Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad characters
Or, "what if everyone thinks my character's perspectives are MY perspectives?!"
Greetings, friends!
We had an interesting conversation about “likeable” characters during Office Hours on Saturday. Likeability is a strange metric. It’s also a subjective one: In my book club, we’ve come across multiple characters that I found despicable and others found relatable, or vice versa. It’s almost as though different people like different things???
Despite this truism, I still catch myself attempting to craft likeable characters. The irony of this is that my novel is, in part, about the impossibility of adhering to moral dogma. By design, it features characters who engage in indefensible behaviors. And yet, when rereading bits of old dialogue, I hear my characters espousing opinions they’d never hold, agreeing to things they’d never do, all for the sake of likeability. But who am I trying to get the reader to like? The character? Or me? Psychoanalysis aside, the rewrite is simple enough once I find the places where I’ve tried to appease my imaginary audience. I can absolutel…