posted
In my WIP, I had this guarantee against making a particular group (Baptists) look ridiculous: there was an important character in this group, a sympathetic one. There were a few minor ones with less sympathetic roles.
The important one's gone, and it improves the book. I'm left with 2 minor Baptist characters, missionaries, and I already know I want one, "Robert," to be a sort of go-off-half-cocked-and-give-up-when-it's-tough type. The most natural thing I can find for his wife "Alicia" is to make her strict, critical, with poor social skills: by "natural" I mean that it accentuates Robert's conflict if she's no help. OTOH it bugs me when a writer picks some group and makes them all awful. These are still minor characters: no scenes from their POV at present.
John Barnes's advice on characters like this is either remove them, or stick their flaws up the reader's nose: don't avoid it.
Anyway, I'm rambling here because I'm not sure what to do. Maybe there's some other set of character traits that would hook me (and then the reader). I haven't thought of them yet. What I'd rather do is have these characters be unsympathetic without seeming to make a statement that Baptists are bad. What are your thoughts?
posted
Tell the story the way it needs to be told and don't worry about what groups the characters belong to. It's not as though you're making them out to be serial murderers. From what you've said, they just seem to be flawed characters in a minor role. I don't think there's much you can do if a few readers are unreasonable enough to take a couple minor characters as a negative commentary on their religion.
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posted
So is unsympathetic the word you use to get around calling people "evil"? If their unsympatheticness relies on them being Baptist, then that would make your story hostile to Baptism. If they could be any religion (or professors of some soft science where you embrace skepticism) then you're probably basing their unsympathy adequately in their other character traits.
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posted
Unless this story is being written specifically for publication within the Christian fiction genre, and subsequently exposed to a greater level of criticism where matters of religion are concerned, I don't think you'll have a problem. Neither do I think it is such a story in the first place, just from what I can read in your post. Some writers (even Christian, and possibly 'Baptist' writers) do the same thing.
Frank Peretti, a popular Christian author of supernatural thrillers with his own enjoyably unique style, has even gone a step further in a few of his novels. In one (I think it was called This Present Darkness) he has several parishioners of a local church manipulated by demons because of their 'false faith,' basically making them major antagonists in the mortal aspect of the story. However, he carefully distinguishes between the faithful and these faithless in the congregation (since it is Christian fiction, after all). You wouldn't necessarily have to go to such lengths...just keep in mind that his books have gone over very well with Christians and non-Christians (and likely Baptists and non-Baptists) alike, despite his vilification of supposedly 'religious' characters.
I highly recommend his novel The Oath, by-the-way, but that's completely off-topic.
In any case, I wouldn't worry too much about insulting Baptists, as long as your dialogue- and expository-based presentation of information doesn't directly paint them as inherently evil. Here's a thought...if you know any Baptists (preferably several, to get a half-decent sample size), have them read the passage in question. That might be a better litmus test than anything we can postulate here.
Godspeed.
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited August 01, 2006).]
posted
It is just a story, hopefully fictional. If so, then don't worry about groups or anything - tell the story. In reality there are some people that are just boring and others that you can write pages about. I have to write personal reviews on all my subordinates, the hardest ones to write about are those who have done poorly or displayed a poor attitude.
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posted
I don't know to what degree the character's religion becomes an important plot point. Maybe being Baptist is merely one facet of what they are, like their race, their skin tone, the color of their hair, their financial status, etc.
If you are uncomfortable poking fun at Baptists, then make mention of it once, and move on. Certainly anyone from ANY religion can come across as strident, pushy and narrow minded. Show them being narrow minded in other ways... then it becomes a character trait and not a direct result of their denomination.
The reality is that for those of us who CHOOSE our religion (ie, not born to it), our character traits in large part determine which religion we fall into. We share a common belief system with others who hold some common character traits. People of like-mind tend to congregate together.
posted
Will, I think you're right to be concerned. I also hate it when all members of a group have a particular characteristic - for example, if all your black characters are drug dealers, or if all the pretty people are wholesome and honest, or all the women are submissive wives, and so on. It's worth considering as you review your cast and plot.
But from what you've said, it sounds as if you have two flawed characters who happen to be Baptists, and they're not even flawed in the same way - I'm not sure what message you could abstract from what you've described above. Baptists are flawed? I'm sure they're not the only flawed characters in your book.
Let them rescue orphaned kittens or something if you're worried.
posted
IMHO, you want all of your characters to be believably human. This means a balance of flaws and grace. If they're human, how can anyone take offense over the role they play in your story? So you have chosen to portray an isolated moment of their lives, and this happens to be a moment in which their graceful qualities are overwhelmed by their clumsier qualities...so what? If you wrote a story about what I did yesterday, or even the day before, I'd be the procrastinating, dithering loser in the plot. If you wrote a story about what I did last week, I'd be someone else. (Well, I'd still be a procrastinator, but you would have a better chance at revealing a few of my more sympathetic qualities.)
That said, can a writer ease the dilemma by looking at his characters in groups? Using your example, say we want "Baptists" to be a character in our book, and we need this character to be fully balanced. So we take an unsympathetic character trait, go-off-half-cocked-and-give-up-when-it's-tough, and name it "Robert." Then we take another trait, strict, critical, and poor social skills, and name it "Alicia." Now, in order to balance our character, we need "Tom" and "Gladys" to be calmly objective and generous. There's a decent cross-section, and our "Baptists" are believably balanced. Do Tom and Gladys need to be characters of equal plot-time with Robert and Alicia? Not at all. But to leave them out entirely skews your greater group-character and risks creating a flat impression, which is what you mean when you say "...it bugs me when a writer picks some group and makes them all awful."
So, are there times when it is useful and necessary to include a flat character in your writing? Someone so one-sided as to be definitively "bad" versus definitively "good"? I think we've hinted at this in other threads, but not quite in this context. I think it depends on whether your story is "character driven" versus "plot driven", but what does everyone else think?
posted
I don't know that you have any reason to mention that these characters are Baptists.
You probably do need to mention that they're missionaries. But as long as you make it clear that you're condemning them for their failure to be good missionaries, and not for their missionary efforts, you're in the clear there as well.
A lot of this depends on your POV. If the primary POV character looks at these people and says " they're not very good missionaries", that's very different from looking at them and saying "stupid// missionaries".
Now, the same would hold true if there were some particular reason to mention that they were Baptists. It would only matter that they were Baptists if they betrayed the POV's expectations (perhaps based on previous experience) of what Baptists should be.
posted
Why not just try to work a sympathetic baptist in somewhere? Doesn't need to be anything major since the unsympathetic ones are minor.
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posted
You don't even need another named baptist character--just an interaction, reference, or implication that some Baptist somewhere disagrees with your "bad" Baptists bad behavior.
I.e:
Protagonist: Stop being a jackass Bad Baptist: You sound like my deacon father-in-law. [continues being a jackass]
posted
The best way to solve this, I think, is to have the characters recongize their faults. Part of Christianity is that there is a standard of living, and the reason why Christians ask for forgiveness is that they don't live according to this standard. So if you have your characters know their faults, and if you have them agonize over them, feeling remorse, deciding to try to do better in the future, et cetera, et cetera, you'll create well-rounded likeable characters.
And if you really want to see how this is done, read Graham Greene's THE POWER AND THE GLORY -- about a pretty rotten Catholic priest you can't help loving and admiring.
posted
Lots of good advice here, and I think I can make this work now. (Or if not, it'll be a different problem.)
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