Mary Rosenblum, your web editor, has published three SF novels, four mysteries as Mary Freeman, and more than 50 short stories in multiple genres, as well as nonfiction! She also teaches writing, and she has created at least a few negative characters in her fiction! 

 

Writing the Negative Character

 

By Mary Rosenblum

 

 

            Hero.  Heroine.  Protagonist. These are synonymous, right?  (Well, except for the gender issues…)  It’s true.  Most of the time, the Main Character in that story or novel is…well…the good guy, gender regardless.  But every so often, we are driven to write this story where the Main Character…well…isn’t really Good, no matter what that gender might be.  We  want to look deep into that conflicted soul and find the seed of humanity that will move our readers.  We want to show the growth of that character from Bad Boy to Good Guy.  But in order to do that…we have to begin with, well…a Bad Guy.

 

            Is anyone going to read our story or our novel if the main character is someone we disapprove of? 

 

Yes, and No

 

            Yes, you can indeed use a character that ordinarily we wouldn’t like much.  He can be a thief.  She can be a hooker.  The kid can be a racist.  And by the end of the story, short or novel length, we can really care about that person.  No, we don’t have to like him or her.  We don’t have to approve of what that person does in his life, or condone her choice of career.  But we can see that person as human, someone whose life choices make sense to him or her, even if they are wrong to our minds.  Someone who is…gasp!...like us in some fundamental, human way.  It is a real challenge to make your reader like someone they wouldn’t look at on the street.  But you CAN do it, and you can really catch reader attention that way. 

 

             This is not an easy task, and not one that I recommend for a novice writer trying to break in.  Oh, it seems easy.  Here’s this outlaw that I love.  He’s so cool!  Come on.  Let’s share his adventures! 

 

            Oh yeah? This guy robs banks.  My brother in law got shot by a bank robber, and now he can’t walk much.  I really don’t want anything to do with this jerk…

 

            And there you have it – the dichotomy that you need to resolve.  Yes, your bad guy main character is sexy and really a good person even if he/she doesn’t do things the ‘usual’ way.  But he lives in YOUR head, remember?  He doesn’t reside in  mine.  Your readers may just plain think bank robbers or hookers or pool sharks are nasty people. Why should they keep reading once they realize what your main character is?  Let’s face it.  Writing the negative main character is a sneaky business.  Until that character is created as someone fully human, someone we can care about, you have to keep us readers engrossed and a bit distracted, so that we don’t realize where you are taking us.

 

 

Reader Cookies

 

            You can keep us reading with ‘reader cookies’.  These are payoffs, good reasons to keep reading and not put this story down.  They can take the form of a great mileau, such as eighteenth century Paris brought to vivid life, or Antarctica, a fantasy universe, or another planet.  The  world is so rich, vivid, and wonderful that we keep reading even though the main character is a bit questionable.   If we’re stuck in an Urbancity crummy apartment with a whiny and nasty spouse and demanding kids and nothing is even slightly interesting…why bother?  We see that landscape all too often in real life.  I don’t know about you, but I sure don’t want to spend my free time there!   But if our immature and rather unsavory equivalent of a street kid follows a unicorn through a rich, magical landscape full of wood and water spirits…well, I may not like him much, but he might grow up a bit, and I’m having such a good time exploring the world I’ll put up with him!   So I read on.

 

            Now this only works up to a point.  No matter how lovely the world, if we really think the main character is a jerk and should be stomped into the mud by the nearest hoofed animal, then our story simply isn’t going to work unless it’s a flat-out comeuppance story.  So we have our lovely world.  How do we make the reader care even a little bit about our unsavory main character? 

 

The Enemy is…Us!

 

            The way you make your readers care about your main characters enough to forgive them their transgressions is to make those characters like us.  Richard Price’s ‘Clockers’ is a great example.  This is a book with a main character who is a drug pusher.  He’s not an addict that could at least claim a pity vote here.  Nah, he’s a ‘clocker’, a young man pushing crack cocaine to people on the street.  Why on earth should we care one little bit about this guy?  Lock him up. Who cares?

 

            Well, Price makes us care.  Because that young man has many of the same worries  that we do.  His future.  His security.  His savings and its security.  He’s so stressed he’s getting a bad ulcer.  So eventually we can find ourselves nodding our heads…yeah, kid, I know what you mean about the suppliers stealing from you…  And we won’t realize until a moment or two later that we’re empathizing with drug dealer.

 

Keep Your Eyes Off the Victim

 

            Another factor that allows us to like this guy is the fact that Price doesn’t dwell on the victims of those sales. Yeah, we know that lives are being destroyed, families broken, and kids orphaned because of this dealer.  But those things happen offstage.  The people who buy these drugs aren’t real people in this story.  That doesn’t mean they aren’t central in another story, but in this one, where our main character is the dealer, they are just faces and wallets, nothing more.  Hungry people with a need that this guy fulfills, they don’t awaken our empathy and thus, our hostility toward the main character.

 

Build to that Sudden Twist

 

            Generally, the power behind a negative character story is one of two things.  We are either going to see him as a fellow human, someone we can identify with even if it makes us uncomfortable, or it’s a comeuppance story where we get to see that main character get his.  Now, the second type of story is much simpler to pull off. Since vengeance is the payoff, we really don’t need to think of that bad guy character as real, so it’s a lot simpler to write in terms of characterization.  But if we want the character to be real, to leave the reader feeling that they might just know this person, then the task is much more difficult.  We need to slowly build the character into someone real and familiar, so that the ending really hits us.  Ah, gosh, he was just about to make it, maybe quit this dealing, do something real with his life…   Slowly but surely, detail by detail, we put together the complex jigsaw puzzle that is our real, flesh and blood, negative main character.

 

Shouting Doesn’t Do It

 

            We all want to start off in paragraph one and tell our readers just how it is:  Hey, he’s a real character!  We must care about him, you hear me? CARE about him, got that ?   You know what?  Readers are very resistant. If you get up on your soapbox and start waiving that character about, yelling, “Care about him!”, guess what will happen?  The reader will say, no, I don’t think so, and go read something else.  We readers are very resistant to writers telling us what to feel.  So how do you do that? How do you make us care? Well you show us, of course. 

 

All Those Hooks!

          Don’t forget that what makes characters real to us are the hooks that snag us. These are the details that let us say, “Oh, yeah, I remember that,” and read on, our character turning steadily into flesh with ever turn of the page.  Hey, he likes chocolate mint chip ice cream, just like me!  He has a cat and loves her!  He hates graffiti.  He helps the local urban coalition clean up the parks.  Every one of these details might apply to quite a few readers.  Yes, I love shrimp, too!  Oh, I could never face my father like that.   Your sister is just like mine….Every time we say, ‘oh yes, I know that…’ you have set another hook into the readers. 

 

So, in summary, create a real person.  Give that person behaviors and interests that enthrall or at least seem real to your readers.  Let us peek into the character so that we know their yearnings and fears. 

 

Most importantly, they ARE a person.  Take a look inward and see if you don’t think so!