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I am wondering what everyones thoughts are on maintaining an emotional sense of connection with a character. It's one of those things that comes naturally to the writer, since only in school and in jounalism (and the author in that one story, Misery) are we forced to write about people that we could care less about. But the investment and attachment we feel is not always easily shared or even understood by our audience. What I want to know then is, first, what are the elements that help a reader to develop and maintain that sense that they actually care about the character. Some are technical points of writing, like using a language that the reader can understand, or conventions that they are comfortable with, putting the story in a format where they can read it in a couple of hours if they are really dedicated or bit by bit over a week if they are just filling spare time. But what about larger issues of creating sympathy with a character who might seem to be unsympathetic at first?
Here is my thought. If you can build interest in the character, and persuade the reader that it is worth the effort of finding out more about the characters motives and history, then you have the luxury of being able to tell your story. If you can provide compelling evidence that what may seem odd or unlikeable about the protaganist is justifiable and good, then you have taken the reader through a transformative experience.
So is this our goal? If it is, then what are some of the techniques that we can use?
posted
By the way, Kathleen just posted a couple of things that look kind of official but I have no idea who exactly they are targeted at. What's this Writing class that she refers to?
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
The idea is that people who want to write, but don't have anything ready (and so can't really participate in a regular writing group--mainly because I won't let them until they have something ready), can go to the Writing Class and get some "instruction" on how to get something ready.
I teach a writing class during winter quarter at the local community school (used to be known as "night school"--this is not a community college but something done during the evening at the local high school), and I figured I could give some of the same instruction and exercises at Hatrack as I do in the regular class I teach.
I have yet to write a story about a (main) character I didn't like. Not to say that I'd hang out with Storm, who would find me weak and slow, but I admire her nonetheless. She is strong, clever, and professionally/ financially successful, all things I wish *I* was. (Okay, I'm clever, but the other two are much harder to attain). Anyway, as a reader, I find that I like characters that I can identify with-- they don't have to be exactly like me, but they should have some quality that I can at least understand, if not one I share with them. For example, I have read Robert Jordan's "Eye of the World". It's really much longer than it should be, but every one of the main, "good", characters is an interesting and separate individual; they all have some, or many, qualities that either I have, or wish I had, so I like them all. (Rand is Honest, Mat is Clever, Perrin is Strong, Nynaeve is Caring, Lan is Dedicated, etc.). Now, if you have a character that doesn't have a likeable personality, or any obviously admirable qualities, then I would think you'd have to make those who interact with him express some reason, by words or actions, that they know he's worth talking to and being interested in, or you have to make bad things happen to him that bring out his better qualities and make your audience like him.
posted
Hmm. Still, it must be possible to write about characters that we don't personally like all that much. After all, look at Card. He's written about a lot of characters that I'm pretty sure he didn't like.
Nonetheless, I'm going to stick to protaganists that have traits I admire, for now anyway. But I'm not sure how to present those traits as the sort of thing that my reader is going to admire.
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Let me start off with, "if i drift off im sorry". Ok character reader connection. Basically your character is part of your creative mind, you might say well im not a bad person, but that doesn't mean you can't think of something a mean person would do, if a bully sees a small boy with glasses on the playground, hes going to beat him up, why? because thats what bullies do, characters can be predictable, they are tools in a story.
Posts: 7 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
I just registered so hopefully my reply won't be too abrupt. But I've always found maintaining sympathy for characters to be the hardest part of writing. And yet, I think that most of us already know how to do so. I don't know what kind of person you all are, but there are always people out there who can make you feel sorry for them, just by living and what they do. Or people who you love because of their personality or actions. It's all in a character's interactions with others. We know it all, we just can't put it into words sometimes. Simply because we want to write it in a different and new way, not the normal lingo of everyday life. I don't know if that makes any sense.
A really good example is like with cool villians. You know, those evil people who you just love! They're evil but they also have one or more traits that you admire. There's the connection. Then of course you can do things like kill the evil guy because he's evil even with the good trait...but I'm diverging. Anyway, I agree that you need something understandable in your characters. So readers will relate whether or not they are aware of it.
I think most of us agree on why people can relate to characters in books. Now all we need is the how of making a character that is likeable. This is my biggest problem. Especially in longer works. Sometimes you get tired of the characters and it's reflected in your writing.
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I have found that while I write I jump from one charactor to another giving each their own flaws and strengths. This might be one of my major problems. In the book I have just finished, there are six (6) {yes I said six} charactors. Each one with his or her own story to tell. Until the end where they all come together and become one. Is this a problem? I don't know. Mr. Card said that you should have only one charactor and one protaginous. (sorry about the spelling must use hammer on fingers). I disagree. If you intend to develope All of your charactors, you must give each one a life. Or am I wrong?
Posts: 51 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
Well, that depends on whether or not you can do it. I myself don't know anyone that has even the least experience of actually being six different people at the same time...I believe that trying to develop other characters beyond how your protagonist sees them means flattening out their personalities, fitting them all into the same mold. Also, those characters can't surprise you anymore.
I meet people every day that I haven't the least hope of ever really understanding. For me to try and write a story from their points of view, I would have to ignore what they really are and pretend that they were something much simpler. That's why I personally don't try to write in POV for more than one character.
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Orson Scott Card may encourage writers to have only one character and one protagonist (I'm not sure I agree that that is what he actually says, however), but does he always follow that advice?
Damon Knight believes (and I agree) that whenever someone gives a rule of writing, the aspiring writer should go to successfully published works (especially those by the person giving the rule) and see if that is what they actually do in their own stories.
Often, you will find stories in which the rule-giver did not obey the rule. That doesn't mean you can break it, too. It means that you should study what the rule-giver did and how it worked. And you should study other writers who also did not follow that rule to see how they made their stories work.
Don't just take a rule because someone gives it to you. Go see if published authors really follow it. And study how they do or do not follow it--learn from them.
Rules won't do you a bit of good if you don't know why they are rules and what obedience of them can do for you--if it can do anything.
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Yes, well you'll never see anything written by me in which I violate this rule...because I can't do it. I never try to write for a character that behaves in a way that I couldn't see behaving myself, because I can't honestly assert that I understand what would make a person act in a way that I would never act, otherwise it wouldn't be a way that I would never act.
I would say, though, that you should generally do what uncle Orson says, not what he does when it comes to writing. His advice to new writers is always cogent and valid, his actual stories are not meant as a model for imitation, particularly by unexperienced writers like me.
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As for writing (putting flesh on more than 2 charactors, I become at least three in my book. Each with his or her own charactoristics. (there goes the fingers again...). I won't say its easy to do but you can do it if you work at it hard enough.
posted
I could do it too, but I think that most readers would rapidly become incredulous seeing more than one character that I could imagine...even granted that they could believe in just one to start with.
Posts: 8322 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
I see your point. What I do in that case is to remember old friends of mine and use their charactoristics for each of my "People". Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. How would you handle it?
Posts: 51 | Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
I told you. I create history and motivations for a person, then have them act as I would with that history and motivation. This person becomes my POV character. I don't bother with POV for others in the story, all I have to do is match behavior patterning for the sort of characters they are.
I limit myself to one POV character because it would be unrealistic to have more than one character based on my personality. I am reasonably competent at predicting behavior using pattern analysis, but I have never been able to understand or empathize with other humans with any degree of accuracy or reliability. So if I assumed that there where two characters that I could write POV for, I would be assuming the existance of a situation that I have no experience of in my own life.
ALso, I regard POV as being best limited to a single character for artistic reasons. There is a greater versimilitude to the way that we experience real life in single POV narratives, and there are also advantages in terms of character sympathy and depth of audience involvement with the central character. Building the entire story around a single person's experiences also provides a natural complement of thematic tensions and sub tensions which can be resolve in various ways throughout the story, leading to an integrated dramatic narrative.
Failing to choose a single point of view for the narrative means having to artificially shape the varying concerns of the characters so that they all experience thematic resolutions with complementary timings. It also means keeping track of separate perception flows (which can be done but is always very hard on the reader, because when two POV characters have differing perceptions the reader is forced to decide which one is obtuse), differing intellectual and emotional abilities, even different vocabularies. And that's just to start with.
All that work, and for what? A narrative that is invariably less true to life (or at least to the reader's experience of life), less unified in theme and prose, less able to draw the reader into deep sympathy with the main character, and harder for the reader to follow. And that's assuming that you're a brilliant writer at the top of your powers.
I'm not. And not only am I not a brilliant writer at the top of my powers, I can barely justify writing POV for even one character, let alone several. But that's just me.
I understand about your point on POV...still maybe it's me. I have always written with several charactors working together and against each other. Each one different than the other. I'm I doing something wrong by writing this way? Is it possible to have something that is interesting to the readers at this level of activity?
For example...in my latest work I develope each charactor in their own chapters so that you could get to know each one separately. Then later on I combined the charactors into one grouping to interact with each other.
Am I missing something in this mix? Or should I re-write the book with only one or two people/charactors interacting together with the others just in the background.
posted
Well, I would have to read your writing to get a feel for whether or not you make it work. Many successful writers do this, in fact, I think that it's probably more common than single POV writing.
The problem for me is that I've never actually liked a book better for being written with multiple points of view. For one thing, it brings up a problem with balance in the narrative, which can only really be solved by devoting about half or more of the narrative to POVs other than that of the main character. This invariably means less concentration on the main POV character, which means that the story is less meaningful to the reader. And there are always things happening that either are not witnessed by the main character, or that are important to the main character but initially presented through some other character's viewpoint. Which means that the story either has to go to the main character's viewpoint to get an after the fact reaction, reprise the scene from the main character's point of view, or simply leave the question of reaction unanswered.
And so on and so on. I myself don't believe that multiple POV is more prevalent because it is better so much as because authors haven't really explored ways to tell the story from a single point of view. When writers imagine a story, they imagine characters in the story and their motivations. Having done that, they then write initially in a very naive and unreadable floating omniscient with shallow character penatration, then learn to handle viewpoint issues a little better and start assigning viewpoint. But I think that very few actually try to recast a story that they initially wrote in multiple viewpoint as a single viewpoint story.
Many best selling writers have never written a single POV book, which suggests to me that it's not a considered decision so much as a result of never having learned to tell a complex narrative from a single point of view. And those writers that I know that have written books both ways, I invariably prefer their single POV books to their multiple POV books.
Dual POV, I think, is somewhat different. It is clearly not single POV, but I would regard it as a valid option when the main theme of the book revolves around a single, very powerful relationship between two characters. Since the relationship itself functions as a complex of shared experience between the two characters, I think that using both points of view can be almost required to complete the portrayal.
But narratives are different. A narrative is unique to a single point of view. True the point of view of many narratives is shared by a community, but when that is the case, it is the similarities, not the differences, that comprise the story shared. But now I'm digressing into some odd theory about stories and how we use them to become unique.
My point is, I don't believe that multiple point of view narratives are inherently better or more compelling than single point of view stories. I believe that most writers don't learn how to write complex stories from a single point of view. And at the very least, if they learned how to do so, then they could consciously control whether or not they use multiple points of view in their writing. Given the many difficulties with multiple point of view narratives, I think that every story deserves a shot as a single point of view story first.
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