Last week, I attempted to convince everyone that backstory
is not only essential to good characters, but vital to the existence of your
story.
If I didn’t convince you last week, I doubt I’ll ever
convince you, so I’ll spend no further time trying. Instead, I want to look at
three different “parts” of backstory. Parts that are good or bad or different
or vital or consistently missing from your average story.
Today I want to focus on a very specific type of backstory
and the resulting character. They’ve become most especially popular in the last
~30 years or so, but they’ve been around since long before then.
I’m talking about the broken character, the character with a
past.
The Picture of Pain
Imagine this: your character grows up on the streets, an
orphan, because their parents were murdered. Now your character steals and
kills to stay alive. They have scars – physical, emotional, mental, you name it
– and they have learned to shove aside emotion and attachment and just survive.
Or perhaps they aren’t an orphan at all. Instead, they still
live at home, under the tyranny of an abusive parent (or two). They stay
because they have to protect their younger siblings from the beatings and the
curses and the darkness. They endure the hurt and the pain, all the while
daydreaming of a life where there parent doesn’t exist.
Or perhaps another example: your character is an adult (I
know, adult characters are such a novel idea, aren’t they?) who had a perfectly
fine childhood, great parents, great schooling, all of it. Except, at some
point, they experience a loss (their job and/or romantic relationship are a
common choice for devastating loss) that crushes them. They turn to something
else in order to compensate. Whether they begin to drink or smoke or dabble in
crime or hurt themselves or whatever it is, they’re broken.
People are fascinated by broken characters. We love them in
novels due to one of two reasons:
a) We empathize
We feel deeply for these sorts of characters because we
experienced the same sort of loss/hurt/abuse/pain. These characters remind us
of… well, of us.
b) We wonder
People read stories about broken characters and wonder “what
would I do?” They wonder if they would make the same choices – good or bad – or
if they’d do something different.
If people like to read about characters that had a hard
past, they must be worth writing, right?
Not… necessarily.
See, authors also have this tendency to overdo it. They squash so much pain into one life that it’s not
feasible for that character to have possibly survived.
Characters that experience pain are real. Characters that experience torture are not.
I’m not talking about hanging them on a rack and flogging them (although this
can be the case); I’m talking about characters that are so beaten down by
everything around them that it is too painful to watch.
How does someone even imagine this character to life? This
character has been so beaten down and broken and attacked and hurt and maimed
and scorned. What sort of imagination creates that?
It’s okay for characters to experience pain. Loss is a part
of life. Abuse is a very real horror and should be presented as such. Addiction
is real. Hurt is real. Pain is real.
But that doesn’t mean we have to indulge in it.
Another blogger (who I seem to tend to link to at random
times) created this post a while back about exploiting suffering in writing.
It’s an excellent post that delves deeper into this idea of “too much
suffering”.
The basic takeaway? Pain is okay. Excessive pain is not.
How does your character cope with tragedy? If they do indeed
suffer a tragic loss, how do they move on with life?
To be extremely general, there are three ways people deal
with pain:
The Survivor
They experience it, and then they survive. Yes, it’s pain.
Yes, it hurts. They let it hurt. And then they move on. Sometimes it’s rough,
somedays are harder than others. Survival is key, to them. They deal with the
pain when it comes and put it behind them.
This sort of character is the least likely to come across as
“broken” in the truest sense. A twinge of sadness when he walked by the
restaurant he used to take his wife to, before she died. A tear or two when she
curls up to sleep without dinner – again.
As I like to put it, these are the kind of character that
have fallen apart and pieced themselves
back together. They’re one of my favorite kinds of characters. You can tell
they broke, once, but they learned how to work the hot glue gun at the craft
store and they almost look… normal.
The Gutter-rat
Next come the Gutter-rats. Some characters who fit this type
aren’t specifically rats, nor do they necessarily live in a gutter. But their
mental and emotional states clearly point to their living in a state that is
less than desirable for happiness and joy.
Street urchins are a common example of this (because they
also happen to live in an actual
gutter), as well as characters who became addicted to something because of a
tragic hurt/loss.
These characters have no real hope inside them. Even if the
story is about their realizing hope is out there somewhere, they start with
nothing and are often… depressing. They make the book dark and moody. That
isn’t always bad, but it can be. Coupled with heavy themes and/or heavy
content, this can drag a book down into the category of “that kind” that
everyone reads and then wanders around wondering what the meaning of life
really is (besides 42).
Gutter-rats can (and have been) used to great power and
amazing themes, but they can also be hard. Spend to long drudging the bottom of
their blackened souls and your reader starts to wonder about the color of your soul.
The Denier
Finally, there are those characters which refuse to admit
that they’re in pain. They shove it off, wear a mask.
This sort of broken character is rarer than the other two,
which is what makes it so fascinating. They feel this pain, but they don’t
identify its source. Whether by choice or inability, they are unable to deal
with what they feel. They go on with their lives and everything is bland.
Until they learn to deal with their pain, they can’t really
live.
The Denier stands at the crossroads and refuses to choose.
Their life has gone static until they choose: Survive or Crash. Head for the
gutter or the craft store.
Painlessly painful
So.
How do we create empathic characters without driving their
suffering to the point of excessive and unnecessary?
In some ways, it’s fairly simple, but in others it can take
a lot of personal contemplation.
First, draw a line in
the sand. Choose a form of suffering that makes you too uncomfortable to write about. There are so many options for
pain (which is a sad fact, but still true). Many of them are too painful to
even consider writing. So draw your line and stick by it. If pop culture
pressures you, don’t give in. It’s up to you to decide what you write about and
what your characters go through.
Second, limit
individual’s pain. If your character has already been through a war and
struggles with PTSD, don’t chop off their arm and toss them into a pit full of
lions that just finished off his daughter. Not only is that sadistic (and not
in the modern sense of “hey this is cool, that makes it twisted up”, but “there
is something seriously wrong with you”), but it’s too much.
Depending on the type of pain, this limit can range from
only one form of pain to a dozen.
Start at the line you drew. Then rank the pain you’ve given
your character. The closer it is to your line, the smaller the number of other
pains that should accompany it.
A bump on the elbow ranks low.
Losing a child ranks high.
Third, develop your
character’s reaction. Are they a Survivor? A Gutter-rat? A Denier? Delve
into this reaction and learn how they tick. Get out the glue gun, the gutter,
the procrastination (their procrastination, not yours), and figure out how they
work.
Be Unique
I thought about using the word “diverse” instead of unique,
but I’ve been using that word a lot recently, so I decided to branch out and
try something different (you know you see what I did there).
Don’t content yourself with the pain that every other character
experiences.
Yes, being an orphan is painful.
But so is losing a child in a miscarriage.
So is failing to get into college after dreaming of it and
making plans based off it.
So is being excluded from a social group, this clique or
that.
Don’t settle.
Be unique [diverse]. Let your characters form their choices
and let the pain stay at a natural level. If a character has a painless
backstory, that might be okay. And if it’s riddled with pain… well, it’d better
have a good reason.
What about you? Do you
have broken characters? How have they coped? What broke them? Leave a comment
and share!
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