The thing is, I don’t like my main character much. I don’t even get the luxury of loathing the poor sap. I just… don’t like him very much. He looks interesting, he has an interesting job and an interesting scar and an interesting heart-rending dilemma to be getting on with, but he seems to have all the personality of a lettuce.
Which all adds up to a giant quagmire of blah in the centre of what otherwise, if I say so myself, would be quite an interesting detective story.
Please, please tell me, what makes a reader care for a character? What makes a character interesting? It’s clearly not a colourful past. This character’s past is positively lurid. And I just. Don’t. Care. It isn’t the pangs of a complicated love-affair. He’s in love with the main suspect. I. Just. Don’t. Care. How can so much happen to such a steaming non-entity?
I’m going to go play with the coffee machine. It won’t help Lead Character sparkle, but it might stop me biting my own arm off in sheer bafflement.
For me the hero has to have at least one flaw. Something tragic in their past usually makes me worry for them.
If they’ve striven in the face of tall odds, so much the better.
I’m trying to think of who my fictional heroes actually are – off the top of my head:
Inspector Rebus – dour Scot, bit of a Maverick, failed to get into the SAS, has a strong sense of justice but doesn’t necessarily play by the rule book.
Marcus Didius Falco – Ancient Roman with a self deprecating sense of humour – and also a sense of justice.
Major Richard Sharpe – participant in the Napoleonic and Peninsular Wars, came up through the ranks the hard way, had a very hard start in life – and has a strong sense of justice.
Perhaps I’m getting myself stuck in a bit of a literary rut here?
It depends if the character is hunk interest or not. If he is hunk interest then you could:
1. make him into a bad boy in the present, building on his lurid past. He could stand up the love interest for no apparent reason, take up a shocking habit for drinking, cigarettes and motorbikes. Or something could come out of his lurid past to haunt him and he deals with it in a reckless, bad boy way and the reader goes “tsk-tsk!” over his foolish behaviour and waits for him to get his comeuppance.
2. give him a secret, something brooding and intense that he refuses to let anybody coax out of him.
3. make him be kidnapped by aliens and a much more interesting hunky doppelganger be put in his place. The doppelganger looks like him but he is intent on taking over the world and so he throws a spanner in the works of the investigation, like a kind of intergalactic mole.
If, on the other hand, he is not so much a hunk but a character for the readers to relate to, you could put him in situations that test his emotion. For example, he could be put in a situation that reminds him of when he was bullied at school and his emotions over that could come out etc. I think when readers can relate to emotions and experiences they sympathise with the character.
I know NaNoWriMo doesn’t allow much time but when my characters turn into blah-blahs I do online character tests for them, like that Jung Typology test I mentioned, and this one:
http://www.writersvillage.com/character/index01.htm
What I like about the tests in the link above is that they also reveal the character’s “dark side” and potential personality disorder. You can have miles of fun with a character with a personality disorder!
Am hiding pretending to be writing, better get off the internet and back to the grind.
Obviously your problem is that he isn’t a dragonling. I did warn you…
But actually I’m going to have to think about this.
I’ve found that having a picture sometimes helps – a picture/photo/painting/drawing of a person, fictional or real as long as you don’t know anything about him/her in RL.
It helps me think of characteristics, behaviour, personality.
This might be slightly off topic (sorry) but whenever I remember, I check out the Photograph of the Week gallery:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo-of-the-week/
For example, here’s a photo that immediately sparks a whole load of different possible stories (possible, mind, not necessarily probable) in my mind:
http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo.tcl?photo_id=592456
My all time favorite male character was Captain Horatio Hornblower, invented by C. S. Forester. I also am quite fond of Sherlock Holmes.
How in the world can one be fond of a misogynistic, arrogant asshole like Holmes? Perhaps it is because he is so intelligent. Perhaps it is because Watson loves him so and presents him so well.
Hornblower is such a complex person. On the one hand, he is so intelligent and competent. And yet, he has no belief in himself. Every time he makes a decision and it comes out right, he beats himself up because it all could have gone so dangerously wrong. Perhaps this is what makes him lovable, his own inability to see how good he really is. And he is so human. He gets depressed. He wallows in it, even. And then rises to action because the alternative would be even more depressing.
These characters are interesting to me because of the internal battles they have with themselves, because of their high intelligence.
C’mon Reed! We are waiting to see your word count go up! There are people out here who are rooting for you. I don’t think it is required that you like or care about your characters. Just write.
I just finished reading Joshilyn Jackson’s “Gods in Alabama”. I really liked the book, but I didn’t really Like all the characters in it. I’m not sure Joshilyn did either, from her comments at the back.
Go, Reed, Go!
Thank you all for your advice and links and really fascinating descriptions of what you like in a lead character. It has all been very helpful, and I think I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. It could be the reflection of my own torch on a further wall of blockage… [That's the self-pity talking. Stop it at once. Honestly, I've had an entire weekend of this - Ed].
And thank you to HMH for the kick up the backside.
Must write. And make tea. [OK, tea first, and then write. No chocolate until you've done 2000 words. I mean it.]
Yee haw! I see a change in the word count. I can hardly wait to read the book. Good for you, Reed.
Yup, well done that Reed. Broken through that wall with room to spare.
I decided that what I like in a detective type character is a bit of Scarlett Pimpernellism.
I like the character to be the sort of person everybody thinks one thing about and then they turn out to be the greatest detective on the planet. Miss Marple who is supposed to be a doddery old woman, Lord Peter Whimsey who is supposed to be a brainless aristo and Albert Campion I never figured out at all. He keeps looking at people blankly through his horn rims and frankly I’m still completely clueless about what he might be thinking.
I’ll even go for people in the wrong situation. So Falco works for me as he keeps saying what a low informer he is and ends up hobnobbing with the emperor and marrying a senator’s daughter.
I also usually prefer your amateur detective who is, by definition, not in the right job. Although the ones about suburban housewives being suburburban and housewify all over the book, not so much. No air of intregue (no idea how to spell that) there. But then it depends how seemingly out of place the PI or Detective Inspector seem.
Anyway.
Keep up the good work on the wordcount there!
You’ve got to fancy them, at some level, haven’t you?
Or is that just me?
I mean, I wouldn’t fancy Falco myself, but I can see that someone would. (Actually, thinking about it, I do rather fancy Helena). Sharpe – yep. Hornblower – yep. Rebus – maybe, I’d certainly pass him a scotch or two. Holmes, yep. As HMH says, it’s his intelligence.
I’ll get myself an icepack on my way out, shall I?
AB