The "good kind" of abuse

If you clicked through just to find out what kind of bastard I am so you could send me hate mail telling me that there's no kind of abuse that's good, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed.  As a fan of popular culture, a writer, a sometimes-critic, and a person with way too much free time on his hands, there is a kind of abuse that is not only good, it's necessary.

I'm talking about the way writers abuse their characters.

One of the classic elements of storytelling - which you get pummeled over the head with, if you read things like Syd Field's books on screenwriting - is that you have to make your protagonist miserable.  I forget exactly when it's supposed to happen (end of Act II, beginning of Act III, all the time, or whatever), but at some point things need to start a downhill slide that makes the character, and the reader/audience who's pulling for that character, extremely unhappy.

If you want a great example of someone who's not afraid to abuse the hell out of his characters, just check out Joss Whedon some time.  He writes great tortured characters, and is completely willing to maim, cripple, bend, fold, spindle, mutilate, murder the best friend, or kick the dog of any given character.  Shit, he killed off two much-loved main characters in Serenity to raise the stakes for everybody else.  Most filmmakers don't have the junk to go there.  Lucas pussed out in RotJ when Lando and the Falcon managed to sneak out of the exploding Death Star.  He's far from the only one.

I've gotten to the point - and I'm not quite at the beginning of Act III in the current project, at least not by word count, though it's moving along nicely - where I really need to be abusing Mack.  Because Mack thinks really highly of himself, for the most part.  People die around him, but he operates in this world where deaths have respawn timers, and for a variety of reasons, he doesn't take death all that seriously.  He doesn't feel much of a threat when somebody says, "They're going to try to kill you and destroy the world."  Because he's Mack.  That's the kind of thing that goes on in his head all the time.

It took me a while to figure out how to really kick him where it counts.  Oh, I'd set it up going back to the first manuscript I wrote with him in it, and I escalated the situation in the present one.  I just hadn't realized what I'd done.  I didn't get what it was that I'd set him up for until I was sitting in a Mexican restaurant last week, scribbling notes on the back of a sheet of paper I'd left in my car a while back while I waited for my food.  (I'll get to that in a minute.  Interesting story.  To me.)

What I realized, while I was making my notes, was that I had to raise the stakes for him.  If the people who'd died around him didn't hit him all that hard, why was that, and was death even a good "stick" to use, to bring about a meaningful transformation in the character?  Because he needed a transformation.  Mack is the kind of guy who's more than happy to go through life always thinking the same way and always talking the same way and always making the same decisions. We all know people like that, right?  People who are consistent in the way they approach situations and problems, and while they may learn the occasional lesson, it doesn't change who they are?

The problem with those people is that, while they're realistic, they make BORING CHARACTERS.  A character who is the same at the end of the book as they were at the start of the book has learned nothing, so the reader has learned nothing through them.  There needs to be some kind of growth and development.  So I had to sit down and figure out what it was that was changing for Mack, and for my other protagonist.  Happily, because they've been traveling down the same basic paths, they're headed for the same basic kinds of change.  Even more happily, though, both the way they get there and what they take away from the experience will be totally different.  If I do it right.  So I get what I think will be thematic consistency for two parallel and interwoven storylines without simply telling the same story twice, and while creating two completely distinct sets of perceptions of one very odd set of circumstances.

I'm having fun with this.  I took a couple of weeks off (because I had a lot of reading to do for classes, and a lot of writing to do based on that reading), and when I came back I realized that I was in danger of starting to spin my wheels.  I've seen my process in action enough to know that there comes a time (or two, or three) in the development of each first draft when I just need to step back and figure out what's right, what's wrong, and what it is that I'm forgetting.  Since this is the third manuscript in which Mack has been featured, and since the first two cover over 1k manuscript pages total, there was a possibility that I'd forgotten quite a lot.

This is what led me to the Mexican restaurant one afternoon, after I got done at the gym.

One of the things I'm good about is keeping a pen with me.  One of the things I'm less good about is having paper handy.   I dug around in the back seat, though, and found a three-page write-up of the back pain I was having a year and a half ago.  (Yes, Virginia - I need to clean my car out more often!)  I took that in with me, glanced at the menu to confirm my order, and started writing.  I had five bullet points that I thought needed to be addressed.  I filled the backs of two of the pages just dealing with two of them while I waited for my food, while I ate, and while I sat and nursed my tea after the food had disappeared.  Those two were both development arcs, including much more detail on how to abuse my main characters.  Mack got 2/3 of a page.  My other protag got a page all her own, and I figured out things about her that made a TON of sense, but that I'd never quite managed to put my finger on before.  Funny as it sounds, I'd written her in a lot of detail back in the first of these books, but had never adequately addressed certain aspects of her psychology.  I didn't have to, at the time; she was a kid with a rough life who coped with it way more smoothly than she should have been able to.  I just didn't ask how she did that, psychologically.  And now I know.

Here's the thing I learned, from that session.  Well, a couple of things.  First, keep a notebook in the back seat of my car.  I stopped by Office Depot after I got done with lunch and picked up an 80-cent spiral notebook that I tossed in the back seat.  This wasn't the first time I've sat in a restaurant and written on whatever was handy.  I outlined LF modules and created maps for them on napkins at a restaurant in Blacksburg, back when I was flying solo.  I sometimes hit Mexican places for lunch on days when Christy can't go to the gym with me.  And it makes a lot more sense to take in a notebook and brainstorm story elements than it does to sit there and twirl my hair while I munch chips and salsa.  So, I'm forever more going to have a notebook in the back seat of my car, to take in with me when I'm eating by myself.  The second thing I learned (and this shouldn't have been as much of a revelation as it ended up being) is that the more you dig into a character's head, the more and more effective means of tormenting them you come up with.

So, that's the good kind of abuse.  Abusing characters.  It's good for them.  It gives them things to react to that surprise them, and surprise you, and allows them to grow.  Which is what they need to do.

Comments

[Allison]

Have you read any Richard Russo?

[Allison]

For some reason, my entire comment didn't post.  Here's the rest.

 I don't know why his novels are so
compelling, because his characters are pretty uniformly abused and
miserable.  I'm always fascinated about this idea of writing a
character, where the author has an entire persona in there mind, where
they actually come to know this figment like a real person...

[unamuzd1]

I haven't, but I've looked at them a few times.  I trend more towards genre fiction, for the most part.

My wife is jealous of me.  The characters that I create take up residence in my head.  I'm glad I married someone who sees that as a virtue rather than a sign of instability.

Gotta go.  Mack wants me to move his story forward...