Inflicting Pain on Your Characters

by Margaret Lucke

Fiction writers are mean. They are cruel. They do not hesitate when it comes to inflicting pain on people.

Not real people, of course.

I'm referring to their characters.

It's been said that the writer's job is to get the characters up a tree and then to throw rocks at them. Or as a writer friend puts it, to get them into trouble and then into worse trouble. This is how plots get made.

This can be hard to do. Most authors I know are kind, warmhearted and friendly. By nature they are disinclined to being deliberately hurtful. So making characters a target for suffering can present a real challenge.

In my work as a developmental editor and a teacher of fiction writing classes, I've had the opportunity to read a great many manuscripts. One common failing I've noticed in the stories of the aspiring writers I've worked with stems from the author's reluctance to subject their characters to the kind of harsh treatment that good fiction requires.

This is perfectly understandable. As writers, we like our characters -- the good guys certainly but, truth be told, we even have a certain fondness for our villains. We often have special affection for our protagonist. While writing a book we live in the skin of our main character, and we come to regard her as a friend. She may be the author in thin disguise.

If you're a writer, you are no doubt a kind, gentle soul, and your instinct is to protect your friend and yourself from sorrow and suffering. You flinch from deliberately hurting anyone.

Tough -- do it anyway. If you pull your punches or soften your blows, you undermine the story's conflict. Tension sags and issues go unresolved, and readers close the book dissatisfied.

For the story is to succeed, you must let your characters confront the physical, mental, and emotional challenges that beset them, no matter how difficult or painful.

One of the best pieces of advice about writing that I've ever received is this: Trust your characters. They know the story, and they are willing to determine their own fates, if only you will let them.

Note: Portions of this post are adapted from my book Writing Mysteries, published by Self-Counsel Press.

Comments

[Ellen Kirschman]

I'm trying to do that just now. Always good advice from you, my first ever teacher of mystery writing.

[Michael A. Black]

Good advice, Peggy, and knowning what a nice person you are, it is no doubt difficult for you to be a meanie, even in the fictional world. ;-)

[Margaret Lucke]

Thanks, Ellen -- your accomplishments have gone far beyond whatever advice I might have given you.

And Mike, thanks too. One of the pleasures of writing fiction is that it gives us a respectable outlet for expressing our orneriness so that we can be nice to people in the real world.