what they’re thinking.
One thing that I’ve done to work on this (can you tell this is actually what I’m working on now?) is to go through each scene and write down all five senses for that character in that setting. As I do this, I ask myself questions about the character in the setting:
- Which of my character’s emotions or experiences would color this setting? Does the sandy desert remind her of her grandmother’s house, or him of Desert Storm? (Or make up new experiences, if you feel like it.) If you need a setting to have an impact, sensory data could trigger strong memories for your character. Or if you just want your character to have a strong emotional experience, sensory data from the setting might be the way to go. Emotional
- Is this a new setting for the character? If so, keep in mind your character’s personality and purpose there. Someone accustomed to danger might scan for the best escape route first. (And she won’t sit with her back to the door. Don’t even ask.) But if she’s there to meet a friend, looking for that friend will be a close second priority.
- Conversely, is this setting very familiar to the character? If, for example, it’s their home or workplace, they may not “experience” it anymore. So if you need to be in that character’s POV in that setting, focus only on what stands out. Most of us don’t know what our own house smells like (unless we’re the ones buying the air fresheners!), but we’ll notice the overripe garbage.
- In a familiar setting, can I have other people interact with the set? The other characters’ interactions with the POV/owner character’s furniture may suddenly draw her attention to the ratty patch on the arm of the couch where her cat sharpens its claws—or maybe the cat does that itself.
- Do we remain grounded in the setting? Do we go too long without referencing something concrete in the “real world” of the story, devolving into people talking in space? (That’s one of my big things to work on.) Note: we don’t have to redescribe the drywall, but even interacting with a prop keeps us from floating off into space.
- Do we remain grounded in the character? Kind of the opposite phenomenon—do we spend too much time on the description so that we kind of lose track of what the character is doing/thinking/feeling? (And thanks to Andrew for bringing this to mind in the comments!)
What do you think? How do you get into your characters’ senses?
Tomorrow, we’ll have more about picking which senses to focus on for your character!
Photo by Vestman
Are character arcs necessary?
After all this talk about character arcs, I was browsing around on an interesting screenwriting blog, and found an article kind of arguing against character arcs. So are character arcs necessary? The answer, of course, is it depends—and it depends on several factors.
In plot-driven fiction, for example, the characters’ growth and change aren’t what the story is about. Dirk Pitt, James Bond, and Indiana Jones see little, if any, character growth in each episode of their stories (aside from the new Bond movies, maybe). While they are memorable characters, and we root for them to win, we don’t care if they have a life-altering experience to become better people. We’re cool with them staying the way they are. The story focuses on their adventures rather than their experiences.
However, in character-driven fiction, the character arc is central. Reading this kind of fiction enables us the live character’s experiences and feelings, and those are at least as important to the story as the actual actions.
It also depends on the genre. Mysteries tend to be more plot driven. Action stories are usually more plot driven. Romances, especially single-title length ones, are usually more character driven.
Another consideration is whether the book will lead into a series (and if so, how long). If this is going to be a serial character, how many different lessons can s/he learn? It’s possible, of course, to do a metaarc—one that takes the character on a journey from the beginning to the end of the series (Harry Potter?)—but it will probably require considerable planning.
What do you think? Can you think of successful characters who don’t arc? Do you write characters who don’t arc?
Micro character arcs in sequels
Yesterday, we talked about character arcs within scenes, and we mentioned that there are two different ways to handle them. The first kind uses scene structure to bring about the change. The second kind of change, however, doesn’t rely on scene structure because it doesn’t happen in a scene—it happens in a sequel. The Sequel is what comes after the scene—the emotional response. However, it also has a structure that can help with this kind of character arc.
Bickham’s structure for the sequel is Emotion – Thought – Decision – Action (which leads to another scene). The Emotion is the initial response to the events of the scene and its Disaster. When the character moves past the initial emotion, they think through the events, their response and their options in the Thought phase. This ultimately leads to a Decision, which takes the character to another Action.
Not all the steps of the sequel are necessary. In fact, the sequel itself might not be necessary—depends on the pacing and whether the emotional reaction constitutes a change. But when the character is going through a major change, we can spend a little more time here. And this is where we motivate the next action.
When an emotional change in the sequel follows the full steps of the sequence, we know that there’s a logical progression of the events of the sequel. By moving through these steps, we can lead the characters and the readers through the steps of the change and create a compelling, convincing change.
For example, if we need our character to go from shocked after the last disaster to furious in the sequel, we start with that initial emotional response—the shock. We don’t have to spend a long time exploring the shock, especially if that’s the kind of reaction you’d expect in light of the disaster. Once we create a vivid picture of the shock (and that’s a toughie, since it’s characterized by the absence of feeling, really), we can give the character a minute to get her bearings again.
Once she’s had some time to recover, she’s ready for the Thought phase. Here we can explore exactly why she’s so surprised—because, say, this revelation is something that the hero could have told her. It’s something she would understand and would have even made her happy, if he had just told her, and he knew that—but he’s chosen to lie to her about it the whole time they’ve known one another.
And that can lead us to the Decision. The Decision can be about the coming Action and set up the next scene—or it can be a further decision about the emotional response. You know what? He should have told her. How dare he not? And if he could lie about that, what else about their relationship was a lie?
And now she’s mad.
What do you think? How have you handled drastic emotional changes in sequels?
Photo by Dan Foy
Micro character arcs in scenes
So far, we’ve looked at character arcs on a macro level—characters changing over the course of a story. At the beginning of the series, however, Deb pointed out that characters can also have arcs within a single scene, where they go from one emotion to another, possibly opposite, emotion.
Character emotions are always delicate things. It’s so easy as a writer to push the emotions a little harder than we should, so that they end up unnatural—especially in a delicate transition. Now, of course it’s always possible to use the events of the scene to create a very natural change in a character’s emotion—but it’s not the only way.
Jack Bickham delves into both kinds of changes in his book Scene & Structure. The first kind of change relies on external actions and scene structure. The basic structure of any scene, Bickham says, is Goal – Conflict – Disaster.
The Goal is the POV character’s goal at the start of the scene, for just that scene. (For a story and characters that feel purposeful and driven, have the character state the goal near the beginning of the scene.) The Conflict is what happens as the character pursues the Goal and meets resistance—dialogue, movement, pursuit, etc.
The Conflict builds to the climax of the scene—the Disaster, when the character’s goal is frustrated. Naturally, when the character is frustrated, s/he will have an emotional reaction—for example, she might go from hopeful or determined at the beginning of the scene to discouraged at the end.
So external events can obviously help to bring about a micro character arc. But there’s another way to show emotional change within a scene that we’ll look at tomorrow.
What do you think? How have you handled drastic emotional changes in scenes?
Photo by Tony Case
Posted in Technique
Tagged character arc, character arcs, characterization, scene, sequel
Comments Off
Creating Compelling Villains – Stephanie Black – The Book Academy
We’re still on break from our series on plotting to bring you notes from The Book Academy, a conference I attended last week. We’ll pick up with plotting tomorrow—including a guest post later this week!
In suspense, you have to have a villain. You have to have a person who is fighting against a protagonist.
Exercise #1—Write down a villain who stands out on some level to you—and why
Class answers:
- President Snow from Hunger Games? Description—smells like roses and blood
- Hannibal Lecter—creepy, without morals
- Brilliant manipulator
- Gollum—obsessed, internal conflict
- Darth Vader—layered, conflicted, simple appearance, memorable, willing to do what it takes to get his way
- Nicholas Nickleby’s villain—Heartless, but there’s a moment in his past where he chose darkness
- Voldemort
- Javert—thinks he’s good, convinced of morality
- Joker—flair for dramatic, feel emotional connection as killing, loved that connection
- Clooney the scourge from Redwall—legend of fearsomeness, backs it up, crazy
- Oliver Twist villain—utter disregard for reader’s sympathies
- David Copperfield villains—bad, love to hate
“You have a choice when you’re going to introduce a very evil character. You can dress a guy up with loads of ammunition, put a black Stetson on him, and say, ‘Bad guy. Shoot him.’ I’m writing about shades of evil. You have Voldemort, a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people’s suffering, and there are people like that in the world. But then you have Wormtail, who out of cowardice will stand in the shadow of the strongest person.” —JK Rowling
How compelling your villain is doesn’t depend on how creepy and freaky he is, but that he seems real to your protagonist, and as real as your protagonist to your reader. They must also fit your story. A cozy mystery probably doesn’t need Voldemort. A global thriller probably wouldn’t be very thrilling with the biddies from Arsenic and Old Lace.
We can also have multiple villains in same novel with multiple levels of villainy:
- Voldemort
- Bellatrix LaStrange
- Peter Pettigrew/Wormtail
- Draco Malfoy
- Severus Snape
Hints for creating villainous characters
In suspense fiction, plenty of people are causing trouble for your villain, but pick a primary villain. Find the main antagonist. Who’s your big guy? In mysteries, think about who this fight is really between.
Jack Bickham talks about how you must know whose story it is. (In her first novel, 250 single-spaced pages into it, she realized her story was going off in 3 different directions—she turned to Bickham). Don’t forget whose story it is. Who are we behind? Who are we rooting for? Who is our ball team?
On the flip side, whose story is this villainwise? Your protagonist has a story goal, something he wants from the beginning of the book. It’s important to him, important enough to fight for. It gives readers something to worry about (which is why they like reading mysteries in the first place). When you read a book with a story goal, you immediately start asking yourself story questions. Frodo must destroy the ring—will Frodo be able to destroy the ring?
In addition to your protagonist, your villain also needs to be goal-driven. He’s got something that he wants. When you’re picking a villain, you want it to be someone who will win or lose big depending on how the story plays out, just like the protagonist has a lot invested in whatever s/he is seeking. Winning and losing—if one wins, the other must lose.
Creating conflict in your novel
The last thing you want to do is give your protagonist an easy ride. Give him as much trouble as possible. If you answer the story question too quickly with a positive, the story’s over.
Shortest stories ever:
He always wanted her. And he got her.
She had to escape. And she did.
These complications are largely the job of the villain.
- Pick a good, strong primary villain. Someone who can really go head to head with the protagonist.
- Villain’s goal must clash with protagonist’s goal—so give one a goal and find a contrary goal for the other. This isn’t necessarily a direct opposition. Her current novel—protagonist’s story goal: heal the rift between her parents and her brother. This clashes with villain’s goal not because villain is set on destroying their family. His goal is to conceal a crime in his past (by killing someone and framing someone else—her brother). (Being accused of murder doesn’t sit real well with her parents, “who are strangely traditional in that way.”)
- What does my villain want?! What is important to him/her? A really compelling villain isn’t evil for evil’s sake or because he’s got the laugh down. Chances are he doesn’t think he’s evil. He’s got a reason for everything. Jack Bickham: Self-concept. Inside, we all have a mental picture of who we are, our opinions of ourselves. We try hard to maintain consonance with this inward picture and we will fight to hold onto it when this picture is challenged. Hard to identify it for ourselves. What does the villain think of himself?
- Usually villains are twisted on some level—his self-concept may be very different from how others view him. Ex: Zero in The Believer—he sees himself as someone who by virtue of lineage/intelligence, he has the right and responsibility to take over for the good of the nation. Doesn’t see himself as evil (though readers and other characters do). Villain in Fool Me Twice sees herself as a good mother. Have this in mind even if it doesn’t make it into print (especially if not in their POV).
Exercise #2—Write down a self-concept for a villain (one you’re working on)
Class responses:
- Believes he should be a leader
- Doesn’t believe in right/wrong
- Humanity has outlived its purpose, cleanse the world of this scourge
- (Possessed) Dark spirit protecting itself—self-preservation
- Religion—convinced of his own moral righteousness
- Sees the world crumbling around him—protect what he has and his fam
- Get justice for the wrongs he’s suffered (victim)
- Sees himself as a good guy
- The best at what he does and he knows it, and gets away with what he wants b/c people are scared of him—devolves into fatal stalking situation
Your main villain (amidst others if you desire)
- Give your villain some shading—make them somewhat sympathetic. Use their backstory, events taking place before the present of the story. What’s their history? Make villain more rounded, even if you don’t get it all in there.
Ex: Voldemort—what makes you sympathize with him a little: Abandoned, orphan, stuck out, teased. Doesn’t justify his actions, but helps us to see him as a little more human. What might make the reader relate to him a little bit? See him as a little sympathetic?
Ex: Darth Vader in episodes I-III—starts out as a good guy, through his flaws and downfall, he loses everything that he valued, then becomes a dark evil person.
Give them a little bit of good. Zero—loves his wife, affectionate toward her, wants to please her. Even villainous types aren’t totally detestable. What about them can we admire?
Exercise #3—with the last villain, write down something good/admirable about your villain or something in his/her past that might make him sympathetic
Class responses:
- (#5 above)—his parents disgusted at his parents, humans butcher his kind—thinks humans are no good
- (#6 above)—Mother deprived of rightful throne
- can’t die
- Wants to be a pillar of the community—wants to look good—funds schools
- Didn’t choose to be an addict
- Weakness/soft spot for kids.
- Hates weakness, but wants help people become better, lose their weaknesses
[Side note on this one: this is especially effective when you can combine this with their self-concept and have it directly relevant to their villany. For example, Snape is mean to Harry because in Harry he sees the image of the man who used to taunt him and destroy his self-concept. It wouldn't make much sense if James Potter were mean to Snape and Snape took it out on long-haul truck drivers.]
Round them out with regular traits (neither sympathetic nor evil).
We have to branch out a bit. As you’re creating a protagonist, you want to create a fresh, compelling invidividual character with his own personality—same for his villain. [A good villain makes a good protagonist even stronger, and vice versa.]
- Three necessary attributes for principle villain:
- Strong
- Smart
- Determined
He must be matched against the hero—a worthy opponent. Make him a worthy opponent—a battle with a wimp isn’t much of a battle. Your protagonist must stretch himself to defeat this guy. Doesn’t always mean villain is physically strong—psychologically, emotionally, mentally—a formidable opponent. He’s determined—what he wants, he must want it badly enough to not give up.
Bickham(?)—make sure your protagonist doesn’t quit and making it logical that he doesn’t quit. Ask yourself “Why doesn’t he just quit?”—compelling motivation to keep him going, keep fighting even when things get really rough. Villain who’s willing to keep battling to the end—don’t go all fuzzy at the end. Maybe pretend to, but don’t just give up!! [That's just unsatisfying!]
He doesn’t have to be invincible—you do want him defeated at the end. Suspense/thriller/mystery—must end with good triumphing over evil! Have him defeated in some measure by the protagonist.
Ex: woman pursuing bad guy to get her kidnapped kids back. Fight scene, villain pulls weapon about to use it—struck by lightning. [Unsatisfying again!]
Don’t have him defeated by wimpiness, giving up (himself), deus ex machina.
- Give your villain believable flaws and weaknesses. It’s okay if he makes mistakes—but make sure they’re credible mistakes. Something believable, credible for his character. His flaws may spring from his self-concept—thinks he’s so smart, he’s proud—underestimates protagonist.
Ex in The Believer—a reader for her publisher asked if her villain’s monologuing was believable? But according to his motivation, yes—if he’s so proud of himself and his win, he might monologue, to utterly devastate the hero. (And because he tells his plan, the protagonist can defeat him.)
- Give your villain a character arc—let him change throughout the course of the story. How does he grow and change? Don’t make him the same person on the last page as he was on page one.
Ex: one of her villain starts off not so bad, kind of mischievous, but by the end of the book she’s ready to kill.
Conclusion: You create compelling villains the same way you create compelling protagonists:
Make them real, make them rounded, give them a compelling story goal and believable flaws and weaknesses.
About the presenter
Stephanie Black is the author of The Believer, Fool Me Twice (winner of the 2008 Whitney Award for Best Mystery/Suspense) and the new release Methods of Madness. She. Is. Awesome. As per conference guidelines, I obtained written consent from Stephanie to blog the content of her presentation.
What do you think? What are your answers to the exercises? Who are your villains?
Photo credits: black cowboy hat—arbyreed; Wicked Queen—Loren Javier; Darth Vader—the Official Star Wars Blog; Villains—Anne the Librarian
Posted in Technique
Tagged characterization, compelling villains, stephanie black, villain, villains
19 Comments
Deep POV: the view from inside your character’s head
So how do we know how our characters think? Maybe you completed the character freewrite or interview exercises last week. Maybe you’ve filled out extensive character questionnaires. Maybe you only have a sketchy mental picture of a new character. No matter how well you know your character, you can help to make sure her thoughts—her voice, her feelings—come through in your writing in what she notices, how she talks/thinks about it and how she feels about it.
What they notice
My friend Annette posted the other day about “lenses.” She tells how on a visit to New York with her mother and sisters, they were each drawn to attractions that appealed to their personal interests—things that the rest of the family didn’t even notice.
Personal interests for your characters might arise from simply the need to “round them out” and make them more full, or they can influence the plot (she hates baseball? Fantastic—he’s a semi-pro shortstop.). When you’re just starting to design a character, even one simple interest can help to create deeper characterization.
Does your character have a passion for painting? Collect baseball cards and rare comics? Live for the dance? If not, why not? Everyone has something he loves&hobbies, interests, even their occupation. The architect might admire the layout of the museum while her dabbling-in-interior-decorating sister is more focused on the color scheme. Their wannabe-artist father, of course, is there for the art, while their hobby-egyptologist mother wants to hurry up and get to the mummies.
Our personal interests often filter what we see around us. The father in the above family might be the only one who really notices the paintings, but he barely glances at the dessicated bodies. These interests also influence our perceptions of those things that we do manage to notice.
Character vocabulary
A character’s personal interests, hobbies and especially profession not only filter what they notice, but the words they use to describe it—from the scenery to the events to the other people in the story.
I, for example, can’t tell a sloop from a schooner. But someone who spends every weekend on his sailboat is going to have a full vocabulary for not just every type of ship, but the masts, the rigging, the knots, the . . . other stuff.
Let’s say that character identifies himself, essentially, as a sailor, despite his day job in sales (*snicker*). When he meets a beautiful woman, is he going to think of her using the vocabulary of fashion? He might like the cut of her jib (that’s a sailing term trying to be a play on “fashion” and “cut,” not an innuendo), but unless she’s wearing a spinnaker (another sailing term—a sail. Very Little Mermaid.), I doubt he cares much about her dress.
Instead, he might use more . . . you know, “nautical” terms—the vocabulary of his passion. At this point, I’ve made it fairly obvious that I know nothing about sailing, but for lack of anything better, he might describe how she moves through the clumps of people like a cutter slicing through the waves. She could have eyes the color of the sea, hair the same shade as the burnished mahogany fittings of his cabin. (Okay, this dude is really starting to wax poetic for a guy, but maybe the sea does that to some people.)
The more parallels our character can draw to the things around him and his passions, the more likely he is to like those things.
Character attitudes
The character’s attitude toward the things and people around him is another important aspect of his character—and his voice. Perhaps most importantly, character attitudes are a strong characterization tool. When we see how someone feels about the world around him, we really get to know him. If he recoils at a church and quotes Karl Marx to himself (“Religion is the opiate of the masses.”), we know him more deeply than if the author just told us that “Jimmy hated religion.”
Again, his interests, hobbies and profession can influence this heavily. Our sailor friend might think a man whose only maritime experience was on a ferry to be a troglodyte. Put your 
character working in an urban environment. Freeway tunnels are the epitome of all that’s wrong with the city—they’re closed in, suffocating, dark, crowded, and most of all, nothing like the freedom of sailing, the open ocean, the wind in your face.
On the other hand, he loves taking his lunch on the observation deck of his building—when the wind is right, you get a breeze from the sea. He has an immediate affinity for people who strike him as sailors. And your Nautica bathroom decor? Well, you decide—he could either love the touch of sailing in your home, or he could think you’re a total poseur.
The slob might not even see the pile of clean (or are they dirty?) socks on the floor, simply walking past. But her neat-freak roommate is sure to notice—and she sees whether they’re clean, dirty, or a mix of the two—and then what does she think of her slovenly roommate? (Hello, Odd Couple!) If the neat-freak is a housekeeper or maybe a professional organizer, does she have a specific term for someone like her roomie?
What other ways can we incorporate and convey our characters’ voices?
Photo credits: 3D glasses—Harry Fodor; Sailboat—Horton Group; Anchor print—mckenna71
Posted in Technique
Tagged attitude, character attitudes, character passions, character vocabulary, character voice, characterization, Deep POV, lenses, perspective, point of view, pov
Comments Off
Perfection isn’t appealing
Sympathetic characters are absolutely vital to good (readable!) fiction. We’ve already mentioned that two things combined make characters sympathetic: strength and struggles.
But if a little strength and a little struggling are good things, then why not a lot of strength or a lot of struggles? Isn’t a super strong character going to be even more sympathetic than one who has some problems? Or maybe piling on the pain endlessly will make a character even more sympathetic?
Okay, you guessed it—just like a character who just gets more and more bad stuff piled on, a character who’s easily and confidently stronger than every challenge he faces isn’t really sympathetic.
Not by Strength Alone
A character who’s just a bundle of strengths has no struggles. He takes everything in stride, and everything continually works out for him. Here’s why:
Jeremy stared at the flames leaping from the third-story windows. There were three children unaccounted for. He took a deep breath and barreled through the open doorway, up the stairs, around corner after corner. The distant cries for help finally reached his ears over the cacophonous crackling. The children—trapped behind a locked door.
He threw his full weight against the door—it splintered at the massive force. He scooped up the children, two in his right, one his is left, and ran back down the stairs.
Jeremy gasped for a cool breath as he burst through the doorway to the outside. The headmistress held out her arms for a child and he held out one of them, smudged and bedraggled but alive. She clutched the boy to her chest, her eyes shining with admiration. “You’re our hero,” she said.
Is Jeremy strong? Brave? Courageous? Yeah, he’ll be getting a key to the city for his heroism. But interesting? Sympathetic? Kind of—but I think most people would like to think they’d be willing to help someone in danger. Everything works out really easily for Jeremy. He’s strong enough, he’s brave enough, and doggone it, people like him. I mean, um, he’s fast enough, and he never really doubts his ability to perform an extraordinary feat.
Ever notice how much dang kryptonite there seems to be floating around Superman’s story world? It’s almost more prevalent than air. Why do movie makers and screenwriters always dig up more of this stuff? Because watching a totally invincible man of steel defeat a dastardly enemy is entertaining for about four seconds. After that, it’s predictable—heck, it’s trite.
Try this one instead:
What was he doing in here? He was no hero. And now the heat and the smoke made it impossible to walk, to see, to think.
He crawled up the stairs, ducking his head down to the treads to catch a breath of oxygen as he groped along through the smoke. He could hear them screaming—for him, for anyone who could save them.
Could he?
Timothy reached out for the next riser, but found nothing—the second floor. With one hand on the wall, he made his way to the first door. The doorknob was cool. Safe to open. He pushed the door, but the child’s cries remained distant.
He clambered across the hall, gasping in the inch of hot airspace above the carpet. Another door—another cool doorknob. He opened the door and the screams for help grew louder. With a last breath of the burning oxygen, Timothy launched himself toward where the bed should be. He felt the sheets and seized a tiny wrist.
The child clung to his chest, Timothy supporting his weight with one hand whenever he could as they stumbled back to the stairs. But Timothy miscalculated—that first step was so much further than it seemed, but suddenly there was no floor beneath him and they tumbled, father and son, down the staircase.
Sprawled in a heap at the base of the staircase, he couldn’t take time to inventory their injuries. It couldn’t be that much further—when had their house gotten this big? Yanking the boy to his feet, Timothy willed his unwilling limbs to push back through the black and the heat, promising his protesting lungs fresh air if his body could just get them outside.
And then they were falling—falling? The front door—the front steps. The heat still blinded him, but suddenly his coughs were punctuated by gasps of cool night air as he landed on the pavement.
Do you feel the triumph now? Are you rooting for our hero to get through his difficulties? Note that Tim’s challenges aren’t as physically daunting as Jeremy’s were. Timothy doesn’t have to break down a door or carry out three orphans to impress us—he just has to overcome difficulties and insecurities.
Just like a character who’s all struggles is static, a character who’s all strength has nowhere to grow. We read to see that character growth—and that character growth is where we become sympathetic with those characters.
What do you think? Have you ever read (or written) a character that was just too strong? Or is there no such thing?
Image credit: Stefanie L.
Posted in Technique
Tagged characterization, strength, struggles, sympathetic characters, sympathy
Comments Off
How to pile on the pain
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
Posted in Technique
Tagged characterization, strength, struggles, sympathetic characters, sympathy
Comments Off
