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Why I love Burn Notice

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This entry is part 9 of 11 in the series Creating sympathetic characters

Yes, it’s cool and it’s glossy and it’s filled with attractive people. And guns and explosions and spy work and secret undercover coolness. And hilarity.

But that’s not why I love Burn Notice. (Those things don’t hurt, mind you.)

Michael Westen of Burn NoticeI love Burn Notice because of the characters. Namely one Michael Westen. (And no, I don’t mean Jeffrey Donovan, though he is quite attractive. I mean Michael Westen.) When USA says “Characters welcome,” they mean it.

Michael is a complex character—he’s terrible at interpersonal relationships. He does bad things. And though he wouldn’t talk about it and takes no pleasure in it, he has killed. He’s not above blackmail or letting the bad guys kill each other.

Though he’d prefer not to have to deal with them, Michael loves his mom and his brother and does all he can to protect them. In a recent episode (“End Run“), Michael was blackmailed into working for a bad guy because said bad guy threatened his brother. The writers even made it so that working for the bad guy wasn’t all that bad—he didn’t want a nuke, just a particular electronic interface. “People will go on killing each other in little wars all around the globe, whether or not you steal it,” he says. “The only difference is how much money I make while they do it.” To show he’ll make good on his threat, the bad guy even shoots Michael’s brother in the arm.

It wouldn’t be so wrong, then, would it? It would save his brother’s life (before he bleeds out, too), and it wouldn’t cost the world much.

Michael Westen building a cantennaMichael breaks into the office, gets the weapon and—sees a photo of a family. With kids. While that reminder helps him put together some of the scant evidence they’ve compiled about this bad guy, I think it also reminds him of the greater good. “I’m not handing over a nuke to save one life,” he tells the bad guy, “even if it is my brother’s.”

Michael is a great character because he’s strong—physically, yes, but more importantly, he’s extremely smart/savvy (mental strength, if you will). He even verges on too strong—as a blacklisted spy/former black ops soldier, he knows just what to do in any given situation. But he has weaknesses—the classics: children; his family; oh, and the fate of the entire world. Most importantly, he struggles.

And this time, he struggled because the choice was hard—it wasn’t save or destroy the world (or save the world, sacrifice integrity), it was save his brother or some small number of unknown people—possibly no one. The talented writers made it seem no great sin if Michael had decided to trade the weapon for his brother’s life. And he almost did.

But in the end, he didn’t. And that’s what I love most about Burn Notice.

Who are your favorite television characters? Why?

You can watch the full episode on Hulu until July 30.

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Technique

Sympathetic characters: more resources

This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series Creating sympathetic characters

This month, we’ve learned about creating sympathetic characters—giving them strength and struggles, balancing each of those elements, and specific techniques for making our readers identify with even unlovable characters.

If you want to read more on creating sympathetic characters, here are the absolute best, most useful resources I’ve found:

  • Sympathy without Saintliness, an online article by author/editor Alicia Rasley. Alicia takes us through some of the most beloved characters in literature capture our sympathies, as well as dispelling some common authorial misconceptions about how we can make our readers like our characters.
  • How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II by James N. Frey, specifically chapter one, which shows internal and external techniques to create deeper and deeper sympathy in your readers (which we’ve discussed here briefly).
  • The Unlovable Character, a blog post on Writing on the Wall Blog by Julie Wright with an exhaustive list of techniques and characteristics to make readers love even unlovable characters (which she graciously expanded with more examples for us here).

[Update: here’s a great quick overview on techniques that do and don’t work for character sympathy.]

By request, in July we’re going to celebrate summer by taking a plunge in the deep end of POV. (Don’t you just love the clichés?) This is a great way to follow up a series on characters, since we have to know our characters well to get into deep point-of-view, and since we’ve been working all June to help our readers lose themselves within our characters.

What resources have you found that helped you improve your characters? What would you like to read about in deep POV?

Image credit: Svilen Mushkatov

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Technique

H is for Homo fictus

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This entry is part 11 of 11 in the series Creating sympathetic characters

In fiction, we strive for realism. Even if our characters are using wands or warp drives, we still want them to sound and act like real people.

You know, sort of.

In How to Write a Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey points out that fictional characters aren’t quite the same as real people:

Ficitonal characters—homo fictus—are not . . . identical to flesh-and-blood human beings—homo sapiens. One reason for this is that readers wish to read about the exceptional rather than the mundane. Readers demand that homo fictus be more handsome or ugly, ruthless or noble, vengeful or forgiving, brave or cowardly, and so on, than real people are. . . .

Homo fictus is an abstraction meant to project the essence, but not the totality, of homo sapiens. (1-2)

One of the chief ways homo fictus differs from homo sapiens is that homo fictus must make sense. Says Frey, “Homo fictus . . . may be complex, may be volatile, even mysterious, but he’s always fathomable. When he isn’t, the reader closes the book, and that’s that” (2) .

Another big turn off is unrealistic dialogue—dialogue that doesn’t sound natural at all, or dialogue that sounds too much like real life (i.e. boring!).

We all fall prey to these sins sometimes. And sometimes we try to justify them with the argument that they’re not just realistic, they’re real. That’s not a good enough excuse. As Nathan Bransford puts it,

Occasionally I’ll point out dialogue or events that aren’t working, and someone will protest, "But this is how people actually talk," or "This actually happened."

Writing isn’t about capturing real life as it actually happens. We have, well, real life for that.

Instead, writers have to elevate life and add spices and all the rest. Writers interpret real life, elevate it, reorder events, and serve up something perfectly balanced and ready for public consumption.

While we want to have the appearance of reality, we don’t really want an exact copy of it in our fiction. In real life, things don’t make sense, people do crazy things, conversations meander and fizzle out without saying much, and causation and purpose in the events of the world elude us. “Fixing” those things is one of the big benefits of reading fiction.

What do you think? How else are fiction and reality different?

Photo by Nadia

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