Kicking Puppies

Keep kicking the poor guy. Your story will thank you.

I've cried over things I've done to my characters (yeah, I know, I'm pathetic) but the more adversity your protag has to overcome, the happier his triumph will be.

Just do not have him kick puppies through football goal posts-might be too difficult for a reprieve then!!

Keep kicking. It's the only way you'll get any leverage on the character. Sometimes I make deals with mine. You know, do this, and maybe, just MAYBE I'll be nice to you down the road.

And I'm with swvaughn on crying over things I've done to my characters. My forum handle is what it is for a reason. When I killed that character I couldn't eat for three days, unless I wanted an instant reminder of what I'd eaten.

I once changed the ending of a novel from sad to happy, because I thought the MC had suffered so much throughout the book she deserved a bit of happiness at the end.

If it works for the plot AND character development, I'd personally go for it... but to just torture a character for empathy purposes when it has nothing to do with what's going on in the rest of the story isn't a direction I would personally take.

Whenever I see a character have mishap after mishap as if bad luck is their shadow for the day, I get pushed out of the story and start just waiting for the NEXT thing to happen.

But that doesn't mean don't do it, because a lot of times the bad luck/awful circumstances is the plot, it's just not the kind I prefer.

Go easy on my characters? Pfft. I find it's much more fun to be mischievous to them. Builds character, and all that. ("broken leg? walk it off!") One of my friends told me she never wants to be a character in my story because I put them through too much hell. LOL!

JEMcGee said:

Whenever I see a character have mishap after mishap as if bad luck is their shadow for the day, I get pushed out of the story and start just waiting for the NEXT thing to happen.

But that doesn't mean don't do it, because a lot of times the bad luck/awful circumstances is the plot, it's just not the kind I prefer.

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The bad things that happen to an MC should not happen because of bad luck. They should happen as the (usually unintended) consequences of choices the character has made.

Otherwise, the character is just a hapless victim of circumstance, and how boring is that?

He'll be better for it in the end...kick the hell out of him.

swvaughn said:

Keep kicking the poor guy. Your story will thank you.

I've cried over things I've done to my characters (yeah, I know, I'm pathetic) but the more adversity your protag has to overcome, the happier his triumph will be.

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I second all of that, including the crying part.

I took it easy on my characters at first, but realized I was never going to have a meaningful story if I kept having something or someone save them just in time to avoid any real damage.

Now my philosophy is 'if they aren't on the verge of having a nervous breakdown at some point, then I'm being too nice.'

You can take it too far, though. My hero literally quit my story once because I took the 'character torture' a step too far. He basically gave up and that would have made the series come to a premature and tragic end. That was one debate he ended up winning. I changed the plot to be a little less mean to him (just a little, though).

After reading this thread I feel like some kind of evil mastermind.

I kill the people my hero loves. I injure him. Take things away from him. Cripple him. Really, just destroy the world around him, one layer at a time.

Why should I show him any mercy? He's the one that invaded my mind.

Wow, reading this helps me realize how nice I'm being to my characters... You guys are evil! I'm kidding.
I guess I shouldn't feel sorry for my characters anymore.

JohnDavidPaxton: I really like your line, "Why should I show him any mercy? He's the one that invaded my mind."

That is so true!

I bet if you cry so will your readers, as long as all the stuff that makes you cry makes it to the page.

Somewhere there is a quote that goes something like, "If there is no emotion in the writer, how can there be emotion in the reader?" (Anyone know the quote/quotee? I always get that one wrong...)

I know there are some who disagree, and would say you don't need to actually feel -- you only need to know what words will evoke the feeling you want -- but I feel what I'm writing. Often not very good for my sanity, but *shrug* who needs sane, anyway?

JohnDavidPaxton said:

I kill the people my hero loves. I injure him. Take things away from him. Cripple him. Really, just destroy the world around him, one layer at a time.

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Nothing wrong with that. Builds character

Re: kicking puppies, my husband has a firm belief that anyone who kills a dog in the course of story MUST DIE.

I had to inform him last night that one of my characters shoots a dog... and does not die.

It's going to be REALLY hard to convince him to read this book.

I mostly agree with what everyone is saying, but I think there can come a point when it's too much (like with everything.) Basically, IMO, you can reach the "Wow, the author really wants us to sympathize with this guy, don't they?" and then you've really lost all sense of danger or whatever, cause the reader just stops caring (this happened to me in Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip.) Especially if, by being mean to them in the beginning, you then use it as an excuse later on to let them just have one glory moment after another (still thinking Skinny Dip.) And in my opinion that is like the MOST ANNOYING TECHNIQUE EVER.

*breathes*

But in most situations, giving your MC a bit of a hard time is a good thing. So don't worry about me.

A great set of sociopaths were are!

I have blinded my current MC, killed the love of his life and his estranged father, killed on of his best friends, set him into a huge betrayal and now pitted him pretty much against the world.

And he's still fighting like a bitch.

Ageless Stranger said:

A great set of sociopaths were are!

I have blinded my current MC, killed the love of his life and his estranged father, killed on of his best friends, set him into a huge betrayal and now pitted him pretty much against the world.

And he's still fighting like a bitch.

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That's the kind of hero I like

In my series, the ending is sad (one of those righteous sad endings), but my friends insisted that I have a somewhat happy ending for a few of my more tortured chars. Personally, I thought a happy ending for the world was good enough, but meh...what do I know. So I ended up writing a mildly happy epilogue, and it shut them up.

Azraelsbane said:

That's the kind of hero I like

In my series, the ending is sad (one of those righteous sad endings), but my friends insisted that I have a somewhat happy ending for a few of my more tortured chars. Personally, I thought a happy ending for the world was good enough, but meh...what do I know. So I ended up writing a mildly happy epilogue, and it shut them up.

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Lol, friends are bad enough but I swear I saw my MC give me the finger a few pages ago.

Ageless Stranger said:

Lol, friends are bad enough but I swear I saw my MC give me the finger a few pages ago.

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Heh, I know the feeling. My most sensible character just refused to do ANYTHING a few weeks ago. It took me nearly a month to write the last three pages of a chapter because he was being stubborn. I think I heard something like "Well, you did already skip ahead and write my death, so what's my incentive?" in the background as I was banging my head against the keyboard.

I don't much care for stories which start to resemble an old style country and western song - one of those where the main character's wife leaves him, his house burns down, his dog is hit by a car and his best friend betrays him and so forth - if too many overly dramatic bad things happen to the main character I lose interest fast. But I don't like him to have things too easy either. So my preference is for stories where the hero has lots of trouble, but mostly that kind of everyday trouble we are all familiar with (or its fantasy or sf equivalent). The weather gets lousy just when he has to go for a long trip, all the taverns are either closed, full or have just been trashed by the enemy forces, the horse gets sick, there is no food to be had, nobody believes him or he can't get in contact with the anybody who has the authority to do anything when he is trying to warn of the spy or the invading horde just over the hill.

And then when his sweetheart gets killed by the spy or the invading horde I will actually care about that.

Ok, the hero should also get into fights or other potentially life threatening situations several times, but mostly survive without losing anything important, sometimes perhaps just barely and other times easily. Again, when he then gets into that fight where his brother dies it will mean more. If you give me a hero who loses half his family in the first fight scene, then becomes half blind and loses his hand in the next, then his sidekick dies in the next... well, I would probably have quit reading before the one where the sidekick dies.

In a word- no. LOL I think readers needs to sympathize/empathize with our characters. They have to root for them. If their life is "not that bad" it may get annoying i.e. Why is this character complaining? It's not that bad!!

TheIT said:

No, not literally.

I'm working on a scene in my fantasy WIP where my MC gets blamed for something he didn't do. It's a last straw situation on several levels, and it's only a precursor of things to come. Part of me is empathizing with my character on being kicked while he's down, while another part is saying, "Hey, that was cool, readers should empathize with him, too, so let's do it again."

I agree with the analogy that writing is like chasing your characters up a tree and throwing rocks at them, but this is one of the first times where it feels like the rock actually hit. Part of me is tempted to go easy on him, but the writer in me is saying no, put on the hobnail boots and go for it. It'll make a triumphant ending more satisfying if the character has pick himself up and start fighting.

Anyone else ever tempted to go easy on your characters?

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Yes. I often have to go back and delete scenes and/or rework them to make things harder for my characters.