Torturing Your Character

[Asbel]

Okay. So, is it a stretch to think when the OP referenced "torture" it was to be somewhat metaphorical, and the examples given to be an exaggeration thereof?

That's kinda what I surmised but I'm hesitant given the responses.

It was kinda both. Whether you're putting a character through physical torture or simply mental or emotional hardship, it's still rough. I do both regularly.

 

[Hypoxia]

Whether you're putting a character through physical torture or simply mental or emotional hardship, it's still rough. I do both regularly.

Drama sprouts from adversity. Drama often requires suffering. Mental and physical torture are shortcuts to drama, more substantial than existential angst or teenage moodswings. And torture distinguishes the characters -- but for fun, flip the paradigm and make the torturer the good guy.

 

[Nathan_Brazil]

There is a school of thought in the romance genre. I think of it as the Soap-opera school, or even the Susan Lucci (after the long suffering actress from All My Children). This genre drips its protagonist into one horrible situation after another...so she can cry, and then overcome.

If the poor heroine gets her happily ever after, surely her dream man and children will die in the sequel. Possibly during a tsunami.

I've always felt this genre borders on sadism, but serials built on this model tend to score very well and draw some extremely devoted fans.

I scratch my head as I wander away...figuring that I will never understand the appeal.

 

[HandsInTheDark]

You know what's even more fun to read? A story where the princess gets her leg cut off trying to rescue herself before the prince even comes into the picture, and loses the other trying to save HIM.

Physical torment aside, torturing characters emotionally and mentally is really taxing on the author. Renowned Harry Potter author JK Rowling states that after writing her character Sirius Black's death, her husband found her sobbing. For many of us, our characters are our children.

Um.. no. Not in my case anyway. I do in fact have a Princess tortured - she's been captured and her capturer is trying to break her will - and I felt absolutely nothing as I put her through torments. They were mostly emotional/mental abuse, because I don't like writing physical abuse and I worry about people who like reading about it. But she didn't have a good time and I didn't care. She's a character. I try to make my readers bond with my characters, but I don't.

I've killed off a favorite character in the most gut wrenching, self-sacrificing way I could come up with. Mostly what I felt was frustration because I wanted a tight, brutally emotional scene that would drive readers' tears, and extra words kept trying to creep in.

AFTER I finish and post, I can reread and get choked up over some scenes. That's how I know I got it right. But during writing, it's all bitch-slapping words, with a pen made of ice.

 

[lovecraft68]

Um.. no. Not in my case anyway. I do in fact have a Princess tortured - she's been captured and her capturer is trying to break her will - and I felt absolutely nothing as I put her through torments. They were mostly emotional/mental abuse, because I don't like writing physical abuse and I worry about people who like reading about it. But she didn't have a good time and I didn't care. She's a character. I try to make my readers bond with my characters, but I don't.

I've killed off a favorite character in the most gut wrenching, self-sacrificing way I could come up with. Mostly what I felt was frustration because I wanted a tight, brutally emotional scene that would drive readers' tears, and extra words kept trying to creep in.

AFTER I finish and post, I can reread and get choked up over some scenes. That's how I know I got it right. But during writing, it's all bitch-slapping words, with a pen made of ice.

Interesting to hear approaches that are polar opposite of each others. For me if I don't feel the character everything comes out crappy. If I wrote cold I think I wouldn't be convincing.

I joked in another thread about being a 'method writer' for serious pieces I tend to get in the head of the character and feel as I make them feel so dark pieces lead to me being depressed, moody, sometimes angry. Last story I did the wife told me to wrap it up soon because she was ready to smack me.

I write with a lot of anger. When I write about someone being hurt, especially a woman I'm angry at the person hurting them. When I write her revenge I'm even angrier and really unload as if these people were real.

The series I referenced earlier, there was no way I could capture the mindset of a drug addict so depressed and filled with self loathing she would choose to make her family hate her so she could kill herself guilt free if I wrote 'cold' I had to find that placed in my mind that recalled all that happening to friends and family years ago.

I can't write with ice, it has to be with emotion.

Even Home is where the heart is which is a romance that would probably nauseate you had a very depressing opening as the MC woke up in his disgusting one room pit of an apartment and got dressed to go humiliate himself and panhandle for enough money to eat that day.

I can fuck up a wet dream pretty much and have. I've written some pretty un-sexy sex here.

 

[SecondCircle]

It was kinda both. Whether you're putting a character through physical torture or simply mental or emotional hardship, it's still rough. I do both regularly.

Right. That's kinda how I read it. Sort of a figurative explanation of "put a character through realistic turmoil." As opposed to the literal reading of "it mentioned amputation so amputate your characters". Just wasn't sure how some of the thread arrived at literal legless characters.

On the topic of "torture" or turmoil in stories, I'd agree with the OP. While storybook HEA's are certainly fine too, I like reading stories where the characters meet extreme adversity. Often in the form of mentally taxing or physically challenging obstacles. Seems to me everything is peachy when things go according to plan. But I think characters truly shine when things are at their worst. And human beings rarely stay the same over the course of a lifetime. We meet obstacles, some even scar us. But sometimes we wind up better for those scars. While we are changed, it isn't necessarily soley for just the better or just the worse.

I like characters facing turmoil. It's realstic, it's interesting, it's suspenseful, and can really define a character. Love at first sight or first kiss is powerful and joyful, but how about love that knows no bounds? Love that endures? After all, did our brave knight not face down a firebreathing flying furnace and risk life, limb, and sanity to save the fair maiden? And what of AFTER happily ever after? What emotion or physical rigors are yet to test this bond? Is it even strong enough? Can it handle a few scars? Will those scars sever the love, or become the perfect beauty mark of memory?

And what would these stories be without those poison apples and harrowing escapes?

Happy works. But like anything, it can become institution. Meaning, it can become COMMONPLACE. Which leads to boring. Bilbo Baggins experienced far more than just joy. So did young Mr. Potter. I doubt a galaxy far far away would be as riveting without a little darkside to test the Jedi (lord knows they seem to be good at LITERALLY losing hands).

What is sunshine without the struggle of a storm to put it in perspective?

 

[Ewobbit]

But the older couple likely did not torture or mutilate you, nor you them, so what's the story?
~snip~
.

Well, the old guy died when I was about 11 or so of a heart attack. And his wife died within a month after him. It was said in my hearing that she died of a broken heart. That losing him after fifty some odd years of marriage had taken her will to go on.

Sometime later, I was told that he lost his leg when a jealous husband blew it off with a shotgun.

(Shrug) It wasn't exactly the point of why I mentioned them, but since you asked...

In another example, I knew a minister's daughter and her boyfriend pretty well. I would like to have hated him because I was pretty well infatuated with her. She was heart wrenchingly beautiful and sweet and kind to me. But, he was such an honestly good man and also kind that it would take a colder heart than mine to find fault with him. Or in her choice of him.

They married.

She got pregnant.

They had a baby.

Then, one night, not long after the baby was born, the pilot light blew out and all three of them asphyxiated in their sleep.

We might imagine that such good and beautiful people would have been the tale that proved the truth of Happily Ever After had it not happened.

Or we might imagine that they were trapped in that golden shining blissful moment AS their happily ever after and it is only for the rest of us with a void left in our hearts that there was sadness in the end of their tale.

(shrug)

I don't know. I'm just tossing stuff around in hopes of gleaning from the crusty old far-... ah, the more "mature and experienced" crowd.

 

[Asbel]

I personally have done warm and cold writing. I'm not sure if this happens to anyone else, but my face tends to change both when I'm writing and when I'm planning stories in my head. My coworker said I was scaring him this week because I was glaring off into space with this manic look on my face. Whoops.

But I do get a little pleasure out of hurting my characters, and I don't really know why. I have in the past even drawn amputee characters and thought "Oh, look at him. Poor thing." and then laughed at it.

 

[Ewobbit]

I personally have done warm and cold writing. I'm not sure if this happens to anyone else, but my face tends to change both when I'm writing and when I'm planning stories in my head. My coworker said I was scaring him this week because I was glaring off into space with this manic look on my face. Whoops.
~snip~.

From the other side of the coin, the delicate blushing flower who lost her ever-loving mind and decided I would make good husband material asked me to read a short story she wrote for a Creative Writing class once.

She described a multiple murder of a wife and three children, the youngest only three, using duct tape and bludgeoning with a bat in excruciating detail. The only living thing in the house she allowed to survive was a teacup poodle whom the investigating detective took to carrying around in his trench coat pocket.

I didn't sleep soundly for a week.

 

[sr71plt]

John Grisham has said he learned early on not to kill the family dog if he didn't want the negative response to swamp his mailbox.

 

[PervOtaku]

I've noticed a trend in television lately is to have some relatively simple plan go wrong in every possible way, to the point that the characters have to go to ridiculous lengths to pull off the goal in the end, usually while creating two new problems in the process. It makes for interesting drama, though after a while it gets tiresome. I think I'm not that creative of a writer to put characters through the wringer over and over like that.

 

[manyeyedhydra]

And amputations and similar mayhem of another's body are totally off LIT's radar, right?

Nope.

They're quite liberal with what you can do in the Erotic Horror cat.

Have fun.

 

[jehoram]

I've noticed a trend in television lately is to have some relatively simple plan go wrong in every possible way, to the point that the characters have to go to ridiculous lengths to pull off the goal in the end, usually while creating two new problems in the process. It makes for interesting drama, though after a while it gets tiresome. I think I'm not that creative of a writer to put characters through the wringer over and over like that.

Not new. Just about every Donald Westlake comic crime novel was that way. And it's a running theme of the Coen brothers' movies.

And John Steinbeck was very good at creating characters and then having horrible things happen to them.