Why are Writers so Mean to their Characters?

Authors do awful things to their characters, don’t they? They burden them with intractable dilemmas, cause heartache, fear, misery, and depression, to say nothing of life-and-death peril, often resulting in bodily harm or death. If writers wreaked such havoc on real people, they’d be locked up.

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Advice from Authors

This past week, I attended a Zoom lecture given by author Jack Campbell. He said if you get stuck while writing, it’s often because you haven’t been mean enough to your characters. He said Mark Twain called it chasing your characters up a tree and then throwing rocks at them. (I can’t find the actual quote on any Twain site and it’s often attributed to others.)

I recall attending a writing class taught by the late author Ann C. Crispin. She told us, if you met your characters in real life, just walking down the street, they should want to punch you in the nose for what you’ve done to them.

The Reason

Why do authors mistreat their own characters? Does sadism explain it?

No, I don’t think so. I take no pleasure if tormenting my characters, and I suspect other writers feel the same way about theirs.

The answer lies with readers. I’m not reader-shaming here, just stating a fact. Readers take more interest in stories where characters suffer misfortune than in stories where they don’t. If the reading public preferred slice-of-life stories about characters enjoying a nice strife-free day, writers would cater to that need.

If you ask why readers prefer stories about suffering, and keep asking why, you’ll enter the realm of philosophy. I won’t venture far down that path, except to say we humans find ourselves living in an uncaring universe. We all want things, whether it’s an ice cream cone or world domination. Since the universe doesn’t cater to our whims, those unsatisfied desires cause us to struggle to pursue our needs. The struggle leads to suffering.

In other words, the universe treats us just as badly as writers treat their characters. Therefore, readers crave stories about characters grappling with problems and experiencing misfortune.

Degrees of Meanness

Many writers inflict physical pain on their characters, from bloody noses to broken bones and even death. Being mean, though, needn’t involve physical trauma. As often, or maybe more often, characters must endure mental anguish of some kind. They must suffer terror, grief, melancholy, distress, jealousy, rage, or any of hundreds of others.

The author control panel includes selector switches for characters, a thousand buttons for the type of suffering to impose, and a dial for the degree of discomfort, with a scale from mild to intolerable.

Is this Necessary?

I know this sounds twisted, brutal, and merciless. However, no real people are harmed in the creation of fiction. Moreover, the agony suffered by characters serves a purpose. Their survival, if they survive, gives readers hope. If the main character dies or otherwise fails to alleviate the suffering, that failure serves as a warning to readers—don’t do what that character did while alive. Some fault, some flaw in the character led to a deserved death.

You’ll find informative discussions about this by Justin Ferguson, the folks at MightyAuthor.com, and Jami Gold.

Be Nice Instead?

Perhaps you’d prefer to write a pleasant story, where nice people live in a nice place and do nice things to each other. You’re free to do so. It might even sell. You’ll have to craft your story so that readers remain interested somehow, attracted by your style of writing, or fascinated by the characters or setting such that they keep wondering what’s going to happen next.

That sounds difficult to pull off. Such a book wouldn’t meet reader expectations. Most often, they clamor for conflict. As author Veronica Roth said, “If there’s no conflict, there are no stories worth telling—or reading!”

I can’t find the citation, but I believe Isaac Asimov said that the task of the storyteller is to maximize the impact on the reader’s emotions. You’ll find it difficult to do that with out being cruel to your characters.

Cruel to be Kind

Think of it like the 1978 song, “Cruel to be Kind” by Nick Lowe. In this case, you’re being cruel to your characters to be kind to your readers. Since your characters can’t fight back and your readers pay for your books, that works to your advantage.

If you’ll excuse me, some fictional characters are due to get roughed up by mean ol’—

Poseidon’s Scribe

Been to Utopia and Dystopia, and I prefer…

Judging from recent literature, the future looks bleak. The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, Delirium, Matched, Legend, and others paint visions of worlds much worse than our own.

Without question, these books sell well. Some have become movies. We readers have a fascination with dismal futures, possibly because:

  • They make our own present seem better by comparison;
  • We like to imagine the end result of current downward trends;
  • The character’s stakes are high, the conflicts larger than life;
  • We identify with being a victim of society;
  • It’s inspiring to read about characters making the best of things in the worst of places; or
  • Millennials, raised in the shadow of 9-11, actually believe their future will be worse than their present.

city-654849_960_720From the writer’s point of view, dystopias have this advantage—at least one of the book’s conflicts is baked in from the start. There will be some sort of man vs. society conflict going on. Whatever other conflicts are present, you’ll find a struggle between the individual and the state. By contrast, in utopias, conflict is harder to come by.

For this post, I’ll define utopian literature to refer to fiction set in a future world that’s better and more technologically advanced than our own, but is not necessarily a perfect world. Dystopian literature is fiction set in a future world worse than our own (with either more advanced or less advanced technology), it’s but not necessarily a completely hellish world.

spaceship-499131_960_720Utopian literature doesn’t seem to be selling as well as its dystopian opposite. Such books once rocketed off shelves. Almost all science fiction written in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s assumed society and technology would advance and life in general would improve.

Such utopian books didn’t portray perfect futures. The characters suffered from problems and challenges as dire as those in any novel. After all, if someone traveled to our present from almost any period in the past, they’d view our modern era as utopian, thanks to our long life spans, medical advancements, reasonably plentiful food, and readily available technology. We look around us and see no end of problems, but in the eyes of our ancestors, we all inhabit Utopia.

Does the prevailing literary mood reflect society’s predominant attitude toward technology? In the 1940-1970 period, could it be that the Space Race, combined with the baby boom (which produced a huge number of youthful readers), result in a yearning for optimistic literature?

Might it be that today’s readers no longer hold a positive view of technology? Has the rise of terrorism, increasing surveillance, climate change, cybercrime, and a fear of artificial intelligence biased the current book-buying public against science?

Possibly, but Baby Boomers had “bad” technology, too—namely, the Bomb. And Millennials have plenty to be optimistic about, such as driverless cars, household robots, 3D printing, hyperloops, missions to Mars, etc.

If each generation knew both good and bad technology, then why would they hold such different attitudes toward it? Or is it something besides a prevailing view of science?

Could it be all due to the Boomers alone? Maybe that “pig in a python” generation is, all by itself, influencing literature as its population ages. That is, when Boomers were young and optimistic, they preferred Utopia, but as they became older, sadder, and wiser, they pulled up stakes and moved to Dystopia.

Hieroglyph coverWhatever the reason for the current literary preference, some evidence indicates the reaction against dystopia and back toward utopia has begun. In 2011, author Neal Stephenson helped found Project Hieroglyph which seeks fiction and nonfiction depicting a positive future. The published anthology, Hieroglyph, is on my list of books to read.

I prefer utopian fiction. Being a techno-optimist, I prefer to think the future will be better than the present, and reading such books keeps me in that mindset. However, I’m not Pollyannaish; I know society could well backslide, much as the thousand year Dark Ages followed the Roman Empire. Further, I know readers of dystopian books don’t necessarily believe the future of the real world will be dismal.

Let me know your position on this spectrum. Do you read solely utopian, or solely dystopian books? Or perhaps you don’t care, so long as the book is good. Your comment may influence the type of fiction to be written by—

Poseidon’s Scribe