McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Making Life Hard for your Characters

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Tami Seven:
As an amateur writer, the hardest thing I have to do in writing a story is creating pain, sorrow, tragedy and misery for my main characters. I think I'm too softhearted sometimes. Has anyone else had this problem?

trboturtle:

--- Quote from: Tami Seven on February 18, 2013, 05:33:31 PM ---As an amateur writer, the hardest thing I have to do in writing a story is creating pain, sorrow, tragedy and misery for my main characters. I think I'm too softhearted sometimes. Has anyone else had this problem?

--- End quote ---

Without pain, sorrow, tragedy and misery for your main characters, there isn't much of a story.... ;)

Seriously, almost all stories have a conflict, be it internal, external. or both. It can be a minor conflict ("Should I eat that last piece of cake?") or major ("Mom! There's a couple of hundred aliens outside and they looked Pissed!") The conflict shouldn't be quick or simple to solve until the story's climax.

And your characters are going to have to go through emotional turmoil trying to resolve the conflict. They are goign to feel pain, they are going to be in turmoil, have emotional lows and sorrows --- that's part of life, and your characters need to reflect that.

Craig

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:

--- Quote from: Tami Seven on February 18, 2013, 05:33:31 PM ---As an amateur writer, the hardest thing I have to do in writing a story is creating pain, sorrow, tragedy and misery for my main characters. I think I'm too softhearted sometimes. Has anyone else had this problem?

--- End quote ---

It depends on the scale of your story, really.  I mean, I have read entirely satisfying conflicts about whether people won a softball game or not in which everyone concerned otherwise had a fairly happy or satisfied life; it's not a scale I write at myself but it can be made work.

Snowleopard:
In a good story the characters grow in some way - sometimes you need pain/sorrow/misery to
create the ground for this growth or for the character to grow in spite of adversity.

Paynesgrey:
I've created characters who's job is to die to make a certain part of the story happen.  So to give their death an impact on the other characters that's believable... I gotta make them characters that the reader will (hopefully) hate to lose.  I find myself not only putting as much work into their development as I do the "main" characters, but also eventually hitting a point where I try to find ways to spare them, or create new characters to take their place... And then my inner 6 year old, the one who never outgrew pulling the wings off of flies, pulls a knife and shivs my inner care-bear... because that means the character's exactly who I need to kill to drive the remaining one's development.

That's the big difference between the typical Red Shirt and, say, one of Joss Whedon's victims, er, characters.  He makes them engaging, so that the reader feels exactly why the remaining characters in the story are impacted so greatly. 

But we can't just brutalize our imaginary friends forever, because people generally want to see the protagonist score some "wins."  (At least in story's where it's possible.  That's not always the case, John Carpenter's "The Thing" for example...)  I originally loved Elric, because he was soooo unique, and appealed to my egotistical, angst ridden teen self... but eventually I got fed up with "He dies, she dies, everybody dies..."  That pony can only be ridden so far.

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