Views from a writing group

[GoldenCojones]

I'm in a writing group. We meet every other Saturday at noon to drink beer and eat pizza and every now and then we discuss writing. Well, today one of our members actually wanted to talk about writing and it turned into a lively discussion. Sorry for the long intro, but the short of it is, after leaving the meeting with a belly full of pizza and Coke Zero (I don't drink much beer) I couldn't stop thinking about the conversation and then at eighty miles an hour on the bumpy little shit trail they call a road that leads to my house I had an epiphany.

I know why I suck as a writer.

I start lots of SF/F stories and I finish a few. The few I finish are rarely very good. It's because I am too emotionally attached to my characters. Every good story has points in the story where bad things happen to the characters. That is usually where my stories slowly languish and die. I have a very hard time being mean to my characters. I read books like the "Sword of Truth" series by Terry Goodkind and DAMN! That boy is vicious to his characters. I really struggle with that.

I have a few stories where I just forced myself to do it. My wife laughed her ass off because I sat at the computer and literally wept as I wrote about my main character being captured and tortured in a Fantasy story. It was the hardest thing I have ever done and I didn't write a word for almost a month after that. When I did start writing again, it was a silly little porn story that I posted here for the Valentines day contest.

I never really understood, and I mean that in the visceral "UNDERSTOOD" way, why it was so hard, but as others in the group were talking about there characters, I realized, that I'm WAY more emotionally attached to my characters than other writers in my writing group are.

Do you guys get emotionally attached to your characters? Do you struggle with the hard times they go through? If any of you have struggled with this and found a way to "fix" it, please share it with me. If I'm going to be the writer I want to be then I have to find a way to write the bad times.

Thanks in advance for any advice you give.

 

[sr71plt]

I will say that I think what I frequently see on the forum that the characters--even the protagonists--have to be liked--by either the writer or the reader--irritates the hell out of me and makes me think that the writer/reader who needs that is severely limited in both her/his reading and her/his observation of life.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

I'm in a writing group.

Every good story has points in the story where bad things happen to the characters. That is usually where my stories slowly languish and die.

I realized, that I'm WAY more emotionally attached to my characters than other writers in my writing group are.

Thanks in advance for any advice you give.

Careful mentioning you're in a writer's group. That's how rumors get started!

Joking aside, I find your problem interesting and I have a couple suggestions:

#1: Focus on what's going to happen AFTER all the bad stuff. Each of us are the results of struggles, scars, and triumphs. If we never experienced any of those things, we'd be rather dull. For your characters to live, unfortunately, bad things will probably happen to them. However, more than likely, they're going to overcome their obstacles. They'll ultimately triumph and become better people. Even better, seeing them tested just might help a reader persevere through a personal struggle, because if a stupid hobbit from The Shire can carry a ring through all of Middle Earth, then maybe, just maybe, they can get through today or tomorrow.

#2: Bad guys seldom believe they're the "bad" guy. Oh, they might accept that everyone calls them that, but in their heart of hearts, when they lay themselves down to sleep at night, they're absolutely convinced the world will be a better place once they get their way.

What I'm getting at is simple: Love the bad guys, too. They have an agenda every bit as strong as your hero. They are filled with all the same emotions and needs. They're not whacking good guys without a reason, they're doing it because they have a vision, too!

I hope that helps!

 

[GoldenMaia]

I get so attached to my characters. It is hard for me to allow bad things to happen to them. And I also have a hard time keeping my 'bad guys' as bad. On the flip side, it's kind of fun to make the asshole a good guy in someone's eyes.

I've found a work-around is writing the scene I 'want', even though I know it's not going to advance the story and just take it out. (The good guys win the bad guy over. The bad guy saves the good guys. The hero wins over the bad guy.) Yes, it leads to a lot of extra writing, and hair pulling, but I don't feel as jammed up if I just allow myself room to play with motives or whatever.

Maybe some day those nuggets will lead to other stories. (wishful thinking)

 

[GoldenCojones]

Careful mentioning you're in a writer's group. That's how rumors get started!

Joking aside, I find your problem interesting and I have a couple suggestions:

#1: Focus on what's going to happen AFTER all the bad stuff. Each of us are the results of struggles, scars, and triumphs. If we never experienced any of those things, we'd be rather dull. For your characters to live, unfortunately, bad things will probably happen to them. However, more than likely, they're going to overcome their obstacles. They'll ultimately triumph and become better people. Even better, seeing them tested just might help a reader persevere through a personal struggle, because if a stupid hobbit from The Shire can carry a ring through all of Middle Earth, then maybe, just maybe, they can get through today or tomorrow.

#2: Bad guys seldom believe they're the "bad" guy. Oh, they might accept that everyone calls them that, but in their heart of hearts, when they lay themselves down to sleep at night, they're absolutely convinced the world will be a better place once they get their way.

What I'm getting at is simple: Love the bad guys, too. They have an agenda every bit as strong as your hero. They are filled with all the same emotions and needs. They're not whacking good guys without a reason, they're doing it because they have a vision, too!

I hope that helps!

Great suggestions.
I have tried to focus on them coming out the other side and that is how I made it through writing the scene I mentioned before, but the pain of writing it was still intense. I think maybe I need to be more focused on that. Maybe write a little of the bad and then skip forward to some of the good and then back. That might work.

#2 is very true and none of my "Bad Guy" characters believe they are the problem. Believe it or not, I am strongly emotionally tied to all my characters, even the bad guys.

It's funny because in the story I mentioned earlier I have now reached a point where the "Hero" is kicking the living shit out of the bad guy and it's just as hard for me to write it. What sucks is I don't have that "Everything will turn out fine" motif for the bad guys. It isn't going to end well for him, although he will have his day several more times in this story before the end.

 

[BuckyDuckman]

Great suggestions.
I have tried to focus on them coming out the other side and that is how I made it through writing the scene I mentioned before, but the pain of writing it was still intense. I think maybe I need to be more focused on that. Maybe write a little of the bad and then skip forward to some of the good and then back. That might work.

I'm going to suggest quite the opposite to you. Embrace the pain. Learn to feed off of it. Make it horrible and then go back and make it even worse, or, at the very minimum, more believable. Since you write Sci-Fi, I'm sure you saw "The Martian" and I'm going to guess you know the behind-the-scenes story of the author - he wanted to make it as insurmountable as possible.

Related as a tangent: There was an episode of "Mythbusters" where Jamie and Adam were taking on the fan theory there was enough space on the floating flotsam at the end of "Titanic" that Jack could have lived. Filmmaker James Cameron participated in that episode. At one point, he makes the statement, "Either way, Jack was going to die at the end."

Now THAT'S a commitment to storytelling! Cameron knew that for the story to work, Jack had to die. Didn't mean he liked it. Didn't mean he enjoyed it. But it does mean he was committed to the idea.

Commit. Go all the way or don't go at all.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I had that problem. Everybody dies in the end. Especially, John.

 

[TxRad]

My first suggestion is to write a story where you know the main character is going to die. He's going to end it all. Suicide is what I used. Eugene I had him kill off a couple of people. It was my way of getting used to harming characters.

Second suggestion. Write a story where in the end you kill everyone off. Powers If you think you have problems hurting characters, you should see what some of the readers had to say.

To make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

 

[NotWise]

I love my characters too. But, bad things happen and the story requires that it be told. I'm totally amateur so It took me months to face it and it has taken years to write it. In the only story I'm writing that actually inspires me my main characters rise from their own blood and destruction -- with a vengeance.

 

[DreamCloud]

I never know what's going to happen to my characters. Plots are secondary to the writing and usually develop late in the story, when I finally think them up.

If I'm crying or laughing, the readers seem to follow. When I'm still crying during the third edit, I know I have a good story. It's emotion that makes the story. Plot and (I'll catch hell for this) grammar are secondary.

Write past the pain and rebuild the hero stronger because of it. It's how we deal with our fumbles that makes us great.

 

[Hypoxia]

Kill them as needed. A nice tragic ending to a hot main character grabs sympathy votes. Cheaters can suffer divine justice like being swept away in a mudslide. Innocent victims can accidentally drink the poison. Sword-carriers can be marched off to oblivion.

You the author can sink ocean liners, crash aircraft & trains, collapse dams & bridges, force quakes & tsunamis, spread plagues & infestations, turn clothing & weapons to dust, nuke bothersome cities, etc. You have the power. Use it wisely. Have fun, too. ZAP!

 

[JKendallDane]

I've written one series where by the end of the sixth chapter of twelve, I have at least 75% of the readers hating one protagonist (and one I was very emotionally invested in) and having to fight my way through the next six chapters to keep the fans on the edge of their seats and still reading as I slowly redeemed him.

With another, the final two chapters of the first book in a trilogy leaves both protagonists in the mangled wreckage of an auto accident at the end of one and the entire final chapter dealing with a funeral and new hopes...and still pulling off the expected erotic scenes also.

Serious drama, tragedy, and yanking at the emotions are all required ingredients sometimes when you are baking a good story. In my opinion, you can't help but BE emotionally invested in your characters if you want your readers to be also. That's what brings a story alive and makes it stand out from all the other cookie-cutter stuff.

.

 

[Hypoxia]

Serious drama, tragedy, and yanking at the emotions are all required ingredients sometimes when you are baking a good story. In my opinion, you can't help but BE emotionally invested in your characters if you want your readers to be also. That's what brings a story alive and makes it stand out from all the other cookie-cutter stuff.

I'm involved enough to cry when I read my death scenes. Knocking-off Ruth and Jenna and even sword-carrier Mel -- those really hurt. Hopefully my emotion bled-over to the page.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I start lots of SF/F stories and I finish a few. The few I finish are rarely very good. It's because I am too emotionally attached to my characters. Every good story has points in the story where bad things happen to the characters. That is usually where my stories slowly languish and die. I have a very hard time being mean to my characters. I read books like the "Sword of Truth" series by Terry Goodkind and DAMN! That boy is vicious to his characters. I really struggle with that.

I'll grant that it's hard to sustain tension without exposing your characters to some kind of adversity, but for my tastes torturing them incessantly is overrated. Constant awfulness a la "Game of Thrones" just leaves me closing the book and looking for something more enjoyable.

Do you guys get emotionally attached to your characters? Do you struggle with the hard times they go through? If any of you have struggled with this and found a way to "fix" it, please share it with me. If I'm going to be the writer I want to be then I have to find a way to write the bad times.

I get a little superstitious about this, because real life has a way of echoing stuff that I've written. I wrote about a catty lawyer who loved cooking; a couple of weeks later I met a lawyer who was the spitting image of my character, even had the same first name - I had to change the story. I wrote about a family member dying suddenly with things unsaid; a couple of weeks later, my uncle died in the night from an aneurysm. And so on. So I feel a bit twitchy about doing bad things to my characters, unless it's something that's already happened IRL.

I still do it now and again, but I try to be sparing with it. Not just the superstition, but also because IMHO a lot of that torment in fiction boils down to lazy writing. Authors need to establish their hero as the Good Guy so they make something awful happen (kick the puppy, rape the girlfriend, etc. etc.) and then let the hero push back against that.

Or they can't be arsed writing a character who has any meaningful friendships or relationships with other people beyond "I punch evil in the face", so they kill off his parents and girlfriend and make him a Brooding Loner.

(Seriously, how many goddamn orphans does the world of fiction NEED?)

So I challenge myself not to leap straight for the thumbscrews, to find subtler ways to drive my stories. I don't know if that's helpful to you, but maybe there are options there?

 

[NaokoSmith]

I get a little superstitious about this, because real life has a way of echoing stuff that I've written....

Ooooh! spooky

In the first FAWC, SaxonHart wrote a great story that was about a writer whose b!tch muse was causing all the terrible things he was writing about to come true. It was a flawed piece; I would just love to see him go back to it and finish it off.

GC, I am so with you on the emotional investment in characters. I have cried and cried as I penned the terrible things some of the characters in my series of romance novels had to go through. Sometimes I would put off writing for days when a hideous scene was coming up. "I'm going to give the poor girl a few more days of blissful ignorance, oh God, how can I do this to her?"

What pushed me to continue was that I was writing moral stories. There were reasons why my characters had to go through being raped, or wounded, or bereaved; suffering. I was trying to show how that feels, that you are not stupid to feel it, how people might recover from such things. I focussed on the readers of the story; I put myself and my characters through it for a purpose they and I were willing to suffer for: to provide a better story with deeper meaning for readers.

JKD puts it very well. The technical exercise of having a basturd protagonist that people hate and gradually redeeming him is great - but you can't get there without setting up the basturd first. Like you, I find it very hard to make up a bad person. I feel so sorry for him/her. But I need to do it sometimes to show how people become inhumane while they still think well of themselves, to explain to myself and to the readers how it comes about that an ordinary man could become a rapist, for example.

Serious drama, tragedy, and yanking at the emotions are all required ingredients sometimes when you are baking a good story.

As Stephen King famously puts it: "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."

 

[NOIRTRASH]

IRL we all die. IRL we all get golden showers of unearned glory and hell. My idea of fiction is to capture it all and show how life is. I play God with my characters, and God doesn't give a shit.

 

[lovecraft68]

I think you have to have some form of empathy for your characters in order to make the piece believable, if not you have robotic stilted two dimensional boring characters.

The way I see it is if I can't feel my characters how can I expect the reader to?

But with that said there needs to be a lone drawn, you can't get so attached that you will either draw the story out longer than it should be because you can't let go, or worse start changing the story because now you don't want X to happen to the MC because you just can't do that to them.

Even in what I refer to as my 'silly' stories, my simple incest pieces I feel the conflict of the characters, that turmoil of wanting something you're not supposed to have.

The only characters I ever were really attached to are Mark and Megan from SWB and seeing I wrote a 50 chapter series over the course of 18 months involving them that was natural, at that point they'd been in my head a long time.

They were also semi biographical in some of the events that occurred to them in some places the series was a form of catharsis to purge some old demons. I put them through hell and back so the attachment never effected the story, but it was there.

The only other character I have an attachment for is "Abigail" who debuted in that series then was featured in a long Halloween piece last year. I find I write those characters better because I think they have some of me in them.

So in closing I think there is a fine line. You can't be so attached it screws with the story, but you have to have some feeling about them or you're just writing emotionless robotic pieces especially when it comes to sex. The sex means more to the readers if the characters mean something to them and if I can't invest a piece of me into them, how can they?

 

[HandsInTheDark]

I think I had this problem when I was younger. But it slowly dawned on me that the stories that had power over my emotions were ones where characters faced adversity and loss - and won anyway. I wanted that power for myself. I learned drama from Alistair Mclean, storytelling and tragedy from Tolkien, and how never to write from John Norman.

The essence of good entertainment writing is to manipulate the readers' emotions. You can make them laugh, cry, fear, have orgasms, rage, wonder, and feel triumph. If you do it hard enough, they'll call your story a good one even if they sobbed their way through a box of kleenex. As a writer you are a dominant, and you subjugate your readers. Personally, I get off on that. The 20-something nearly raping herself with her vibrator as she reads what seems to her to be the ruthless seduction of her younger self; the 40 year old making an unconscious fist as he reads about how a corporation abuses workers like him; the cathartic victory you feel when a really foul protagonist reaches a fitting end; the uneasy fear you get from reading one of my dystopias and finding a society like that all too plausible... every time I max out someone's emotions, I win.

Once I got hooked on that, my characters became tools, made of words. I have no empathy for my characters. They are just the sledgehammers I'm using to crack open my readers and make them feel. I make my characters as human as possible, flaws and all, and make them face challenges, because that's what readers identify with.

Characters don't matter. Characters are piles of words and you can change any word at any time. My sport, my prey, is real people and how they think and feel.

 

[NOIRTRASH]

Characters resonate with readers at the same place in life. A 17 year old girl cares about her prom gown not the lump in grannies breast.

 

[jomar]

I had that problem. Everybody dies in the end. Especially, John.

There's something just so wong about that.

 

[Serafina1210]

I rarely kill my characters, but I often torment them. I identify with some of them quite strongly, but since I'm a masochist, this is not a problem for me.

Remember Vonnegut's rule #6: "Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of."

Readers care more about where you leave your characters than what you've done to them on the way. My highest rated stories leave the main characters happily in love after their trials. My own favorites leave them in ambiguous or painful circumstances that they find fulfilling in ways that don't necessarily have much to do with happiness.

 

[GoldenCojones]

First off huge thanks to all of you! I think I am getting a lot out of all of this. Keep it coming

...
GC, I am so with you on the emotional investment in characters. I have cried and cried as I penned the terrible things some of the characters in my series of romance novels had to go through. Sometimes I would put off writing for days when a hideous scene was coming up. "I'm going to give the poor girl a few more days of blissful ignorance, oh God, how can I do this to her?"

What pushed me to continue was that I was writing moral stories. There were reasons why my characters had to go through being raped, or wounded, or bereaved; suffering. I was trying to show how that feels, that you are not stupid to feel it, how people might recover from such things. I focussed on the readers of the story; I put myself and my characters through it for a purpose they and I were willing to suffer for: to provide a better story with deeper meaning for readers.

All of my SF/F stories are essentially moral stories. Maybe all my stories are, well not "Satyr's Lust" but all the rest . I write for the same reason I believe we all write. We have something to say. Something we believe is important. And that is why I HAVE to get past my hangup. I have something to say and I can't let this stop me from saying it. To take a line from QuarterFlash "I'm gonna harden my heart"

JKD puts it very well. The technical exercise of having a basturd protagonist that people hate and gradually redeeming him is great - but you can't get there without setting up the basturd first. Like you, I find it very hard to make up a bad person. I feel so sorry for him/her. But I need to do it sometimes to show how people become inhumane while they still think well of themselves, to explain to myself and to the readers how it comes about that an ordinary man could become a rapist, for example.

I actually don't find it hard to make up a bad person. In my story "The Bull" the main character was, IMHO, a bad person; selfish, self-centered, narcissistic, and completely uncaring about how much she hurt others. But I loved her just as much as I love all my characters, good and bad. I ended that story where I did not only because I loved that ending but because to go farther would have required hurting her. Several of my readers wanted that. They wanted her blood to spill, but, especially for a Lit story, I was unwilling to do that. I think that as several of you have suggested I need to force myself to write those scenes so that I can get to where I can write them more easily.

 

[le_kitty]

This is really interesting.

I get into the head of my characters and I know them intimately the moment they become real/imagined for me, but in the end, I also don't really care about them. I could kill them without batting an eye.

I do however absolutely hate being pulled along by a string, especially when the trope is so well done we know exactly what we're sitting in for... so I tend to avoid drama when it looks like we'll be in for the long haul, and I'll clock back in at the epilogue if I'm still interested in the plot.

And horror, I really really struggle with horror.

But struggles itself, ironically, no, struggles are the easiest to write because they have such a visceral feel.

If you cried through writing a scene, I think that's a success. If characters brings out your emotions, you've succeeded, because humans are emotions. You've already evoked them, without even trying!

If I think about it, sometimes the way I write, and the way I approach my characters, mirrors my approach to life. I burn bridges easily. Death also doesn't scare me. I can honestly say I'm not afraid to die, I could be afraid of the way I die, but not of death itself. Perhaps that's why I could kill them.

There's nothing wrong with being WAY more emotionally attached. Don't fix it, but figure out why.

 

[GoldenCojones]

...
There's nothing wrong with being WAY more emotionally attached. Don't fix it, but figure out why.

You are right! I don't want to fix being emotionally attached to my characters, but I do need to fix not being able to write the bad times.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

Bullshit. This is mostly all just American pseudo intellectual 'creative writing course' cant. ('Cant' btw means occupational jargon or pious dogma).

There are a lot of idiots around who pray for some magic formula for perfect writing, part of which appears to be this idiotic bullshit about 'tension' and 'drama' from 'conflict' and having your characters enter some kind of pressure-cooker.

This is why Hollywood is dying today.

There is no magic formula. There is, however, magic, in the non pejorative sense.

If you fell in love with your characters, you need to make your readers fall in love with them too. That's all.

"It was a fine and sunny day. There was not a cloud in the sky. And it stayed that way the whole fucking story long. How 'bout that!" ...thus spake Ann Barnhardt, a woman with whom I am in love.

Nothing bad happened to her today, and nothing bad is going to happen to her. And Donald Trump is going to be President what's more.

And the king of Saudi Arabia, a character that I REALLY l-u-r-r-r-r-v, is going to die a slow miserable horrible and hopefully painful death. And me and Ann Barnhardt are going to open beers and watch and laugh, 'cause we think he fucking well good and deserved it.

And the sun is going to set down low in the sky, and it will be all orange and purple and glowing-like. And the beers, my god the beers... They'll be Westvleteren and I'll have out my Smith & Wesson and gun-blueing oil, and we'll polish long stiff hard barrels together... Until moonlight -, the pale moonlight announces that it is time for the ocean of fairy glittery sleep to wash softly into the shores of our minds...