In my work, I don't think in terms of hero/villain. I don't present a main character who has a flaw to recognize and overcome. I also don't think in terms of good/bad, not really. I don't really think of protagonist/antagonist either, though certainly I have people acting in opposition to one another. What I have is sort of a sliding scale of moral and ethical failures. Just like real life. I think this keeps my stories from becoming melodrama or morality plays, where good is rewarded and evil is punished. In my stories, things happen between people because of who they are, not necessarily because of where they're situated relative to my personal moral compass. At least I try to do that.
I'll attempt to speak more concretely. Suppose I have two characters, Shelly and Davy. Shelly loves puppies. She adores them. She'll give up her own dinner so that a puppy can eat. Davy, on the other hand, despises puppies. He hates their loose skin and big eyes and waggly tails. Passionately.
It would be easy to set Shelly up as a good guy/hero figure and Davy as a bad guy/villain. But what I would want to do is to empathize with each of them in the same way, to show that each character's feelings about puppies are perfectly reasonable and valid responses to the world for those characters. I would allow myself, when writing about Davy, to think of puppies as unruly, vile and wriggly beasts that foul their beds and yap all night and disobey all commands or whatever. I would think of something I didn't like and map those feelings onto the fictional Davy's dislike of
For the record, I like puppies.
Anyway, I am approaching a couple of scenes in my work-in-progress where the characters to be examined hold personal beliefs that I find absolutely repugnant, but I owe it to them (and, not incidentally, to my readers) to not condemn or comment upon these sets of beliefs. I owe it to the truth I'm seeking as a writer to give full vent to whatever my characters feel, and to stay as much out of their way as I can. Real live intelligent educated people have ideas that I think are stupid and poorly thought out, but I have to present their fictional counterparts the way they see themselves, as intelligent educated people. I have to love them for what they are, unconditionally.
The title of this post is a joke for Rick Daley.
I think this keeps my stories from becoming melodrama or morality plays, where good is rewarded and evil is punished. In my stories, things happen between people because of who they are, not necessarily because of where they're situated relative to my personal moral compass.
ReplyDeleteI so did not do this in Monarch, but I've tried to do it in The Breakaway to a great extent. That one has been tricky, though, because it's so obviously clear who the "bad guys" are when viewed through the lens of our current society. However, what I hope I pull off is to flip it all over and get to that personal moral compass point you speak of. When I reach that point in the story, I hope the reader stops and goes, uh, who's good again? Does it even matter?
Maybe I'm talking about something differently here. I'm not sure.
By the way, I see Monarch as a pretty melodramatic piece of fiction, but I also think it works for what I was trying to do with that book. I should write about melodrama again. I did that while ago. Should dig up the post. :)
ReplyDeleteI think Nick is pretty murky ethically. He tries to be good but he's short-sighted. He's a lit bomb in the living room, is Nick. And that's the thing about MONARCH, you have clear good/bad roles that the characters sort of identify with in an abstract way, but once you start to examine the characters closely, they're all flawed. And your bad guys like to be bad guys.
ReplyDeleteCINDERS has people as people, not as types.
Scott, that's what I was after, so it's good to see you say it out loud. I hope other readers actually examine the characters. If they do, they'll find lots of little exciting things, I hope. This was another reason to tell the story in three POVs - to help demonstrate the layers of human interaction and how it affects where we think of ourselves in terms of good and bad and right and wrong.
ReplyDeleteI have yet to find an antagonist in Cinders. I hope I never do.
One day I'll write in an omniscient POV like you've done in your novels. I might have to rewrite the book after the first attempt. :)
I think the ideal you're getting at here can make it so hard to show our work to people who know us. "Do you really hate puppies?" "I didn't know you believed in X." Etc. As though it is all autobiography.
ReplyDeleteI have stepped into the shoes of main characters whose politics I abhor and those whose choices equate to a search, it might seem, for their own oppression, and I hope I have told their truth.
But my minor characters? Now you've got me thinking about whether I've done the same with them.
In other words, great post!
j a: Yeah, minor characters are easy to treat as furniture. You can do like Dickens and give each minor character a single but eye-catching trait (always saying "I will never leave my husband" or always picking at rust under fingernails) and otherwise use them as machines, which I think is what most of us do, or you can treat them as real people with actual backstories and all. I have a cast of a dozen characters in my WIP and I'm trying to make them all flesh-and-blood, but it takes a lot of work. In a few chapters, two policemen will show up, and very likely they'll just be 2-dimensional objects shaped like policemen instead of actual characters. They'll be props, but they're only in a couple of scenes so I'll allow myself that. Though now that I'm aware of it, their flatness will nag at me. Perhaps I'll give them names that are a private joke. Sometimes that's all it takes for me. I could call them Kernighan and Ritchie. That would be fun, and very meta.
ReplyDeleteI love it ;-)
ReplyDeleteIt's important that characters are true to themselves, and emotions and actions are not superficial. That's what separates good story-telling from lazy story-telling. Not that a classic good guys vs., bad guys tale is inherently lazy, it just has to have reason.
Great post, Scott. I have worried about my own mental stability sometimes when I've written characters that are truly crazy, or seemed completely unhinged while they believe what they are doing is normal. I like when I'm in the zone like that, but it sometimes scares me when I've created a truly brutal character (even if he's rational in his own reality). Makes me worried that I can see that side of the equation a little. But as you say, it behooves us to keep thing real and honest, for ourselves AND our readers.
ReplyDeleteEric: "Makes me worried that I can see that side of the equation a little." No, man, that's just what it's all about. Truth and honesty! I think more and more that my best writing comes about from the examination of my own flaws. The less perfect I realize I am, the less self-righteous I am, the more my writing seems to take the shape of something that matters. Or so I tell myself.
ReplyDelete@Scott - Guys named Nick tend to be ethically murky; no surprise there.
ReplyDelete@Michelle - I think of Monarch as having a western (e.g., "John Wayne") sense of morality. Good guys and bad guys, but the good guys do whatever it takes to protect their family kind of thing. Melodrama maybe, but that's not always a bad thing. And I like westerns. lol
@Scott - As for the post, I love the way you describe this. I've been trying to think about how to frame this idea as I revise Sublimation. I like the idea of loving the characters wholly. I don't think I achieve that uniformly, but it's the essence of my approach, and thinking about it like that may well help be tone up that part of my writing.
Reading your own thoughts, something else strange occurred to me. I don't know if I've ever written a character who does sit well with my general philosophy or moral compass. It's interesting to think about that.
"I don't know if I've ever written a character who does sit well with my general philosophy or moral compass"
ReplyDeleteI of course expect everyone to be a saint, so I'm constantly disappointed by people, including (maybe especially) me. Which is great fodder for fiction, if nothing else. But the main thing about this love of characters is that in some important ways you must refuse to view them as objects that fulfill dramatic roles like "hero" or "villain" or "sidekick" or "victim" or whatever, and view them as people you can't change but must accept and embrace. Though, of course, I totally reject the idea of fictional characters as separate things from the narrative. There is only the narrative, focused now and then through different voices and pushed through a plot. That's all. Sometimes there isn't a plot, just voice and theme (which is another aspect of voice).
There is only the narrative, focused now and then through different voices and pushed through a plot. That's all. Sometimes there isn't a plot, just voice and theme (which is another aspect of voice).
ReplyDeleteYou are way past nearly brilliant now, Mr. Bailey. That is one of the most liberating, validating, and empowering statements I have ever read. You've hit on the idea many times, but I think that's the most to-the-point I've seen it.
That has transformed me as a writer.
I know hyperbole. I love hyperbole. I am friends with hyperbole. That was no hyperbole.
It's my Unified Theory of Writing. Once I started thinking in terms of narratives instead of the constituent parts (story, plot, character, voice, theme, symbolism, et cet), my understanding of the novel became both simpler and more sophisticated (I tell myself). It's like a sculpture; people don't just think about the chisel marks, they think about the whole thing at once including the negative space and the architectural space around it. You can look closely at the way the marble is polished here, rough there, but to see the sculpture is to consider all of it at once and to see that you can't separate out the pieces of technique because they all interrelate and interdepend. But yeah, the short version above is a better way of putting it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I get as excited as Nevets about the distinction of of narrative vs. plot (partly because I write genre fiction) but the problem of "good" vs. "bad" characters sure resonates with me. Most of my books are inspired by people who are often ridiculed or criticized, and I try to imagine them as real people, and see their side of the story. One of my MCs has the opposite of my political views, and another is a spoiled Paris Hilton type. Another is inspired by the insider-trading Martha Stewart. I enjoy the challenge of making them likable.
ReplyDeleteScott, Although it has taken me several days to get to this, the post is enjoyed and appreciated by me! :) I like puppies! I like their soft skin and how they curl into a ball and how sometimes when they close their mouths their tongues are still poking out. I usually write the way you describe, but sometimes I explore the idea of having good characters and bad characters, having the existence of evil. It's not at all the way I see the world, but it has been helpful to me in my storytelling. Anyway, this is not to say that one way is better than another, but it was a big realization for me when I realized I was approaching it one way but that there was also another way to see things.
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