I wasn't entirely finished with that list I made. I shall add the final point I have now:
4) Sympathetic Characters
Now, don't mean the characters are sympathetic; I mean the reader has to connect to them. Your goal is SUPPOSED to be to ENTERTAIN the reader, so you want them to have some kind of connection to the characters; why should they care if your protagonist is shot in the stomach? Why should they celebrate when your character makes a full recovery? Shouldn't they believe that your character believes they're part of their world (unless they don't, in which case the reader should believe whatever the character believes). In other words, why not humanize your character? Make them react to a bad day. Make them unsuccessful somehow. In the words of Joachim Valentine, "Nobody likes a perfect superhero."
Saturday, August 29, 2009
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Small problem here. "Sympathetic Characters" are not fully as you describe.
ReplyDeleteI am a BIG FAN of the "Sci-Fi" genre when it comes to my writing, when I actually write... and it is "difficult" to place a "human force" behind certain things without breaching the line of cartoon and further more breaking the line of reality to the point it is difficult to stay within the world.
The solution? Is to actually make said thing WHAT IT IS. Don't make Sympathetic characters! There is NO REASON one should like the robot guy, or alien whatever even if he's crying and dying. Believable, yes... but ONLY within the grounds of THEIR WORLD, not ours.
The opposite can be true of the characters in any story. You can absolutely HATE them or even not really care either way.
Trick: Making readers "not realize" or read onward regardless of their feelings toward the character. (I stand by the fact that the world sells the story and the characters only move it from place to place or "world to world".)
Sympathetic characters only work when they are "truly human" or at least you wish to imply as such.
Also: There are no rules to writing. :p
The only other ideas I've a "problem with" was 1) but thats only because my view is that anything "new" is new. This includes something old "with a twist". Its still "new literature" and technically original within the grounds that originality allows. No real extra "note" was needed. Not in my opinion at least. Unless, of course, you are gonna "M. Night Shamalamainanana" the story up.
WHAT A TWIST! X|
No, I generally don't like his movies... except for Unbreakable. That one didn't suck and is actually worth more then one viewing.
I was referring to the main characters. If the reader doesn't care if the main guy gets offed, why would they BOTHER to read the rest? Curiosity, maybe, but once they find out who you're using next, they'll stop.
ReplyDeleteAnd I only consider a "twist" a twist if it's not completely predictable. I have seen very few things manage to do that.
I didn't mean "let's make the alien cry!" when I said that. I also never said there were rules to writing. I said this is how it works. I'm pooling collective knowledge and I said what makes a book SELL, not what makes a book GOOD.
Personally, I think most of the crap out now shouldn't have made it off the writers' desks (err...computers).
By sympathetic characters, I mostly meant "Don't make the character perfect". I'm not sure why I didn't cover that in this one. EVERY character has to have a flaw of some kind that balances all their other traits, just like with real people, even if it's just a stuck-up attitude. Even aliens have flaws. If their weapons aren't part of their body, someone can get that weapon due to their mistake or the other person's 1337 thieving skills. Either way, inferiority of something in a specific field can be played on and used against them. Do I need to bring up the Tortoise and the Hare? The Ant and the Grasshopper? The Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage? Well...that one's a little less known...it's one of the Grimm's Fairy Tales...yeah.
Mind you, I only brought up short stories. Let's see, longer works of Sci-Fi: George Orwell's 1984...ad others, too...my mind's not working right (I just finished mowing).
And there's nothing original. Changing something to make it original is still not original by the fact that something was changed to be used again. It's recycling old ideas, not coming up with new ones.