Abusing the Characters
I picked up a book on writing short stories a couple of years ago. On occasion, I go back to that book and read bits and pieces of it. My intent is not to write short fiction, but rather to write long fiction. My problem, whenever I start a short project I get stuck realizing much longer potentials. The outcome, I get sidetracked.
However, one night, as I was reading, I came across a little blurb I thought was interesting. Essentially:
You are not writing if you are not abusing your characters.
What does this mean?
Well, I think that is a fair question and at times I wonder if I have any clue how to answer it. You know, Harry Pottter is a loveable character; but, when you watch him in his world, everything bad that can happen has or does happen to the guy… and yet, he still comes out swinging. Essentially, Harry is orphaned, he is made to live with abusive relatives, he is both loved and hated, and often distrusted, by his classmates. He found a home at Hogwarts, but it is never permanent enough to actually be called his home. He has to leave Hogwarts because Voldemort takes over the Magic government. Basically, when good things happen to Harry, bad things are not far behind.
That is one example. What other examples can we look at?
Pretty much anything you read. Currently, I am reading a book titled Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas. He also wrote, Little Girl Lost, which I read a year or two ago. Anyway, the protagonist, John Blake is constantly finding himself in danger. He is also, constantly, trying to find his way out of a life where his friends and old flames end up dying. Blake is an ex-P.I. who is working as an Administrative Assistant at Columbia University’s College of Writing. He wants to write. However, before the story starts, a friend of his ends up dead, suicide, and he has promised to find the murderer while protecting the friends mother from knowing what she was doing for a living (hint: it has something to do with sex).
At every turn Blake is confronted with something new, different. Whether it is the angry, distraught mother of the deceased, or a large hitman chasing him through some underground tunnels beneath Columbia that were used for steam and coal transport. At every turn he is either in danger or the threat of potential danger, imprisonment (he works against and alongside the police) are prevalent.
In Aleas’s previous book with the same protagonist, the character investigated the murder of an ex-girlfriend and encountered many of the same problems, issues, that he is here. Some people didn’t want him to succeed, the police thought he might be a part of it, he was arrested, beaten, and watched people die. Friends. Coworkers. As a result, in every chapter you are either in a happy state (nothing bad is happening) or a sad state (stuff has hit the fans). Most happy chapters are transitional. The characters are catching their (collective) breathes and the audience gets to see that the world is not all bad and then you get back into the thick of things.
The point to abusing the characters is that you have to keep things interesting, you have to set them up either to succeed or fail, and with the possibility that they are going to fail. Back to Harry Potter, at any given moment a lackey of Voldemort could’ve killed Harry. And yet, they didn’t because Voldemort wanted to kill him. At any moment, Harry could’ve given up and left England… well, Scotland, where Hogwarts was, and landed in America or some other obscure country, but he didn’t. He stuck it out because, in the realm of storytelling, as the Hero Harry had to remain where he was and fight the battles because it was in the fight that his story becomes interesting, readable, and memorable.
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