I had writing stories in mind, but any and all media are fine, even imaginary scenarios you play out in your head involving real people. So, do you feel the need to be nice to your fictional characters, creations, imaginings, etc?
I often do. To make them feel real I have to get inside their heads and imagine what it is like to feel as they do. In a strange way, to hurt them would be like hurting myself.
I’m starting to find that caring about them has the reverse effect too - now I start imagining better things for myself, and I become more optimistic about my life.
It’s as though I’d learned through fiction that realism means pessimism, but by writing fiction I’ve come to believe that optimism is more realistic.
Nifty little cycle. Any thoughts?
I will note that a neat tool we have as writers is “it’s not that bad.” There’s more wiggle room with artistic license to undo things you’ve done to your characters that are harder to achieve in real life.
But it makes me wonder what it is like to be a horror writer, and have to choose between either experiencing the horrors of your own creation, or else cutting off your feelings.
Well, as bloodthirsty as some of my fiction ends up turning out, I actually don’t like killing off characters—I don’t set out to torment them, and I’ve (so far) never gone on a kick of deliberately writing some Kafka-esque persecution/injustice story.
But then again, I take my characters along where the story needs to go. Sometimes, that’s not a pleasant occasion. In fact, some of my better (I think) story decisions came when I realized I felt reluctant to do something that’d go badly for a character—that’s when I knew I pretty much had to do it. If I found myself feeling that strongly about it, it had to be strong story material. And afterwards, I couldn’t imagine things going any other way.
Well, if you don’t have something interesting happen to your characters, the reader’s going to get bored. So you can’t be too nice to them.
On the other hand, you shouldn’t be a sadist. Or even rougher than necessary. Take this as a cautyionary note:
Cecil Scott Forester wrote often brutally real fiction about wars. In his Napoleonic novel the Gun, virtually everyone who vcame into contact with that titular piece of ordnance had awful things happen to them – death, dismemberment, poisoning, blinding, a scary list. A lot of his other novels are just as nasty to the characters. Most of these books are out of print.
there was one notable exception to this carnage – one Forester character who Forester had end up alive, whole, and successful after being put through the wringer. That was Horatio Hornblower, the hero of twelve books (and a handful of oscure stories). His books hsave managed to stay in print all these years, when the others have fallen into obscurity, and lead to a major motion picture and a series on A&E. This, I think, is no coincidence. People continue to read the Hornblower books not only because they’re good, but because they have , after all the grief, happy endings.
And when they filmed The Gun as The Pride and the Passion, only one of the principals dies, in a glorious death. They stuck a much happier ending on Forester’s The African Queen, too. Hollywood knows that gritty unhappy endings don’t sell.
I’m an author who writes primarily for children. In those cases, while I do have “happy endings”, yes, I often make the characters suffer along the way to “earn” them. When I was in junior high, an author (I don’t remember her name) came to our school and said we shouldn’t be afraid to put them in the worst spot we could imagine–and then find out some way to make it worse.
However, I have also written for older audiences, and then, all bets are off. I’m working on a novel now in which the villain is really bad, but the way she’s been treated by others is also horrible. (And my protagonist and a number of other characters are also going through the wringer.)
I’ve written Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes fanfic, poetry, sf and some historical fiction. I tend to be nice to my characters… but if the plot demands death, mayhem, dismemberment and minor skin rashes, so be it!
Depends on the character, I think. Some characters deserve to be beaten like a dog and others don’t, but then it seems disinteresting if the character don’t go through some kind of trauma. And by trauma, I don’t necessarily mean cut off their arms and give them gall bladder failure, but there has to be some kind of conflict to drive the story.
I don’t write fiction any more. But when I did, I was nearly sadistic to my characters if I actually liked them. If I liked them – and I’d only write stories with protagonists I liked – I’d torture them in their hero’s journey. Some things I wouldn’t do – no female protagonist ever got raped, for instance, and any such exploitation was only ever implied – but they’d lose jobs unjustly, get beat up, suffer terrible losses of people they loved, etc.
I can only remember ever blinking once, in a story I wrote about her. The main character was a little girl from our world who went to sort of a sci-fi Narnia, and vastly preferred it to our Earth. In the first draft, the woman who became her foster mother died in the storys’s climactic battle, but once I actually put that down on paper I couldn’t bear the thought of it; it would have ruined SFN for the kid, after all. So the mother got to live.
Two other characters had to die in her place, of course. I’m sentimental, not nice.
Is it just me, or has it recently become somewhat cool to be needlessly cruel to one’s characters? Seems to me I’ve read a couple of books lately where just out of the blue, bad stuff happens to people, as if the author must prove that he has the guts to actually go there, which ends up just seeming blasé and detached in a careless way. To be somehow edgy, and to show that this is not some kind of touchy-feely rainbow-shitting unicorn kind of story, but actual serious literature, where sometimes, bad shit just happens for no reason, like it does in real life – as if the fact that bad shit happens for no reason in real life were some kind of deep revelation the author needed to communicate. One instance I remember was in ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’, where suddenly,the protagonist, who loves running, looses both feet due to frostbite.
I’m a subscriber to the “test the heroes to the point of destruction” school of writing. I’ve often joked that when you read one of my novels, you can tell who my favorite characters are by who suffers the most. I like to beat up my heroes, but they always persevere. It’s pretty much a given that at least somebody in my novels has a healing power (I write modern/urban fantasy (original) and Shadowrun (fanfic) stuff) because if they didn’t, my heroes would spend the entire novel in the hospital!
Oddly, I don’t get any satisfaction at all doing this to female heroes. All my main protags are male. My female characters get difficulties, but they’re usually emotional rather than physical. I don’t think it would be possible for me to write a rape, unless it was of a side character and it occurred off screen. And I think if somebody put a gun to my head and forced me to write a rape scene, I’d probably have an easier (relatively speaking–it would still be extremely hard for me) time of it if the victim were male.
I write science fiction and I do put my heroes through the wringer as far as being in desperate straits, but what I also do is make the rewards at the end worth it. I do have lines I won’t cross: injured is fine, maimed for life is not, for instance. I do, sometimes, have to kill off characters I like, because otherwise there’s no tension.
I remember being very taken aback by that at the time, but I do think it fit, under the circumstances. Didn’t seem gratuitous to me, given that character’s particular… issues.
I’ve written a few continuing stories (for my own entertainment) and had my characters do such stupid, embarrassing things that I fantasized the two of them getting together off on their own and plotting to materialize and beat me up in revenge.