Tag Archives: James N. Frey

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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Technique

The noble goal

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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

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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

Techniques for sympathetic characters

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This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Creating sympathetic characters

As I mentioned before, I’ve been using the term “sympathetic characters” as shorthand for “characters whom the reader can identify with.” Creating reader identification is the ultimate goal here, because, as James N. Frey says in How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II, a character the reader can identify with is the key to creating the fictive dream—to immersing the reader into the world of the story (not to mention the mind of the character). And in that book, Frey outlines specific techniques to create that reader identification.

Sympathy

Frey goes so far as to say that you have to make the reader feel sorry for the character. I don’t know that I’d say that—but I would say that you have to let the reader see your character struggling. That essentially what Frey conveys—let the reader see the character as lonely, disadvantaged, put upon, sad, confused, unpopular, unfulfilled, imperiled, etc. As Frey concludes:

Sympathy is the doorway through which the reader gains emotional access to a story. Without sympathy, the reader has no emotional involvement in the story. (9-10)

And sympathy is a stepping stone to the next technique:

Identification

The next step is getting the reader to support the character’s goals and aspirations. While a character doesn’t have to be admirable, Frey stresses, the easiest way to get readers to support a character’s goal is to make sure their goal is noble.

And as a side note, it’s good to make that goal clear. It doesn’t have to be the character’s ultimate goal of the story right off the bat, either—but getting that in there pretty soon seldom hurts.

Once you’ve got the reader on board with your character’s noble goals, draw them in deeper with:

Empathy

Now we want to get the reader feeling what the character’s feeling—we want to instill in the reader the same emotions and responses. And, Frey says:

You do it by using the power of suggestion. You use sensuous and emotion-provoking details that suggest to the reader what it is like to be [the character] and to suffer what he is suffering. In other words, you create the story world in such a way that the readers can put themselves in the character’s place. . . .

You can win empathy for a character by detailing the sensuous details in the environment: the sights, sounds, pains, smells, and so on that the character is feeling‐the feelings that trigger his emotions. (19)

This doesn’t mean that every sad sack character should be trudging through the pouring rain (to the courthouse to try to win his freedom from a wrongful conviction)—though it might help. It does mean, however, that it helps for the character to take notice of his environs, and for them to mirror (or, possibly, contrast or mock) his internal emotional state.

But wait! There’s more! And the last step to fully transporting the reader is one we’ve mentioned here before:

Inner conflict

It’s not enough to have the characters struggling against some external forces (to gain sympathy)—we must also see them battling internally. This is the last step here because we need the readers to fully support the character’s goals and feel what they’re feeling before an internal moral debate will matter to the reader.

But once we have the readers feeling what the characters are feeling, then we can use internal conflict to fully transport the reader into the character’s head and the world of the story.

Frey’s book How to Write a Damn Good Novel, II was the one of the best resources I found for detailing the actual techniques of fostering reader’s sympathy for characters (and if this all seems very abstract here, check out the book—it’s replete with examples to make his points clearer, as well as his full arguments, which are much better stated than my summaries).

As I mentioned before, “Sympathy without Saintliness” by Alicia Rasley is another great resource—an online article with a few exercises at the end to help you increase your character’s sympathetic factor. Also, Julie Write posted an “unlovable character checklist” of factors you can use to get your readers onboard with even the most unlovable characters over on Writing on the Wall.

What do you think? How have you striven to create characters your readers can understand and cheer for?

Photo credits: Name tag—Sanja Gjenero; “Rain” (waterfall)—Flávio Takemoto

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