how nasty are you?

[Dragonlady]

This is a bit of a random one, but how nasty are you to your characters? I hit a crisis in my wip at about 25k words and realised part of the reason is that my character development works like a light switch - PING she is all sorted now - and I can struggle to introduce conflict - i'm not nasty enough to my characters perhaps. I've also read a lot of books lately where quite nasty things are done to characters - either as the way a world is set up or the journey particular characters are going through - and they often make the story a whole lot better.

As someone who writes about an imaginary world, I have the decision of how nice by our standards to make it. In the real middle ages a lot of babies died, women were treated badly, those who looked different, were mentally ill or loved the wrong people did not have a fun time. How would I decide which of my protagonist's babies aren't going to make it? (I accidentally have a novel idea with a female protagonist who loves women and is not interested in men so need to work out how to deal with that at some point in my world).

Some writers, like Robin Hobb and the writer of the bone ships book i'm reading at the moment choose to make their worlds more liberal in certain ways. Females can have a greater range of roles in the six duchies, and in the Bone Ships universe both men and women are sailors so heterosexual relations are banned on ships, and homosexual ones encouraged, as ships are not the place for babies. Discrimination of a magical characteristic is a central theme of my WIP but how nasty should I make them towards other groups?

All thoughts welcome! How nasty are you to your world and characters?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I think I’ll decline to answer since I’d have to look my characters in the face and deal with the guilt

 

[MikeAnderson]

One of my characters in my W.I.P. gets scalped. While still alive. Does that answer your question?

 

[.matthew.]

Discrimination of a magical characteristic is a central theme of my WIP but how nasty should I make them towards other groups?

I think that would depend on what the characteristic is. Like if it's something super dangerous people would be very scared of it but it would likely be harnessed by those in power leading to a combination of awe and fear. If it's something that makes them look different you'll likely see discrimination based on that but the type would depend on whether it is considered bad culturally or religiously. If they can hide in plain sight you might have invasive checks on people if they are persecuted to rout them out or stop them attaining powerful positions.

I could go on but it's becoming a dangerous wall of text, so it really just all depends on what they are, where they are, and who is the discriminating party.

 

[CTRandall]

I hit a crisis in my wip at about 25k words and realised part of the reason is that my character development works like a light switch - PING she is all sorted now - and I can struggle to introduce conflict

I ran into a similar issue recently. I resolved it not by doing something nasty to one of my main characters (that seemed too easy and predictable) but instead by having an MC overreact to a bad situation and do something nasty to a minor character. This simple action made the other characters wary and mistrustful, which opened up the whole story in ways I hadn't previously imagined. In this case, it worked because the MC could claim at least some justification for her actions, even though she clearly went way overboard.

That is a fairly extreme way of dealing with the issue. I've also tackled this problem simply by having a character make a mistake or misjudge a situation or another character, which then puts other people off. You don't always have to use violence or permanent injury to introduce tension and conflict.

 

[msstice]

I'm a wuss. I can't let anything really bad happen to them. Especially kids. I put people in danger, but I get them out in the nick of time. Thankfully, I'm not writing for the gore-and-guts market segment. Except for the truly evil character. I hold a very simplistic world view. I'm not interested in understanding the evil doers. I'm sure they were cute kids once, but that was a long time ago. Now bad things must happen to them because they are evil.

 

[DLCroix]

Law of chance. That is the key. At least for me.

I usually work with large folders of images. Every character, even the likely MC, is just an image within that great compilation. Because I also distrust the MC; I don't believe in the protagonist as the big star of a cast that does everything or that the story should necessarily focus on him.
Rather, I usually work with three or four characters in a story in which, although one of them is the starting point (which does not mean that it must be the MC), the second is condemned to follow the first and is aware of his less importance, because in any case the fact of having appeared first gives the other preponderance in the story and in fact it is the one that the reader pays more attention to and tends to think is the MC.
Now, depending on the physical position that both MC and secondary have in the folder (arranged alphabetically), the other characters usually appear.
It's not that I'm love of my characters; in general I try everyone has the same possibilities. In fact, many times they don't know who the real villain is. Which becomes even more ambiguous when you have three or four peoples or races hostile to each other represented by different colors in that matrix of images.
Imagine how they would get along on board a ship.
Obviously there will be a town that dominates the others (speaking of the discrimination you mention), either by color frequency or number in the folder. Have you noticed that the duplication of copies generates the copies of copies of copies? There a genetic simile is hinted at, in which the files that are first copies of the original would be more, let's say, pure, right? And the other peoples, despite their differences, will only eventually agree to join forces around a specific goal.
There you already have delicious variants that allow you to establish desperate relationships of love and hate, friendship and gestures of nobility that make possible some kind of true brotherhood and reconciliation. And all that is given by the simple exercise of looking at photos. Examples: Peoples who despise each other but defend the same city together. Or even members of that dominant ethnic group, despite being the alleged villains, refusing to attack that city.
The law of chance helps you when as an author you try to intervene as little as possible in your story. At least I, although I have an outline or plot; I mean, I know what has to happen, but I also ignore how this is going to happen. I know the what; not the how.
Let's say we have a crime investigation. I look at my folder, I see the position of the MC (probably, I insist on that) and at most that of the secondary. Perhaps the starting point be the dead man, a third position in the file folder.
How do I choose it? I flip a coin to determine if I should search up or down. There are many ways to find it: you can for it from a alphabet letter. As I am usually indecisive, I look at what day it is and what letter it corresponds. If the letter doesn't match any search, I check another folder. Even a song that begins with those lyrics helps imagine scenes.
The same happens if I must kill a character. Sometimes, in effect, the supposed MC dies. How nasty, uh? But they are not my decisions. Because in my stories no one is safe.

The one who has the worst time is the secondary. So far, the best heroine I have created appears only in the middle of the second book of my series. She is a former decorated Army officer tired and bitter in the midst of the crisis of her forties, an even tertiary character who is only functional for the story, the reader has no reason to appreciate her more than the others. And yet she becomes the MC only because she was the only one who was saved from a massacre where her entire unit fell, precisely because she was elsewhere at that time. This feeling that she should have gone pass with her sisters even more serious. And only then she understand that must continue alone. And also the reader. How will manage?
Was a matter of looking at the folder again and throwing coins. Someone always appears, and it is incredible how a simple folder of images is transformed into a whole matrix of relationships and functions whose interaction between each character depends entirely on chaos and chance.

Now, I would not complicate much with cruelty. I prefer to see the stories as a great adventure in which I imagine the characters hating me for putting them in such trances ("You must be joking, woman; do you really think that I can do that?", I like to think that they tell me); not as an excuse to convey a certain message, much less an ideological pamphlet. I don't think the role of the writer is to preach, as we are reviewing in another thread. It is inevitable that one has to explain certain things, but the less the reader see your hand handling your characters, the better.

 

[Steve Harrison]

I'm certainly not nasty. When I murder people, I shoot them or blow them up or make it quick in a variety of other brutal and clever ways.

I would therefore describe myself as caring and compassionate.

 

[-K2-]

Nasty, depraved, nightmarish are all relative terms. Horrific in X world is laughable in Z. In my current story, my character's backstory is much worse than her current predicament because she has taken control. Yet even she is exceedingly cruel to herself.

However, the most terrible part is, every bit of her backstory and everything that happens in the current world is actually pale to real life events. I tend to use real life to really make it dark. It's dark NOT because it's terrible--which it is--it's dark because it's real and going on somewhere in our world this very moment. Fantasy terrible, people can deal with. Real life terrible, most people would rather not hear about. More the shame, it's through hear/see/speak no evil that such things continue to this day.

As an example, what follows is a TRUE story, and one of the mildest that makes up the character's backstory:

Spoiler: WARNING: A very unpleasant story--read at your own peril

As it turned out when she was very young, one of her owners had become angry with her, and his solution was simple. He dropped Kae into a 55-gallon oil drum, poured in a bucket of table scraps and other garbage upon her, and topped it all off with roughly twenty rats and sealed it up. As he did, he warned her that there were only a couple days worth of food in there, and he would let her out in five.

True to what he claimed, the rats devoured it all and then turned on her. After being bitten a few times, Kae realized if she snapped one’s neck, they would eat it instead. After a day of being bitten killing one at a time, Kae finally had enough. When the man opened the drum in five days, there sat Kae, cold and more defiant than ever; her legs buried under fourteen dead rats.

K2

 

[DLCroix]

I'm certainly not nasty. When I murder people, I shoot them or blow them up or make it quick in a variety of other brutal and clever ways.

I would therefore describe myself as caring and compassionate.

However, I believe that there must be an element of constant fear that conveys the true sense of danger in which the characters are involved; something that somehow moves the reader.
I am not talking about showing graphic violence, that is only an easy resource, but that it is enough present the obvious danger for the character to make a decision about it. The reader always wants to see that anguishing dilemma in which the character must decide about his own salvation or that of others.
Sometimes it is about saving innocents (the typical example of a man who goes into a burning house to rescue a lady's baby); in others, it is just a desperate idea, or even stupid.
Like the epic ending of a novel in which a lazy man forcibly recruited as a sailor, a vulgar scoundrel with more of a wolf than a hero, unhinged by the obsession of his officers not to lower his flag when it was already evident that the surrender was it the reasonable (BTW, a shot had knocked down the flag there was), when he saw that the boy who had come there to comply with that order falls wounded, he decides to go up his own and put that damn flag back in its place. And the soldiers of the enemy ship, who at first shot him almost for fun, first cheer him on with jeers and whistles, then they start to stare at him in silent admiration, and finally they even cheer him with pride.

I think if you don't put your characters in these trances, you will never see them do something important. In fact, quoting from the previous post, just as I don't believe much in the MC as a star character, I also don't conceive of a standard villain. Rather, I believe in antagonists, beings who are equal to the supposed good ones, that is, with their own families and desires, and that although they consent to do evil, and know that history will condemn them for it, they also do it for reasons beyond their control. The survival of his own people, for example. Or out of loyalty to his superiors. Those are bad guys, but usually you never know who they are or you can't see their faces. They are puppet masters. And the same even the leaders of the supposed good ones.
The best example was taught to me by my older brother, who was an Army officer. Before he died, he said he did not want the national flag on his coffin; he wanted his company flag. That was his family. The men and women who suffered with him. Because even within the Army there are units whose second oath is with the flag upside down. They don't swear by God, obviously. That teaches you that even among yours there are people willing to do a lot of damage. And one, as a writer, it's not that's preaching, but knows that evil exists. So for me there are no typical villains. Because I know they are everywhere.

BTW, you don't murder people; you kill characters. Making that difference is very, very important in case a reader ever criticizes you. This is the reason for the media warning that "any resemblance to people in real life is mere coincidence." Because many times people are not clear that a character is NOT a person or DOES NOT refer to anyone in real life; it is just a vehicle that carries meaning. It is a sema. In the same way that you draw a figure on a blackboard, that is just a figure; not a person, right? Well, the same thing happens with literature.

 

[sknox]

I give my characters challenges--sometimes they give themselves challenges--but I am not deliberately nasty. That is, I don't deliberately try to have awful things happen to them in order to create motivation. I don't find that very interesting, which is part of why I don't care much for grimdark.

I'm a medieval historian. My stories are set in an alternate Middle Ages. But that really doesn't mean I have to show babies dying or people being persecuted or whatever. As a historian, I can make a pretty good case that the 19thc was worse than the 12thc. But none of that means anything to me as a storyteller. There's plenty of room to tell any sort of story I care to tell. And no matter what story I tell, there's plenty of room to get stuff (historically) right and wrong. Being realistic is not the same thing as being grim.

 

[Joshua Jones]

Broadly speaking, bad things happen to my characters, but never gratuitously. What I mean is, I never write something horrible happening to a character for no real purpose or "to show how much he/she is willing to go through to get what he/she wants." If it happens, it moves the plot forward. Story, after all, is king.

That said, how badly the characters are treated depends on what I'm writing. My SF WiP is on the grimdark spectrum, so plenty of awful things happen there. My fantasy WiP, however, is less dark, so my characters get off a bit easier.

 

[msstice]

When the man opened the drum in five days, there sat Kae, ...

dead from dehydration.

 

[-K2-]

dead from dehydration.

Are you sure?

K2

 

[Droflet]

I think I’ll decline to answer since I’d have to look my characters in the face and deal with the guilt

Come on Jo, if YOU can't give advice on how to mess with your characters, no one could.

 

[Steve Harrison]

BTW, you don't murder people; you kill characters. Making that difference is very, very important in case a reader ever criticizes you. This is the reason for the media warning that "any resemblance to people in real life is mere coincidence." Because many times people are not clear that a character is NOT a person or DOES NOT refer to anyone in real life; it is just a vehicle that carries meaning. It is a sema. In the same way that you draw a figure on a blackboard, that is just a figure; not a person, right? Well, the same thing happens with literature.

I think you took my comments a little too seriously. I do know the distinction between murdering people, killing characters and a humorous* post on a writer's board.

* OK, an attempt at a humorous post.

 

[TheEndIsNigh]

To answer the original question, hanging is too good for them.

 

[DLCroix]

I think you took my comments a little too seriously. I do know the distinction between murdering people, killing characters and a humorous* post on a writer's board.

* OK, an attempt at a humorous post.

Well. But anyway it is convenient to make the clarification so as not to confuse the minors who read these forums. Also, if someone bothers me, I hit him with a pan, he, he; I don't write a story to get even. In fact, almost all my friends ask me for the roles of villains because they know that those characters I portray them better than the good ones.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Come on Jo, if YOU can't give advice on how to mess with your characters, no one could.

I think if I was writing my early books again I’d be more subtle. Having said that, I’m still pretty hard on characters. But the more interesting conversation, rather than being gleeful about how awful I’ve been or listing the various things I’ve done to characters where and when, is the question of why it was done.

I did not have to use physical torture but I did so. I chose that route (and others, the torture is a fairly obvious route but the walls in Inish Carraig -which I just thought were great craic as a sf thing for the book, mostly - are the horrific people mention to me most often, as well as the use of the glens-land in Waters) as the writer. Anyone who says it’s because of the story or the world is dodging the truth that they still chose. Trauma can be delivered In lots of ways, if that’s what is needed in a character.

i have spent most of the last 18 months working slowly at something reasonably dark (for me, I suspect others will find it as dark as my other work). It is probably the book that unpicks most of my understandings of what it is to be from a country with a divided and often violent history, where terrible things were done to neighbours and those from the same city, in the name of a place, political belief or to protect a culture. (I did laugh on twitter when someone mentioned that being brought up in N Ireland wasn’t quite normal since we used to have to sit in the car while our mams went into the shop to stop it being blown up by the bomb squad...)

For me, then, the point of trauma in books - and I say trauma, rather than nastiness, because that’s what I ultimately inflict, albeit with a blunt instrument sometimes, but maybe that’s to do with my background and seeing blunt instruments applied on the news (because I was sheltered from the hardest elements of the troubles, although they were all around us) - is hope. All my books have hope at the core of them. It is hope in the darkness they celebrate - and, I guess for me, the greater the darkness, the more impactful is the hope.

i honestly think until I unpicked the fine relationship between my background (which links Into @Toby Frost ’s thread about preaching, although I haven’t fully worked out my response to that yet) and my storytelling -which came when I began to set stories against my country - I would have answered this with a gleeful, I’m so nasty, here’s the things I do post.

Now, I instead think the question could be how nasty are you, and why? And my response then is very nasty, and because I seek to understand hate and violence, and find hope from it. That’s probably as close as I can come to it.

i might do a blog on this, actually. It seems there is much to explore. in the meantime, come to me for all your kill-a-happy-mood thread requirements

also - sorry - this post turned out to be about me and my writing, but i *think* that was the nature of the question asked? Apologies if I picked that up wrong. Plus, you know, pragmatist. I do to seek to understand.

 

[Droflet]

Eloquently put Jo. You know I was only pulling your leg, right? Personally I found what you did to your characters, especially you MC, to be enormously powerful. It gave him a background of understandable nightmares which is excellent for character development.
I must add that I was none too kind to my MC, and for the same reason. We both just approached the subject a tad differently. To which I say, (in my worse French) vive la difference. So there.