Nice Writers Finish Last
April 14, 2012
One of my major failings as a writer is that I don’t want to torture my characters. A great way to keep a reader invested in long-form fiction – be it a novel, a series, or a novella – is to have horrible things happen to characters to which the reader has grown attached. The worse it is for the character, the better for your readers.
I hate doing that. I hate it when horrible things happen to people at all. When they are characters I have created, characters that I also love, that I have built, I just have a really hard time doing nasty things to them. In short fiction, I can usually throw enough curves to make it through without doing really shitty things to them. In long-form fiction, I tend to create reversals, but nothing too major. Nothing really horrific.
I need to work on that. I need to become a real bastard.
Just like life.
Perhaps the focus shouldn’t be how they’re suffering, but they overcome and persevere. THAT’s what enthralls.
But in order to overcome and persevere, bad shit has to happen. I fail at creating really bad shit for characters to overcome and persevere through. That’s the torture I need to learn how to inflict.