When bad things happen to good characters
Is it OK to drop a piano on someone I love?
I’m writing something at the moment, and I’ve had in mind since the beginning that one of my most loveable characters is heading for a terrible fate. This event would be good news for the plot, but very, very bad news for them.
I thought I’d better do some research into how the bad thing would play out. Let’s say that I want to drop a grand piano on a removal-worker character called Charlene, and so I called a friend of mine who, for reasons of professional expertise, deals with a lot of piano disasters.
My friend patiently talked me through the long and grim series of events that would unfold as the piano came hurtling through space towards – and then into – unsuspecting Charlene. I listened and made notes. Every time I interrupted to ask a question, he would pause for a moment, and then politely say, ‘Well, not exactly.’
As he talked, I started to feel sad, and then a bit ashamed, and then miserable. My friend was talking about real people who’d been through this piano thing. With every awful detail, a little of my enthusiasm for the storyline ebbed away.
There were two problems here. The first is that this would be a horrific experience, and Charlene doesn’t deserve it. I like her, and I hold her entire fate in my hands. Why would I do something so vile and unnecessary? It would be like torturing ants.
This, of course, is a non-problem. Charlene doesn’t exist, so it’s fine to torture her. In fact, even worse – she does exist, but only as a little piece of my ego. This reminds me of something that Will Storr wrote in his excellent The Science of Storytelling. He teaches classes in character writing, and he’s noticed that some of his students are resistant to giving their characters realistic flaws. He writes:
I sometimes sense the problem is that they’ve rather fallen in love with their protagonists. They’ve lived with them for months and maybe years of drafting and redrafting and they don’t want to closely define them because they’re this and they’re also this and they’re this and this and this and, oh my God, they’re just amazing! The last thing they want is to assign to them any flaws.
For some of these students, I suspect what’s secretly holding them back is that the protagonist actually is them.
In other words, to sympathise too much with your characters is maybe to compromise your story. I can drop a piano on my ego.
(Here’s Will giving brilliant advice on the In Writing podcast.)
There’s a second, more serious problem, though. If you’re writing a little made-up story about the worst stuff of life, you’d better get it right. You might have a reader who’s been through something similar, and you shouldn’t insult them with a ham-fisted and superficial account of it. If you’ve watched someone you love dying, you don’t necessarily want to read about brave invalids having special moments before slipping off painlessly. If you’ve gone through chemotherapy, you don’t want to read about someone who experiences it as a minor inconvenience, written that way because the author thought it would be a good meet-cute between them and a sexy oncologist.
And so if you’re inventing something awful just for entertainment purposes, you have a responsibility to write it properly. This is an even more pressing duty if it’s something you haven’t experienced firsthand. That’s another reason why I’m nervous.
But maybe this is all just a reminder to take it seriously. Bad things do happen to good people – all the time, everywhere we look. We use stories to help us cope with that. When the novelist Mhairi McFarlane, who writes romantic comedies, came on the podcast, she also touched on this. She said:
Give your characters real problems. I think that my writing improved massively once I was prepared to really tackle things – and that doesn’t mean turning into Jodi Picoult. But I think that when I set out, I thought romantic comedy was intrinsically lighter. I don’t want to say ‘frivolous’, because I don’t think I ever thought it was frivolous, but lighter. And as my books have gone on, I’ve been more and more prepared to talk about really knotty, difficult, emotional things. Dig into the things that are actually really difficult and cause conflict in families. Be prepared to be a bit of an emotional surgeon.
Anyway, this is what has been rolling around my head for the last week. Then I had a meeting with my MA dissertation supervisor, and I told her about it. In the gleeful tone with which you might expect someone to say, ‘Eat the cake, life’s too short!’, my supervisor cried out, ‘Kill her!’
She likes Charlene too, but she really wants me to drop that piano. Maybe I will.
This Sunday, for paid subscribers, I’ll send out the second prompt for the In Writing Creative Club. It’s a game or exercise that allows us all to do something quick and creative with zero pressure, and to share it with other writers. The first one was a big success – thank you to everyone who joined in.
If you have a paid subscription for £4 a month, you can also leave comments, and listen to audio versions of the Thursday newsletters (including this one) on your podcast app.
In the meantime, if you’ve tortured your own characters, let me know how you found it – and good luck with your writing this week.