Bad Emotions Made Good

When writing a story you may find that the good guy has access to a limited range of emotions compared to the bad guy.

Basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, etc.) are easy enough to evoke, but more complex or darker feelings tend to be more difficult to justify.

For example, if the hero’s best friend wins the lottery, a good guy would react how? If he’s a decent human being, probably by being pleased for his friend.

If a friend of the villain—usually a not so wholesome individual—wins the lottery, then the response can be more varied. Pleased (because he plans to ‘share’ in the wealth), jealousy, resentment, maybe even plans to steal the money. These darker thoughts are often more interesting and offer more ideas for where to take a story.

While making your main character evil but still likeable is a very hard thing to achieve, that doesn't mean you can’t give them (and the reader) the chance to experience the darker side of their personality. 

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Tertiary Characters Have Their Own Issues

In the last post I talked about contentious issues and how they can be used to grab a reader’s attention. But sometimes issues can sneak into a story without the writer being aware of them, and in a way that can reflect very badly on the story and on the writer.

The main character is usually well defined, as are the core set of supporting characters, but there are a whole host of other smaller parts, from the neighbour with the occasional line of dialogue to the girl at the coffee shop who never says a word, that populate a fictional world and give it a life beyond the two or three people that really matter to the story.

And it is these small, seemingly insignificant roles, that can lead readers to infer things about the writer’s view of the world that the writer never intended and doesn’t think.

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Repost: Let Characters Be Wrong

Nobody likes a perfect character. Someone who is super good at everything and gets everything right is annoying. 

Even the most suave secret agents of indestructible superheroes need to make mistakes in order to make the story interesting.  

There are two parts to using wrongness in a story. There’s the actual mistake (which sometimes isn’t known to be a mistake at the time), and there’s the consequences of the mistake, usually forcing the character to deal with powerful feeling of guilt or regret.

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Uncontriving Characters

In writing a story you want to limit the number of characters you use. Instead of your main character having one friend to commiserate with over a drink and another friend drive him to the airport, they might as well be the same person. 

Sometimes it can be obvious which jobs should go to which characters, but other times it can take a while to realise you can meld two into one. As well as making things more manageable, there are a number of useful consequences of doing this.

Fewer characters are easier to remember and makes the story easier to follow. Giving a character more than one thing to do gives them depth and complexity and generally makes them more interesting. And having familiar characters turn up in different parts of a story is something readers like.

However, simply conflating a bunch of characters into one person can come across as contrived. 

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Status as Character Calling Card

The main character in a story will tend to have something about them that marks them out. They need to be distinct from everyone else just as a matter of practicality. It might be a special skill or ability—they’re the best at what they do—but it could also be a behavioural or psychological thing. A character who’s good-hearted or brave or willing to sacrifice or whatever.

While their job or social standing will give the reader a rough idea of the kind of person the story will be about, it’s this unique quality, this thing that marks them out, that gives them their true status. It is also what makes them appealing to read about.

However, while you as the writer may have a very clear idea of what’s so great about the character, the reader doesn’t. And letting them in on it halfway through the book is not going to do you any favours. You have to win them over in the first few pages. So how do you do that?

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Multi-Dimensional Character Building

We all want to write characters that have depth and complexity. We want them to feel like real people who struggle with decisions and choices, and we want the reader to be curious about what path they’ll take.

The problem is that if you give characters all the reactions and moods of a real person, they can turn into a confusing muddle of contradictions.

Conversely, if you try to streamline a character’s motivations and goals in an attempt to create a strong throughline which the reader can clearly identify and follow, that can make the character seem one-dimensional and robotic.

How, then, do you make a character feel fully formed and yet at the same time easy to engage with? 

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The Complexity Of Complex Characters

 

A glass slips out of Mr A’s hand and smashes on the floor. He sighs and sweeps up the pieces and then gets another glass out of the cabinet.

A glass slips out of Mr B’s hand and smashes on the floor. He lets out a howl of rage and stamps the pieces into dust under his feet.

The different reactions of these two men are both perfectly plausible. But in this case both men are the same person. The only difference is that these two events occur on different days when Mr A-B is in dealing with life in different ways.

Again, perfectly plausible. We all have our moods. We all have good and bad days.

However, in fiction, having characters react in a variety of ways to more or less the same stimulus will make them appear to be acting out of character. But when is it distracting and unnecessarily convoluted, and when is it a reasonable depiction of the richness of human interactions?

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Characters Are Developing All The Time

A reader follows a plot by the changes that occur in a character’s life. If their aim is to find the lost treasure of the Incas, then how the situation develops—if they seem to be getting closer or further from the goal—will be the primary way to tell how things are progressing.

Changes in the physical world indicate that people are acting in order to realise their goals. If the scenario remains static, then you have no plot.

But as things change in the physical world, they have an effect on the character instigating them. If things are going well, if things are going badly, if outside forces are getting involved—all these variables not only change the external situation, they also change the character internally.

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Forcing Readers To Like Characters: Recognition

So far in this series on how to force readers into an emotional relationship with the characters in a story we’ve looked at the various ways to create sympathy. 

Another technique is to create a character that the reader feels they recognise and relate to. Someone who’s dealing with things that strikes a chord with the reader’s own experiences. 

However, this does not mean the reader will only identify with characters who are similar to themselves. If that were true, every story would only have a very limited readership. And any story set in an unfamiliar world would be rejected immediately. Clearly that is not the case, so what is it that readers do identify with?

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Sympathetic Characters Part 5: Betrayal

One of the sharpest pains we feel on behalf of a character is when they are betrayed. In order for the reader to feel this pain, they need to know who the betrayer is. The closer the relationship between the character and the betrayer, the greater their pain and the greater our sympathy.

A story that focuses on finding out who the traitor is—a mystery—usually reveals their identity near the end of the story, at which point the reader and the main character discover the truth together.

In terms of creating sympathy you can use to draw the reader into the story, that's too late to be of much use. 

When it comes to sympathy, the sooner you reveal the betrayal and who's responsible, the better.

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Sympathetic Characters Part 4: Outcasts

There’s something very attractive about the outsider character. Being rejected and having to strike out alone feels quite romantic.

The main things to remember when developing this sort of character is to show how happy everyone inside the group is (even if they’re just kidding themselves), and to demonstrate clearly that the character is not welcome.

Humans, as a whole, crave belonging. We want to be accepted into the group, to obtain status and be listened to.

People who reject the mainstream and become Goths or nerds or B-boys are still looking for a gang to call their own. We form societies both in small, familial group, and large metropolises. 

And each of these has its rules and hierarchies and cliques, even the ones that claim they don’t.

It hits deep when membership to any sort of club is either rejected or revoked.

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Sympathetic Characters Part 3: Noble Souls

So far in this series on creating sympathy, I’ve dealt with the extreme end of the spectrum. Danger and suffering are pretty broad, easy to grasp concepts. Readers who encounter these will find it hard to resist feeling concern for the characters in the story. However, they are also quite simplistic and blunt, and once the immediate danger/suffering passes, the concern for them will also.

There are more subtle ways to evoke sympathy in the reader. When readers work out what’s going on for themselves, it often has a more powerful and lasting effect than the more obvious methods described already.

Someone who is pretending not to be hurt or upset, immediately interests a reader. If your character is lonely and unhappy but acts like they’re perfectly fine in front of others, that kind of behaviour can be both appealing and intriguing.

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Sympathetic Characters Part 2: Suffering

When it comes to feeling sympathy, our emotion are hardwired to be triggered by the distress of others.

It can be tempting to avoid putting your characters (especially the ones you like) in too much pain and agony. Whether physical or mental, any kind of suffering can feel like a betrayal of characters you’ve become very fond of.

Unfortunately, if you don’t put them through the wringer their problems will seem minor and not worth worrying about.

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Sympathetic Characters Part 1: Danger

This first part of this series on creating emotional attachment between readers and characters is going to look at engendering sympathy, and in this particular post, by putting characters in risky situations. If you want the reader to feel concern for the characters in your story, putting them in danger is a simple way to do it.

Any time something of value is on the line, how the situation plays out will be of interest, and that is true for all the parties involved. But if you can communicate what’s at stake and make the reader as keen to avoid that outcome as the character, then it will amplify the level of interest in what happens next.

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Forcing Readers To Like Characters

The story you’re writing may have the kind of lead character that people automatically root for. He may be a good guy doing the right thing; or a decent woman trying to sort out something that needs sorting. Heroic behaviour and overcoming adversity can bypass the whole need to tell the reader this is someone to cheer on. It’s obvious.

But they might be a little more complex than that. Maybe flawed, maybe even a bit awkward. Or they may not get to their heroic moment until much later in the story. How do you get the reader on board as quickly as possible without having to add ‘stick with it, things get good later’ at the bottom of each page?

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Let Characters Be Wrong

Nobody likes a perfect character. Someone who is super good at everything and gets everything right is annoying. 

Even the most suave secret agents of indestructible superheroes need to make mistakes in order to make the story interesting.  

There are two parts to using wrongness in a story. There’s the actual mistake (which sometimes isn’t known to be a mistake at the time), and there’s the consequences of the mistake, usually forcing the character to deal with powerful feeling of guilt or regret.

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Characters Should Think Progressively

Written fiction allows access to a character’s mind in a way that no other medium can. What someone thinks often gives a new perspective on events, can reveal aspects you hadn’t considered, or add depth to the way you perceive a character.

Often this is presented as a snapshot of the character’s current state of mind. This is what’s happening, and this is what the MC thinks about it. But what makes a character interesting isn’t just who they are or what they do, it’s how they get there.

And while ‘it’s the journey not the destination’ may seem obvious, knowing exactly which part of the journey is the interesting bit may not.

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After The First Draft: Part 2

A short series looking at how to approach revisions. Part 2: Pinocchio Needs A Soul.

Your characters, particularly your MC, are the most important aspect of your story. If people don’t engage with them, they aren’t going to finish reading the book.

You don’t want to wait until you’re polishing the final draft to sort this out. You want to do it as early in the process as possible. Once readers are hooked into the characters, you have a solid foundation to build on.

That doesn’t mean your characters should jump through windows and have kung-fu fights (even though it might add a fresh twist to the Regency romance you’ve been working on).

What it does mean is your characters need to be more than puppets being moved from scene to scene.

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Making Your Readers Care Like Your Characters Care

In any story the main character will have something on their mind. They will worry and fret based on how important ‘the thing’ is to them.

Just because they happen to think this thing is worth obsessing over or getting upset about doesn’t mean the reader will also.

Showing the character really worked up about this thing won’t automatically make the reader feel the same way.

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Not All Characters Deserve To Be In The Story

It’s pretty easy to overpopulate a story.

Usually, it’s to make things seem realistic (an office should have people in it, a party should be crowded).

Sometimes it seems like a clever ploy (with 73 suspects the reader will never guess who the murderer is!).

Or it can be a way to give different types of readers someone to root for. These characters are the love story, these guys provide the adventure, this one will appeal to older women, this one to comedy fans...

Too many characters often make a story hard to follow, confuse the reader and create unnecessary complications. But once they’re in, taking them out can seem daunting, like pulling at a single loose thread that ends up unravelling the whole cardigan.

It’s really not that hard, though.

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