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Anyways.
Why do I keep harping on that inept vampire fiction when I am neither into vampires nor, despite evidence to the contrary, completely heartless?
I'll tell you why. There's a lesson in there for us. And it's a lesson so clear that you don't need the brains of a Belgian sheepdog to find it, either, which makes it useful even to those of us so zooed on cold meds that we can't tell Richard the Third from Richard Simmons.
Okay, forget I said that last part.
My point, and I swear I do have one, is this: over the past couple of weeks I have gone on and on about my main problem with this piece of crap, and the problem is not so much that it's distractingly badly written, as that the problem is serious enough that even the distractingly bad writing cannot distract you from it:
The author apparently sees her vampire as an attractive and desirable character.
She apparently expects us to share this opinion. Indeed, her whole story hinges on this assumption, since he is in fact the main character. And it's an assumption we all make as writers: we assume other people, readers, will want to spend time in the company of the characters we create.
However, she has not done a single thing to make us like or care about him. So when the female lead lays eyes on him and immediately starts thinking romantic/horny/whatever thoughts, the reaction of the reader is "so what?"
The reaction of the reader would probably be "oh HELL no!" if the female lead wasn't such a waste of pixels herself, so really, it could be worse.
But that's a problem I encounter relatively often in mysteries, which are what I write: the author clearly positions the main character as someone I am supposed to identify with and relate to and cheer for and admire... and does not do a single thing to earn those reactions from me.
And there we are, right back to the basics: Show, don't tell. And be careful what you show me, at that. Because if your "spunky, feisty" female protagonist (who had better be a fucking Schipperke if you're giving her those adjectives) demonstrates her feisty spunk simply by being rude to all her cross her path, whether they deserve it or not, well then I will probably see her as a noun that is only polite if she is, in fact, canine. I won't like her and I won't root for her to save the day and win the man.
If your darkly handsome vampire lead goes around killing the innocent without mercy, do not expect me to boomerang around with him when he runs into his One!True!Love! and gets all sentimental. Because I am not she, and I am wary about my throat.
It's a matter of being aware of what you're doing as much as anything. In showing us how downtrodden the heroine is, are you making her whiny and uncharitable? It's surprising how often I find myself not liking the view I get through the character's eyes. Which is cool if that's what you intend, but... is it?
I posted a week or two ago about trying to create a small-scale likable protagonist, and some of the decisions I made in attempting to create a perspective character readers might like, despite the fact he's a scattered thinker and maybe not terribly smart and has a tendency to break "dumb" laws regarding drinking ages and some controlled substances.
The vampire story that's about to earn its own tag? Is a great example of what happens when you put no thought into how the reader is going to experience your character, and just assume everyone else loves/lusts after your character as much as you do.
Because: bad writing.
And also: ew!!
- Mood:
bitchy
Comments
This character is not redeemable. Someone who goes out and rips the limbs from innocents without feeling even slightly sorry about it deserves only a stake through his head. He must lead a miserable life - *so* much in love with himself and unable to use a mirror...
But the other side of that particular coin looks no better. If a writer wants to make readers like a character (maybe because they are afraid that unless they tell the reader how nice this person is, the reader won't like them) and they forcefully try to push my emotional buttons in order to make the character more sympathetic. I've heard this called 'save the cat' as in, if you show the character saving a kitten you know he's decent at heart - to which the standard reply is, of course, that Hitler loved dogs and Blofeld had a cat. On its own, a good deed is not particularly sympathy-inducing; particularly not if it doesn't cost a character much.
Bad choices... it depends on why the character makes them and how they feel about them. It's a complex thing, and much easier to say what will turn me off a character than what will attract me to one.
It really is one extreme to the other, isn't it? I have the same reaction when I feel like I'm being manipulated by a writer.
On its own, a good deed is not particularly sympathy-inducing; particularly not if it doesn't cost a character much.
I very much agree, and I think I posted something like this very thing a while back--there are "nice" qualities that don't do very much to redeem the character at all, because the niceness is easy and convenient to the character. If the dog became inconvenient or troublesome and the character continued to clean up after it or pay for its medicine or help it up and down off the couch--I think I'd respond to that, because it's an accumulation of small acts of kindness and patience.
I think the inept vampire and your example here are kind of two extremes of bad writing. In my post I was talking about characters whose creators are so invested they expect the outlines to come to life for the reader, so they forget to actually flesh the character out. I've seen stories like this, actually, that read like detailed outlines but didn't work at all as stories... apparently because their real purpose was to give the writer a frame to hang her own fantasies on. They were never written for other readers, even if the author thought they were.
And if my example is sort of not-thinking, a totally non-analytical approach by an author, your seems to me to describe that overthinking, when the author doesn't trust her creation and keeps trying, as you say, to push a button instead of being confident the character can work on her own.
It is easier to figure out what doesn't work for me than what does. And avoiding what doesn't work does not, sadly, leave me only with what works. But I appreciate the reminders to stop and think--especially to think "the reader is not me and does not have my emotional attachment to my character," and also "the reader is not stupid and does not need to be led by the nose."
Edited at 2008-03-17 02:12 pm (UTC)