Love thy characters

[tangofiction]

Partly inspired by meditations on "happy ends", and partly by some of my recent reading...

I really can't stand books/stories where the author doesn't love the characters.

I really can't stand books/stories where the author doesn't love the characters. That is, where the primary purpose in writing the text is to convey an agenda, rather than tell a story about people whom the author cares about. In novels, such an agenda may be something like "the filthy lives of these characters reveal the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie". In fanfic, it might be character-bashing revenge fic ("she rejected him in the canon, now she must suffer!"). In both novels and fanfic, this can also happen when the author falls in love with their plot/twist/idea/symbolism, to the point where the characters no longer matter as personalities.



Writing with an agenda is not the same as writing with a purpose. There is undeniably a point being made in a novel like "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", for instance -- namely, that it is an unfortunate aspect of human nature to identify beauty with virtue. But Hugo never allows his characters to become puppets used to illustrate his concepts; he appears to give them free will, and writes them in a way that makes the reader empathise with them. You get the impression that the writer himself cares about them. By contrast, in novels like Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (which I ranted about years ago at the start of this diary), what really matters to the writer is her own oh-so-brilliant plot and the moral of her story. The characters are mostly puppets. The author doesn't seem to care about them, and neither do I.



This applies to everything from romance to horror. If the characters are not alive to the author, they will not be alive to the reader. Nobody will care if they are made to kiss, or to explode with gobbets of flesh dripping off the walls; the only emotion you can provoke in a reader that way is disgust or cynical amusement. If you want to make the reader care about what happens to the characters you need to care about them yourself.



This doesn't mean that you shield them from all conflict and kill the drama, or that everything you write should have a happy end. I think a writer has to love their characters independently of the plot. That is, you don't design the plot based on how much you like your characters ("let's give this guy a happy end, he deserves it!") but based on what is interesting, coherent and logical. Then, and only then, can you fall in love with the characters to your heart's content and suffer/rejoice with them.



So. That's today's rant.