We All Love Characters Who Go Through Hell, But...
You know what drives me nuts? When I’m reading a book and the author totally lets the main character off the hook instead of letting them face the consequences of their choices. Or gives them an easy ride, rather than let them go through some real misery. We always want to see lovable sympathetic characters go through Hell. You know what ELSE drives me nuts though? When a character goes through shit that would drive the strongest person on Earth insane and just shrugs it off. That’s the worst.
Nothing throws me out of a book faster than a character who encounters unthinkable god-awful misery and just shrugs it off and goes back to obsessing about their love triangle or what to wear for a party. It’s a tricky balance to strike, because you don’t want a character to get so traumatized and depressed that they’re actually a basket case. That starts to get really painful to watch. But we have to feel the characters dealing with all the awfulness that’s been thrown at them. Or if they’ve gone numb, we need to know they’ve gone numb. That’s like a baseline thing for believable characters, and its incredibly hard to get right. One answer is to make the suffering just enough to keep them miserable without spilling over into “anybody in this situation would be in a fetal position forever” territory. But it’s super tough. Narrative sadism takes a LOT of practice.
Image: Hieronymous Bosch
