Characters Light and Dark
By Donald Maass | July 5, 2017 |
On Saturday, Jo Eberhardt posted about unlikeable characters. She pointed out that what makes loathsome characters compelling in spite of their faults are their clear motives, consistency and genuine relationships.
Interestingly, those are also factors that make likeable characters compelling. That started me thinking. What other qualities are critical to creating characters we care to read about for several hundred pages? Is there a universal checklist of character elements that cause us to feel swept away?
We tend to focus on characters’ faults, troubles and turmoil. That’s not wrong. They are the basis of story. They allow characters to make mistakes, stir things up, struggle, and wrestle with life in ways with which we can identify. Writers say, “It’s their flaws that make them interesting.” Well, interesting to writers.
In my prior paragraph, there’s a distinction that matters. Flaws are a negative. Struggle is a positive. Flaws by themselves are not attractive, but struggles draw us in. The inner journey—which really means the difficulty in arriving at a state of grace—is rooted in a desire to change. Absent that yearning, characters are stuck. They can only wallow, whine and suffer. A small subset of readers will tolerate such characters, but only up to a point. Most readers reject them unless there is a reason to hope.
There is, however, a further distinction to make. Not every inner struggle and outward plot problem are guaranteed to engage readers’ hearts. When we are swept away it is because a character’s inner struggle is one that we deem important. It matters. It feels close to home. Plot problems are the opposite, they have an anti-gravity: They are the most compelling when they put us face-to-face with our deepest fears.
Your deepest fear is not necessarily my deepest fear, obviously, which is why there is a diversity of story type. Some authors express it all to you and yet say little to me. Plots have varying levels of appeal and that’s not bad. The point is that a plot—a problem—will grip your unique audience when it first of all grips you. When it matters. When you wish it would stay far away from your home.
When characters sweep us away, we wish we were them. What makes us feel that? External circumstances are a factor. Times and places can interest or enchant us. English historical settings and faux-medieval fantasy worlds have perhaps endured, in part, for that reason. We’d like to live when and where we feel that life was (or is) better, more dramatic, fraught with social pressure, full of pleasures and where and when we may have the vicarious enjoyment of a status (high or low) that we would not otherwise be able to experience.
Characters’ professions and personalities can also appeal. Who doesn’t want to be a spy, a boy wizard, a symbolist, or a tattooed hacker with a violent streak? Imaginatively, I mean. Who doesn’t want to wisecrack, have steel nerves, or see the world in terms of beautiful metaphors? We’d all like to be better, bigger and elevated in ways that we aren’t. It’s not just lives that we wish for, but traits. Characters we want to be are characters whom we envy.
Characters we envy may be many things, but one key thing that they have, and which we want, is love. Characters who sweep us away have others who believe in them: supporters, mentors, friends. They also sweep us away when they themselves are swept away by a great love of their own. The One. The Only. Scientifically speaking, One True Love is a romantic fallacy, I’m sure, but that love’s appeal is not its singularity but its power. We all want to be deeply in love, subsumed to the point that this love gives our lives meaning if not a fundamental reason to be alive.
Characters who sweep us away also do things that are admirable, heroic and impossible. I have written previously about creating impossible odds. What constitutes heroic actions is fluid and varies by story, but if a sense of heroism is achieved then what is done involves doing good. That can be good for others or good for self or both, but it is right action that for a given character is both difficult and necessary.
I’m not talking today about what makes characters feel realistic, lifelike or authentic. I’m not talking about voice. I’m talking about what makes characters enthralling in stories. Whatever it means in any given story, when we meet characters who face impossible odds, who meet defeat if not death, who act for the good, who love and are loved by others, who meet their limitations and fail, and somehow rise again, then we cheer.
Naturally, we don’t need to cheer. Not every character needs to be as admirable as a Jean Valjean, Atticus Finch, George Smiley, Celie, Nancy Drew, Harry Dresden, Lyra Silvertongue or Jack Reacher. Not every character needs to be as heart-catching or thought-provoking as Jane Eyre, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caufield, Holly Golightly, Kilgore Trout or Captain Yossarian.
It’s not necessary to be swept away but it’s not impossible, either. Why not develop your characters until they achieve that enchantment? Why not fashion that checklist and tick off the qualities that will make your characters as enthralling as your favorites in literature?
How does your current protagonist struggle inside? How is your protagonist’s problem your own deepest fear? Why do you wish you could be your protagonist? Why do you wish you could live when and where he or she does? Who loves your protagonist and whom does your protagonist love in turn? Why makes that love greater than all others? What must your protagonist do that is impossible? How does your protagonist rise again?
[coffee]
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
“Why not develop your characters until they achieve that enchantment?” Why not, indeed? It takes personal courage, that’s why–the courage to believe that my work (who, me?) can be truly distinguished.
Now the two major characters in my WIP (nonfiction based on historical research) are rolling around in my head, asking me to locate and identify the aspects of themselves that will enthrall the reader while never doing violence to the facts.
The five major characters in my WIP-to-be (fiction) are also rolling around in my head (but not colliding with the first two), also begging for the opportunity to enchant.
Don, you are making my work both more challenging and more doable, not to mention exciting. Thanks.
You’re welcome!
I’m glad you followed up on Jo’s great post, because after reading it I got pulled right into House of Cards and found myself mesmerized by the character of Frank Underwood. I’m not interested in US politics, but being pulled into Frank’s world has made me care about that world more because I can see how his love for it drives his every move. The man is ambitious and ruthless, but at its core his story is grounded in his acting according to what he thinks of as good, and he’s driven by love, for politics and his wife (whose story is itself just as compelling). Needless to say, I’m excited to learn a lot from that show over the next few weeks.
In my own work, I’d say getting in touch with my protagonist’s one true love has been key to understanding his struggle. In the new opening I wrote for my current draft, I tried to explore more of my protagonist’s love of stories, something that barely rose to the surface in previous drafts. It wasn’t just that love, but how that love developed. An orphan boy who is taken in by a kind old man who teaches him to read and then is murdered, and all my protagonist has to hold onto that time of hope is the books the man owned — books he reads again and again as he wanders in search of a home. In the new opening, that backstory came out quite clearly as my protagonist enters the home of a wealthy man and is given the opportunity to be adopted as the man’s heir, but only if he burns his books — “books are for fools” as his new mentor puts it, and he proceeds to discipine him in his practical ways. That set up a new level of struggle for me to explore as I’ve traced it’s effects forward and halfway through the current draft my protagonist has become a whole new character — more driven, acting rather than just reacting.
I love that story! Books are for fools? Indeed, but not reading is for those even more foolish, but hey look at that. I’m already arguing with your characters! Solid conflict and big theme are at work. Now I want to read, fool that I am.
Thanks Don — big boost of confidence for me, and incentive to dig further here :=)
Don, thank you for this.
I’ve been trying to create a compelling secondary protagonist in my WiP. Bits and pieces of her story are told through three times in her life–when she’s 18-years-old, 49, and 89. As an elderly woman, she behaves in an unlikeable manner toward a favorite character. That turned off my crit partners. I had not clearly displayed specific struggles in the other timelines and I had not adequately layered in her internal emotions and thoughts as an 89-year-old. So your column and questions are immensely helpful.
I’m struck by this: “I had not adequately layered in her internal emotions and thoughts.” That touches what I’m currently teaching (Emotional Craft) and to Jo’s observation about understandable motives. When we understand your cranky 89-year-old, I suspect we’ll listen instead of turning off.
My protagonist struggles with how much to reveal of herself and how much to hide, as if finding the right balance will make her safe and lovable and acceptable. But circumstances force her to tip that balance, first to one side, then the other. She falls in love with an inappropriate person, but that only makes her look harder at what it really means to love. And why sometimes it means letting go. Teenagers want to cling to things, to love, to life, to friendship, which she does until it hurts. I admire her moxy and her tenaciousness. And I think, her recklessness, too. She has to face down a dragon, but in doing so, she meets a bigger monster. The one inside that keeps telling her she isn’t good enough. Thanks for this today!
“She has to face down a dragon, but in doing so, she meets a bigger monster. The one inside that keeps telling her she isn’t good enough.”
There’s the core of your pitch, right there!
Don, It’ s funny, but I was thinking about Harry Dresden before he appeared in your list. He and FitzChivalry Farseer both, actually. When you were talking about how we sort of wish we were the heroes that sweep us away, I was thinking about how each of them wields a cool sort of magic, and is able to do the super cool big thing we wish we could do in dramatic circumstances.
But did you ever notice that whenever Harry wields big wizardry, of the sort that makes us cheer inwardly, there’s almost always an immediate price? He’s gone too far, or created a side-effect or collateral damage, costing himself or someone he cares about dearly. Same with Fitz. Every time he uses the Skill or the Wit, the other shoe is almost always going to drop.
And both Butcher and Hobb use this as a lever between internal struggles and plot struggles. And particularly when it comes to the “L” word. Neither Harry or Fitz have been particularly lucky in love. Or even friendship, for that matter. And so often it’s the powers and character traits we admire that keep that misfortune rolling along. Often, when Harry knows something because of his wizardly coolness and wisdom, he has to keep it from those he cares about, often sacrificing friendship or love. Fitz walked away from the love of his life and his firstborn daughter, all to save them from the side-effects he knew he would bring into their lives.
Again and again, the special traits that make us feel awe, and often admiration, lead to emotional suffering and loss of love… And thereby, to yearning. And ongoing hope, too, I suppose. And, boy, does it keep the pages turning.
Off to apply your closing checklist to V & E. Thanks for another damn-near wizardly cool and wise lesson.
I suspect you are lying about having been in the lumber trade. You have been a professor of literature, admit it.
Harry and FitzChivalry are enthralling characters. Their sacrifices make them noble, but the key point (which you make) is that their yearning for love is undiminished by magical backlash or bad dates.
We keep hoping for them even thought we know very well that for them love is impossible–or at least will cost them dearly.
There is, however, a further distinction to make. Not every inner struggle and outward plot problem are guaranteed to engage readers’ hearts. When we are swept away it is because a character’s inner struggle is one that we deem important.
You know, Don, it’s interesting that I read this today, as I am making my way through some middlebrow and pulp fiction of the 50s. I find I am interested in the working stiff or the small-time hood if I get into their heads and see even their wrong choices having purchase for them. There are some stories we read because they are slow-motion car wrecks.
Thus, I would add to your statement, above, that if the character himself considers it important, that works too. (This is the basis of comedy, BTW, for the “inner struggles” of the characters in Seinfeld, for example, are never important! They are precisely the opposite, but blown up to cruciality in their own fevered minds).
I do love being enchanted by a character. We all do. Here I’m thinking more along the lines of being engaged by a character, simply because he’s human, making choices, and not always the best ones. But we will watch because we want to know that he’ll get out of it … or get what he deserves.
I owe you an e-mail, Jim. Check your inbox later today.
I love this: “…if the character himself considers it important, that works too.” Precisely. Characters’ passions are persuasive, even if we don’t share them. Even if they are wrong. Or illegal. Or self-defeating. Or Jerry Seinfeld. Succinctly put.
Hi Jim & Don:
There are at least three types of stories that fall into this category, with a potentially unlikable but somehow compelling character in a “slow motion car wreck.” (Reminding me of Jim Nisbet’s definition of noir: “The kind of story where the protagonist is utterly screwed on page 1 and it just goes downhill from there.”)
Pathos: Where an everyman launches a hapless plot or strikes out at an overpowering force or “system.” Think Dog Day Afternoon, Night and the City, or even A Streetcar Named Desire. We root for the protagonist, even though we know she’s doomed, because we too understand the universe ain’t fair, and we admire the guy willing to stand up to fate and spit in its eye.
BTW: Jim, it’s interesting that 50s fiction is bringing this up for you, because that seemed to be a heyday for this kind of story.
Satire: The protagonist lives in a stifling society with strict rules, and at first hopes to succeed in that society. Only by failing does the protagonist learn the folly of that pursuit, which leads to a conclusory insight or “marriage.” Enter Jane Austen.
Black Comedy: Here the system is not just stifling but destructive–organized crime (Goodfellas), the military (Catch-22, Dr. Strangelove), politics (Wag the Dog), the media (Network), Hollywood (The Player).
In all of these the truth of Jim’s comment is borne out: Even if we see the quest as hopelessly misbegotten or doomed, the character’s investment invites us in. But Don’s comments also hold true: Absent enthralling protagonists, these stories can easily turn relentlessly bleak.
You also are secretly a professor of literature, fess up. And thanks. I love the clarity you bring to complexity.
Thanks for another great post Don.
What is it about interviews of horrible people that we find enthralling? We don’t believe their justifications, and we don’t necessarily believe they are telling us the unguarded truth.
I’m working with a character like this, so I was wondering what you’d put on their checklist.
*BTW cherries are ready*
Owe you guys an e-mail, too. Later today!
Horrible people acting horrible are indeed fascinating. The Housewives of Pretty Much Anywhere. Why? What enthralls us about terrible people, I believe, is the opposite of what enthralls us about heroes.
The meanness of horrible people allows us to indulge our own. Their misery delights us. We love to judge them. Where we want protagonists to win, we want horrible people to lose. Reality TV shows, ask me, are actually morality tales.
What should be on the checklist, therefore, is self-absorption, meanness, pettiness, status-awareness, vengefulness, haughty disdain, and lack of empathy. Let them eat cake. When we chortle and rub our hands in anticipation of a horrible person’s comeuppance, you’re on the right track, I’d say.
I love this: “What constitutes heroic actions is fluid and varies by story, but if a sense of heroism is achieved then what is done involves doing good. That can be good for others or good for self or both, but it is right action that for a given character is both difficult and necessary.”
Your earlier exercise about describing our personal heroes led me to recognise that my protagonist is actually a version of my own greatest personal hero: Dorothy Day. That insight has helped me work through problems that were clouding the way forward.
So I appreciate this more subtle look at heroism as right action that is both difficult and necessary. While I love reading fantasy as much as the next person, in my own work I want to write about everyday heroism, about the challenges of doing good in the world and–as you say–the necessity of trying.
Thank you for the advice, encouragement, and thought-provoking questions.
I had to look up Dorothy Day, but I’m glad I did. What a life! Very inspiring.
“When you wish it would stay far away from your home.”
Wow. What a great way to look at things. Working on my crime novel it can be hard to gauge what may be “too much” – but thinking of it in terms like this will help me break down those barriers I’ve made for myself. You’ve given me a lot to think about, in a good way, as I’m sure you’ve done for many others. Thanks for sharing!
I think it’s unhelpful to worry about how much would be “too much” tension for readers. In the unlikely event there is “too much” tension, you’ll find that out many stages before publication.
A more useful question is, how can I pile on more?
I’m going to write both of those down in the front of my notebook as a reminder to not hold back. Working and talking through these things in the early stages is a big help, glad to have a few good sounding boards!
Thank you for today’s post. I savored every word.
It seems to me, the biggest flaw of a character may also contain the highest opportunity for them to overcome their greatest challenges.
The young adolescent protagonist in my middle-grade time-slip fantasy is a boy-scientist who ridicules all things supernatural.
His flaw is his absolute dedication to logic at the expense of accepting what he sees, so much so, that he discounts out-of-hand, anything remotely paranormal and everything he can’t measure or prove.
When he’s faced with living in a pocket of time where the landscape is distinctly supernatural, his first instinct is to save his sanity, and run away to avoid the disastrous consequences that place his life at great risk.
But in order to save his family, the boy must overcome his intolerances and take command of his fears.
At first, he withdraws and wallows, but gradually impossible events and a succession of strange entities unravel the distant past, and open his mind and heart, to face the dangerous phenomena that rattle him to his core.
Why do I wish I could live when and where my protagonist does?
He and his twin sister live on a grand estate beside Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, England, in a sentient stately home that rivals Downton Abbey in a rabbit hole of spacetime where ‘Narnia meets ‘Alice’ and shatters ‘the looking glass’.
I’m looking forward to the Surrey International Writers Conference this fall. See you there.
See you at SIWC, if not in the place where Narnia meets Alice!
Too many main protagonists in thrillers these days are Batman without the cape (e.g. Jack Reacher). I find this very boring. Much more interesting to me is the ordinary bloke who finds himself thrust into an extraordinary situation and has to draw upon qualities he never knew he possessed.
No argument from me.
Hello, Good Sir:
Well, before getting into the nuts and bolts, I’m going to raise a respectful objection to your remark that characters who are stuck “can only wallow, whine and suffer. ”
Now, you mention this in the context of understanding the character’s yearning, and I agree with that. But even characters who possess such an understanding can be stuck due to forces that simply overpower them.
Every story save the last in James Joyce’s Dubliners concerns paralysis–emotional, political, professional, economic, moral, spiritual, sexual. (In fact, whenever a student asks if characters have to change, I respond: “Read Dubliners.”)
In some of the stories, we see how the characters are complicit in their paralysis; in others (such as “Araby” and “Eveline”), we empathize with the character’s helplessness before it.
Even in The Dead, the one hopeful story in the collection, Gabriel Conroy is stopped in his tracks by the realization he has never been capable of showing his wife, Gretta, the kind of passionate love that inspired the young man who died for her of a broken heart.
These characters do a great deal more than “wallow, whine, and suffer.” They stir our hearts or agitate our minds, because we understand what it means to get stuck. But your point about yearning stands firm: The characters move us precisely because we sense within them a yearning that cries out for fulfillment, but goes unanswered.
Finally, I love your list of questions. I’ve been struggling with this issue myself in the current WIP (working title: Helpless Immortal).
The premise is a little involved, but let’s just say our protagonist, one of the great heroes of Celtic lore, is cursed by one of the gods for a seeming lack of gratitude, and is now condemned to live and die over and over until he learns “all the wisdom of the world.” He has no divine or superhero powers, except that he remembers every lifetime. Haunted by those memories, he wanders through time.
I found myself getting stuck (that word again) because that goal (yearning) is so vast and impossible to obtain that it seemed incapable of being anchored to the actual story within the novel. How does this one series of events convey part of the “wisdom of the world” that he didn’t already know (having been around for 3500 years already)?
I realized I needed to think through his various stages of trying to live for wisdom, and his ultimate realization that the quest is a trap — it’s a genuine curse, from which he cannot escape. He can never learn all the world’s wisdom, so he’s just condemned to keep wandering.
But then he has to decide what to do with each lifetime, determine how to live, and that’s where his “timeless” yearning found linkage in the time-bound story.
He ultimately embraces the example of the bodhisattva, who surrenders his own quest for enlightenment to help others on theirs. In this he sees true nobility, and he feels he can live and die over and over if that is his inspiration each lifetime. (He even forgives the god who condemned him to this fate. Gods do these sorts of things. Since they cannot die, they don’t understand.)
And so the novel concerns his commitment to one girl he meets during his present lifetime. Rather than answer your questions, I’ll just provide the beginning I’ve come up with so far, and see if it’s responsive:
How slight and sentimental—a story of love. You know the world as well as I, it doesn’t take long to suss it out. We all sense the peril brewing at the heart of things, feel it rising through us, if only for a moment at waking, before the chatter of the mind distracts us, like repartee at death’s dinner table.
Worse, this isn’t some grand romance we’re talking about, a marriage of noble hearts blazoned by destiny to inspire us all. Hardly. I speak of poor, mad Georgie McCarthy. And me. The lost wanderer. What pair could mean less in the grand scheme?
And yet there lies my premise—it is easy to be enchanted by the great and the grand. I do not mean to belittle those who rise up to lead a restless people, or take a stand against the “elected” schemers fluent in the language of hogwash who pit the desperate against the scared, all for the sake of thievery. Courage, of all manner and merit, is precious.
Nor would I ever, even for an instant, think to slander those who can conjure the mysterious silence of beauty, or divine the logic of the stars.
But a wise man once told me that the true test of greatness lies in thinking and feeling deeply about simple things.
There, for me, lies the key to the lock. For the span of two lifetimes, it has been my fate, my purpose, to think and feel deeply about Georgie McCarthy’s simple, fragile, ravenous heart.
If only I could have saved her.
David, I’m intrigued. The opening is filled with stuff I want to think about and chew on. “There, for me, lies the key to the lock. For the span of two lifetimes, it has been my fate, my purpose, to think and feel deeply about Georgie McCarthy’s simple, fragile, ravenous heart.” Wow. And then the killer ending.
I’m impressed.
Let’s leave a discussion of protagonist paralysis for our next beer. I love that lyrical opening!
I love this, and I love reading all the comments & discussion even more. Thanks for nudging me out of my post-holiday doldrums!
Yeah, after the fireworks over the East River last night today does feel kind of blah and back-to-work. Guess we all must make some fireworks on our pages, eh?
Hi Don. Another post that has me thinking. (Thanks!) You mentioned the inner journey and I loved the phrase: “the difficulty in arriving at a state of grace” Such a beautiful analogy to where a protagonist wants, no, needs, to be. You captured a yearning that is so profound that I’m going to put it on my desk.
On another note, that “one true love fallacy”? Not a fallacy. I’ve known and been blessed by just such a love.
Thank you for another great post.
Yes, I know you were blessed in that way. Even in sorrow, I’m glad about that.