Lots of writers talk about being mean to their characters. Lots of critique groups tell writers to be meaner to their characters, to figure out what the worst possible thing is that can happen to that character, and then somehow make it happen. Of course, it has to happen believably, so if your character is terrified of drowning and your story is set in a desert, well, you’ll just have to change the setting. Or come up with a reason for there to be a pool or a lake or something out there, or for the villain to pick waterboarding as his/her preferred method of torture, or…
There are a couple of things wrong with this approach. First off, there’s the practical aspect: in this age of multi-volume sagas, if you use the absolutely worst thing that can happen to a character in the very first book, you’re either going to be repeating yourself a lot, or you’re going to have to make do with those second-through-tenth-worst things for later books, or you’re going to have to come up with a reason for the character to develop a new worst-possible-thing for every new volume.
More important, though, is the fact that “be mean; hit the character with the worst thing that can happen to him/her” makes it sound as if everything bad that happens to the protagonist comes from outside, from a decision that the writer makes. And while this is true from one angle (I am, after all, making one choice after another regarding who I’m writing about and what happens to them), it also encourages writers in some very bad habits.
Foremost among these is the attitude that the writer can make an arbitrary decision about what goes into a particular story at any time. There are certainly lots of decisions to be made as a story gets written, but if one wants a readable book at the end of the process, they aren’t arbitrary ones. Every decision the writer makes places limits on what can happen later on, and once one is past the first flurry of initial choices (is the ship captain the protagonist, or should that role go to the first mate? Is she coping with an enemy or a natural disaster or her own bad choices in the past?), every new choice is limited by the things the writer has said before.
The obstacles the protagonist faces can arise from outside circumstances (the bandit attack that separates the protagonist from his/her guide), or they can arise from the protagonist’s own emotions and misconceptions (losing his/her temper and chewing out the ambassador), but they have to fit the story the writer is telling. And they have to fit on lots of levels. Facing public rejection by her older sister may be the heroine’s worst nightmare and make for a wonderfully emotional, intense scene; but shoehorning that scene into a plot where it doesn’t belong can wreck the pacing, the structure, and the flow of the story the writer is actually trying to tell.
Which brings me to another problem: “Figure out the worst thing that can happen to your characters and then make it happen” pays no attention whatsoever to the story the writer wants to tell. Yes, of course, “…in the context of the story…” should be in there right after “…worst thing that can happen to your characters…” but it never is (at least, not any time that I’ve seen the comment made), and I know from bitter experience that there are tons of people out there who will take one look at this, decide that it’s really good advice, and proceed to jettison the neat desert setting they’d planned on, and instead send their protagonist on a sea voyage because he’s afraid of the water, or who’ll ditch the space-opera action in favor of a family saga because their protagonist’s family is a nightmare. And then they bog down because they don’t know anything about ships and they don’t like family sagas, and they wonder what went wrong.
The thing is, being mean to your characters starts with putting them in a story in the first place. Most stories do not involve happy people happily living happy lives without problems…and there’s a reason why “may you live in interesting times” was a curse in ancient China. And there certainly are writers who fall in love with their characters and proceed to make everything much too easy for them, which is hardly ever as interesting as watching a character struggle with an almost-insuperable obstacle and triumph over it in the end.
The second part of being mean is that whatever happens, whether it’s an external problem like a bandit attack or an internal one like choosing to trust a long-time enemy, what’s at stake has to matter to the character. If the main character doesn’t care what happens to the princess, one way or the other, then they’re not going to worry about the delay caused by the bandit attack – it doesn’t matter to them whether the dragon gets hungry and eats the girl before they get there, after all. But if the princess is the protagonists One True Love, then the delay the bandits cause is horrifying and traumatic.
It is usually helpful to think a bit about why the character cares so much about whatever-it-is. OK, if the princess is his/her One True Love, then it doesn’t take much thought, but sometimes the reason isn’t so obvious. If you are going to confront the protagonist with his/her most awful nightmare, your protagonist had better want something else enough that he/she will deal with it and keep going, instead of saying “Face that? No way; I’m out of here.”
The third part – the one that gets left out a lot – is that the thing the character cares about has to be relevant to the story. Throwing in an angsty little subplot about the hero’s near-drowning in childhood has nothing whatever to do with trekking across the desert to find the cursed tomb, and trying to come up with a way to make it have something to do with it…well, if there’s some obvious and brilliant tie-in, by all means use it, but it is not worth bending your brain – and your story – all out of shape just so you can get that “worst possible thing” into a story where it doesn’t really belong. There are plenty of things that can get in the way of your protagonist’s goal that belong in a desert. Use one of them.
I’m definitely guilty of being too nice to my characters! I’m currently rewriting/revising a fantasy novel, and one of the things my first-readers said about the first draft was that I made things way too easy for the characters – almost everything worked out right away, and they didn’t have nearly enough conflict. I’ve been trying to work on that in revisions, and I think I’m doing better, although I may still be letting their problems get solved too quickly.
I had a critique partner recently tell me something along the lines of, “I didn’t think she had enough set backs, so I broke her arm. I also added a scene where she gets shot in the leg.” This happened repeatedly. Sure, it was an action book, so the character was bound to be injured, but by the time I was done reading the book, I had lost track of how many body parts were supposed to be injured and I was amazed that the girl was even able to get out of bed, let alone, kick some major trash. I told her I was losing track of the injuries and that maybe there should be some emotional setbacks instead.
It’s all well and good to create setbacks for your characters. But it’s another thing when you arbitrarily throw things in just because you feel like it. If your plot is solid, then these things should be happening naturally anyway in most cases…
Now I have to figure out how you could drown (or half-drown, if we need this character awhile longer) in the desert. Hm. I think there’s a donkey involved.
The donkey breaks through into an underground irrigation system, taking the rider with him. many archeological sites have been found by this kind of accident.
“Figure out the worst thing that can happen to your characters and then make it happen–”
I’ve never figured out what the people who give that advice intend. I doubt they mean anything much resembling what they actually said.
If writers actually followed that advice, there’d be only one genre: very, very dark horror.
Also, if the really “worst possible” thing happens to the character, they’ll be a broken husk of a person, desperately wishing they were dead. If not, you have overlooked a lot of possible bad things you could do (because anybody can be broken by the right sequence of events).
So actually doing that probably doesn’t lead to an interesting story, except in one very small special niche (not much used in SF and fantasy).
The donkey goes crazy when he scents the water of the oasis and gallops right into the water. Our rider encumbered by his gear nearly drowns.
Yes, what Dyer-Bennet said — it needs to go, “The worst thing _that will not break the character_.” I mean, I can break my characters a lot, into itty-bitty emotional pieces that send them crawling around the room like a remake of The Yellow Wallpaper. But notice that even The Yellow Wallpaper _ended_ with the crawling-around-the-room bits.
So it has to be the Worst Thing… …at _that moment_ in the character’s development… that Makes Sense in the context of the story that the author wants to write… that Doesn’t Break the character permanently. Not as catchy, but important to remember, oh-yes. *beth prods at a character of hers who was dancing on the fine line of breaking*
The author who I thought of the first – who finds the worst things to happen to her characters – is Lois McMaster Bujold. But the downside you mentioned doesn’t happen – maybe because she’s so competent.
Another downside is that not all readers want to read about a character essentially going through torture. The amount of tension and conflict that a reader desires to experience through the story is highly personal. For instance, I couldn’t stand to continue reading the Dresden Files even though the stories were interesting and I really liked the characters because Harry was constantly getting beat up and put through torture each book and I just couldn’t stand experiencing that kind of story. This advice tends to forget that not all readers want the same things from a story.
This is a piece of advice that drives me absolutely nuts – especially, as I’ve seen it framed, when the idea is to think of the worst thing that can happen to a character in each situation and to foil all of their attempts to make anything incrementally better for the entire book (until the end). This is the reason I stopped reading the Game of Thrones series – he was just unspeakably cruel to every single character to no apparent end, which completely ruined the books for me.
Creating interesting and meaningful conflict is difficult enough without confusing matters by inserting blind meanness.
T-shirt idea for such a character:
large print: “Not really a drama [queen|king]!”
smaller printer: “(My author has it in for me.)”
Eric Frank Russell, in 1950, writing as Talbot Mundy, wrote the first appearance of the “ancient” curse, in a story titled “U-Turn.” It is the first known instance of the exact words that are so often quoted. The story was reprinted in 2000 by NESFA Press in a collection of Russell’s short stories.
Howard: I think it’s because her characters change, and so “the worst thing that can happen” also changes. And, as you say, because she’s good. 🙂
@ Shannon and Howard
One of the first “worst things” she planned was having a child. So its not so much the worst thing the AUTHOR can imagine – its the worst thing her characters can imagine/fear.
Considering some of her “worst things” were: flunk a test, have a kid, get married, go into debt, meet your parents….. her characters had lots of room to grow without being killed or wrecked.
I always felt like that piece of advice was actually for people who didn’t have a plot. If they just had a bunch of characters they really liked and didn’t know what to do with them, one of the easy ways to get started is to hit the character where it hurts. But, of course, it can’t just be a cheap shot, the point is not to hobble the character and make them fail, but incite them to take action, to actually give them some stakes in the larger story.
But I like broken characters. Broken characters need something, and bit by bit they can build themselves back up. They have something to get over. But the ‘worst’ thing – that’s worrisome, because usually you’ll have a dead character, and no story. But having something the character fears happen, that’s different.
My writing teacher’s #1 rule is: follow the girls (ie: do what the story is telling me to do). But she also is a big fan of doing the worst/biggest stakes I can think of. Her thinking goes like this: I may never get a chance to write a second book. So I might as well do my best/worst.
And also, the imagination is amazing — I may have thought that THIS was the worst thing I could do to my character, but as my character overcomes this and grows, I discover there’s something even worse. I suppose you have to trust in your universe or the Girls in the Basement to provide that bigger and better for volume 2 and 3 and 4 . . . . (And I hope that I will be growing as a writer, too, and able to handle bigger stakes.)
It’s helpful for me, because given a choice, my characters would sit around and drink tea and tell funny stories to each other.
But this series of posts is very thought-provoking, because I think I did the equivalent of Crafting my way out of my story. I’ve arrived at a different story that is worth telling, but yeah — that “pulling them out of the desert and putting them on a ship” example is really niggling at me. The road not taken . . . .
I think a better way to think about being mean to your characters is the old saying “what can go wrong, will go wrong.” You don’t need to dredge up a character’s childhood fear of drowning with an oasis in the desert, you just need them to get lost, or run into what they thought was a rescue party that turns out to be working for the villains and capture them, or any number of things that fit the story, but makes trouble for the character to work their way out of. This can help to create action, keep the story moving, catch readers’ interest, and can help develop your character through their emotions, actions, and reactions to this trouble. It doesn’t need to be the absolute worst thing that can happen to the character, things just need to go a bit wrong from how they wanted or expected them to.