There is a balancing act that every writer, unless that writer is P.G. Wodehouse or some similar, sunny-natured genius, must perform when creating characters. That act involves deciding just how realistic you can make your characters before you risk losing the audience.
Truly realistic characters would be overwhelmingly wracked with self-involvement, obsessive thinking, repetitive conversational skills, and long periods of mental white noise. Realistic characters would tend to lack drive. They would be too polite, too passive. Too fond of television. They would spend far too much time in the bathroom. Okay, okay. I should speak for myself here. If everyone wrote characters based on me… ha.
Real people can be less than completely delightful inside. In real life, we have polite veneers, installed at great cost and effort by parents, schools and peer groups and society. Jails and mental institutions are places where veneers tend to be thin to nonexistent.
Readers demand that fiction reveal truth, but not to the point where it becomes uncomfortable or, god forbid, boring. We want to believe in the characters we read about but we also want to like them and relate to them and, if possible, wish we were them on some level.
Writers often accomplish this likability by giving characters a desire readers might share. To really sell those desires, it’s best that the writer share them. Consider Charlotte the spider. She’s convincingly spider-y, what with the living in corner of a pigsty, spinning webs and blood sucking and so forth. She’s also kind, smart and maternal. Charlotte wouldn’t be Charlotte if she wasn’t driven to help others (in between entombing flies and sucking them dry.) All this makes me think E.B. White was probably a lovely person.
In Gone Girl, the summer’s big thriller (so exciting! so excellently plotted!) we have a married couple, one of whom has gone missing under suspicious circumstances. The story alternates between the the couple’s two points of view and their first person narrations gradually reveal them to be far more complicated than they at first self-report. That said, even at their worst, they have qualities we can admire or at least understand. Baddies need to have some redeeming qualities, such as being verbally facile, smart, charming and so forth.
I have long loved the unlikable character, partly because such people can be comic gold and partly because I’m deeply in touch with the unpleasant facets of my own personality. Some unkind types might argue that I give too much rein to the unpleasant or irritating qualities in my characters. (Here I’m thinking of a few of the letters I received about Alice, I Think. “Dear Susan Juby, I hate Alice. She’s so stuck up and thinks she’s all that. Why can’t she be more like other people and like the things I like?”) I do consider just how unpleasant and self-involved I can make my characters, but my own weakness for jerks shines through.
Bright’s Light brought me face-to-face with a whole new level of challenge. Bright and Fon and the rest of the party favours are future-dwelling professional party clones who have been line bred for generations to be as good looking, fun and vapid as possible. They have the life span of aquarium fish and the attention span of gnats. They are trained from birth not to get too attached to one another because competition make them more productive. If they develop deep friendships, they are less likely to give every client their all. Their deepest value is being cutting edge fashion-wise in order to earn the most credits to pay for various forms of escapism.
In short, they are Paris Hilton, the Kardashians and other such uselessness taken to the nth degree. How to make such people even remotely likable? I decided the points of contact between Bright and Fon, our misguided and dippy heroines, and qualities readers could relate to would be the rivalries we all feel with friends and coworkers from time-to-time and their brave willingness to step out of their prescribed roles when circumstances demand it. I also hoped that the (fairly positive) changes they undergo as their world starts to go badly awry would humanize them. Finally, when you have very unusual characters, sometimes what is needed is an outside eye to lend contrast and perspective. Hence the appearance of Grassly, who hails from another planet.
I’m not sure I made the right calls with regard to developing Bright and Fon, but making them shallow, self-involved and intermittently nasty felt more honest than to have them be just like regular girls circa now. Once in a while I’ll read literary fiction that includes child or teen characters who speak like forty-year-old Columbia University anthropology professors or hard driving lyric poets. Drives me straight up the wall. On the other hand, if you go overboard on the verisimilitude you might drive readers straight out of their minds. Like you know?
Books: no one ever said writing them would be easy!
I’m interested in how other writers handle the unpleasant aspects of their characters and just how much unpleasantness readers can tolerate. Drop me a line with your thoughts.