posted
Especially in a short story, how do you create sympathy for a character? You've got very little time to do it. I suppose it doesn't have to happen right in the hook, but I imagine in a page or so....is it a compelling situation? A nice person?
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
I doubt there is a magical formula, but I would suggest it would have to do with the character. If a character starts of in a bad situation that people can relate too, you get some sympathy right from the start.
I guess one way to figure it out would be to determine what would make you sympathize with the character. Are they working two jobs, and barely making it? Maybe they are ugly, and people pick on them all the time.
If the situation and intraction with other characters is set up to make the life of the character harder, you will get some sympathy for the character.
Of course this make some assumptions that the story is well written, and the character is properly developed.
posted
I agree with LDS that there isn't a magic formula. I try to make my characters likeable. If a reader likes the character, or feels a connection to the character, he/she will be more sympathetic towards the character. In a short story, it's easier if you use "normal" people, that way there's less to explain.
I've learned a lot here at Hatrack, and one of the most important things I've learned, I leanred from Eric.
In short, Eric taught me that whereas all literary short fiction is character driven, this isn't true with most genre short fiction. Most genre short fiction is plot driven. So the goal isn't really to create these great characters as much as it is to develop good, intriging plots.
Now before someone rashly clicks on the "post reply" button, I'm saying that MOST genre fiction works like this. NOT ALL OF IT. Indeed, some of the best genre short fiction has great characters. Ender's Game, Flowers for Algernon, and The Reach are a few that come to mind.
But if you're interested in creating sympathetic characters, I don't believe it's the character that does it so much as the situation. Raymond Carver's short story "They're Not Your Husband" begins with a man going into a diner where his wife works. He orders a meal. Then two other men come in. They sit next to him and begin commenting on how overweight his wife is. Embarrassed the man gets up and walks out, ignoring his wife when she calls for him.
The situation is one in which I think most readers can identify with both the husband and the wife. What the husband does isn't right, but who among us can say that we wouldn't feel his embarrassment (even if we wouldn't walk out). And we feel for the wife because she's A, the object of ridicule, and B, going to have to suffer in some way because of her husband's embarrassment.
So you have to think up a gut-wrenching situation if you want the reader to feel sympathy for the character.
posted
Thank you, Balthasar. I think that was aptly put. It makes a lot of sense. It may well be that when I get feedback saying that a character is unsympathetic, there may just be something about the underlying plot that is not striking a chord with them. On the other hand, I do write a lot of character stories, even as short stories (character comes to some important realization at the end rather than a major change...not enough time to show a major change) but in a few of the cases I'm thinking about I meant for the stories to be event-driven or idea stories. This is really helping me understand where I need to go with them.
Posts: 3567 | Registered: May 2003
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posted
Wonderful examples Baltharsar . I actually am concerned about this issue in a short story I'm working on. It seems that if the character is a victim of the situation/plot then the reader feel more sympathic. If the main character is all powerful we loose the sympathic edge. What I like about Baltharsar's examples is that not all the main characters are people I would like in real life, yet they made me feel deeply because of the situations they are thrown into . In those stories it is not only the characters it is the situation- what's Ender without Battle School or Algernon without the operation?
[This message has been edited by Kickle (edited October 01, 2004).]
posted
The kind of character stories you're writing are commonly known as "epiphany" stories--stories in which the character comes into a deeper understanding. As far as I know, it was James Joyce who "invented" this kind of short fiction. He at least coined the term.
There's two problems with writing "epiphany" short fiction. Well, they're not problems, really, as much as they are important things to think about. The first is that an epiphany story IS a character story and can be nothing but a character story. The dramatic question of this kind of story is always, "Will so-and-so come to a deeper understanding of such-and-such?" In a sense, this is THE dramatic question of the majority of 20th-century fiction. So-called plotless fiction.
Genre fiction, however, has its roots in the old, romantic fiction of the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Plot was king back then. That's not to say that character's weren't important, but, rather, that the meaning of the story was found in the action of the story, not in the character's perceptions.
I don't want to imply that the two can't be merged together, but I'm not sure you can ever merge them fully. Now here's the problem--at least as I see it. What makes speculative fiction work is the speculative element. That's key. When that gets moved to the background and the character's internal perceptions gets moved to the foreground, I'm not convinced you have a pure speculative fiction story. What's the rule: A SF story is the kind of story where the speculative science is essential to the plot. How does this work when the focus of the story isn't on the science, but on the character? In other words, I've found that EVERY character-driven speculative fiction story I've tried to write I can write without the speculative element. I can remove the SF, F, or H element and have basically the same story. And often times its more powerful.
This is not to say that it can't be done. In my previous post I noted some examples. I suppose my point is this: If you're going to write a character-driven speculative fiction story, you have to find a way for the speculative element to be an essential part of the character's epiphany. So essential, that the character couldn't come to the understanding outside of the speculative backdrop.
This is the way I see it. In fact, I'd embrace a debate on this. I'd love if someone could convince me otherwise.
posted
Thanks Balthasar, that made perfect sense to me. I won't argue, I'm on your side on this one. I agree wholeheartedly!
Posts: 471 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
Isn't that the whole point of good speculative fiction? Speculative fiction isn't to postulate the "if", it is to examine the "what if". And that "what" will nearly always be an insight into human nature.
True, in much fiction we can be shown a situation and allowed to react to it on our own, without the intermediary of a character that experiences the same epiphany. But usually in good fiction there is at least an element of that humanity in the characters which we hope to touch in the reader, and thus the character is touched as well.
Which gets to what I think is the important point. The character should be someone that the readers can identify in themselves. A touching character shows the audience a mirror of themselves. The effective "what if" story sparks a critical phrase in the mind of those who read it. "What if"...it was me?
posted
Balthasar, thank you for the great insights. I had never thought of these things before.
I have read the novelette "Flowers for Algernon" and the novel Ender's Game, but I haven't read "The Reach." That's a Stephen King short story, right?
On this short list, the examples of speculative fiction that use sympathetic characters tend to be longer works. Perhaps a short story simply doesn't have enough words to do all that heavy lifting.
I believe a writer can achieve this in serialized short stories. If other stories have established the milieu, and perhaps an ongoing plot, you could easily write intermediate stories that are character driven. Television science fiction does this all the time, though not always well.
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Survivor: I've always assumed the "what if" of speculative fiction works like this: What if human were to colonize the Moon? Mars? What if children were sent to a battle school? What if robots slowly took over society?
Okay, maybe what I really mean by speculative fiction is hard SF. I'll need to think about this more.
But I still think my original point is valid--namely, that speculative fiction has its roots in plot-driven fiction, not character introspection, and therefore, and "epiphany" story doesn't work as a speculative fiction story. This does not mean, however, that good SF stories can't have deep and compelling characters.
Doc Brown: Yes, "The Reach" is a King story; it's in his collection, SKELETON CREW. And it's considered his best short story.
I want to claify something. I'm talking ONLY about SHORT fiction. I do think that novella-length and novel-length speculative fiction can be very character driven. I'm just not sure short SF can.
posted
Balthasar, I agree with you. My comment about serialized short stories was just thinking out loud, so to speak.
King talks about "What if . . ." questions a lot in his book On Writing. From page 169:
quote:What if Vampires invade a small New England village?
I'm a hard sci-fi guy myself, and King's "What if . . ." questions don't excite me. He seldom stresses character in his stories, and has a clear disdane for plot, but he loves situation based stories. The stories that come out of King's "What if . . ." questions sell a freaking boatload of books.
posted
I can see your point; it is hard for a short story to be both speculative and centred on the character. I'm certainly finding it hard to think up good examples.
Here's one that sounds from the description of an 'epiphany' story that it should fit: Asimov's "The Last Question" (if I remember the title correctly), a story about an AI making a realisation about the nature of its relationship with the universe. But the story at its core is really about that relationship, not the AI itself.
P K Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (which eventually metamorphosised into Total Recall) may count: the memory insertion procedure caused the character to remember memories that he had suppressed, so he came to a realisation about himself.
posted
Well, Doc, I agree with you that King doesn't stress character in his stories, but I think it's because he doesn't necessarily have to. His characters are so real that they don't NEED to be stressed. This is one thing about King's writing that makes me a huge fan of his. I'm particularly thinking about the Dark Tower Series, 'Salem's Lot, and Rose Madder when I say this.
I think King's characters are some of the most sympathetic I've ever read. He takes you into their heads, makes you understand their motivations, makes you understand even the reasoning behind the mistakes that they make, and mentions little things in the background that makes you recognize them as real people. I think that's what makes his stories so scary. But he doesn't make it obvious when he does it.
The characters are just THERE, but they are true. And that really helps me to sympathize with them, because they either seem really familiar or seem as if I could talk with them if they sat next to me on a bus.
I guess for me sympathy boils down to understanding. If I can see where they're coming from and why they're acting a certain way, I'm more likely to root for them in a conflict. (Even if they're the bad guys. Give me a bad guy with deep motivation over a flat good guy any day!)
posted
If by uncommon you mean "fantastic," then I agree. But Hemingway's "The Killers" is an epiphany story, and that's based on an uncommon experience, namely, coming face to face with the mob. But perhaps this is merely semantics.
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I'd also disagree with Doc Brown (and Stephen King himself) that King doesn't care for plot. He certainly does. What he seems not to like is the idea of the plot outline, or plotting out a novel before hand. Of coures, I'm working under the notion that the "plot" is the way the story is ordered to keep the reader reading. Maybe King has a different notion of plot.
posted
Indeed, I meant "uncommon" in the sense of being "fantastic". Indeed, in the other sense, there is no such thing as a "common" experience. After all, coming face to face with "the mob" is a quite common human experience, if we include any essentially criminal and unaccountable organization in that description.
I'd agree with you about King as well...and with Jeraliey that King's characterization is based firmly on making the characters the sort of people that the reader instinctively understands.
It is one of those things that makes me wonder whether I'm really cut out to be a writer. I don't like humans. I always want to write about and for people who simply lack human qualities. Those are the stories that interest me. But nobody else likes them.
posted
It varies. Sometimes I just leave the human qualities out and leave it up to the reader to notice or not. Nowadays I usually go ahead and give the character a clearly dehumanizing background.
And I've learned to portray some human qualities in my characters, though that's still a bit hit-or-miss. Sometimes other people like it, sometimes not. I generally don't find it very satisfying, though.
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