A Vacillating Character

People vacillate. They decide one thing. Then they change their minds. Sometimes they simply don’t know how to decide. However, a character who does this in a book is a really hard one to find sympathetic as a reader. This may seem unfair and unrealistic, but it is almost always true. So, my advice to writers:

Don’t allow your main character to vacillate on an important decision or belief early in the manuscript.

You can show your character beginning with one point of view and then moving towards the opposite point of view. In fact, this is one way to build a great character arc. But having your character going back and forth on this opinion in the first chapter is not a good idea. You need to build toward the change, and you need to work at making the readers believe it.

Other characters should challenge your main character’s point of view. There should be proof of your character being wrong (or at least misguided) in key scenes which you as a writer craft so that they build into an undeniable truth. Then—and only then—should your main character change her mind.

And I say her mind because generally, my experience has been that it is female characters who tend to have difficulty having one point of view. Why is this? My guess is that female characters are often written by female writers. And we as females have difficulty standing up and saying that we believe this one thing and only this one thing. We have a hard time writing characters who do that, as well.

Why? Because most women have spent their whole lives being taught that being inflexible and opinionated is a bad way to make friends. We are told that we aren’t sympathetic unless we see other people’s points of view and waffle. But it isn’t true. This is a big lie that we are carrying into our writing.

Make your female characters grow. Let them be wrong. Let them change. But whatever you do, don’t make them wafflers. I’d rather hate a character than deal with a character who doesn’t know what she thinks about anything.