Some characters seem to have to go through absolute hell to get what they want. By the end of the story they are battered and bruised on every level — physical, emotional, etc. How do we know, as a writer, if we are taking it too far?
As a reader, I have been known to put down a book and walk away entirely if there’s even the threat of a character I love suffering too much. I hate that feeling of anxiety I get while I’m waiting for the big boom to come and I’ll stop reading rather than experience it. As you can imagine, this means I don’t really go for thrillers or horror.
My personal preferences aside, I think there’s a valuable question here. We want to make sure that our characters have a lot at stake and we want to make them fight for what they want. How do we know where the line is between acceptable tension and risk, and the reader throwing up their hands and crying, “Enough already!”
I read a quote on an old entry on the Mark Watches blog that deals with the show Firefly. Mark says, “A really good writer will allow his or her characters to suffer, experience loss, and hurt.” I absolutely agree. I also think, however, that there’s a limit to how much can reasonably be thrown at a character.
I am all for making a character suffer. I love when a character suffers. But I do think you can make a character suffer too much. I can’t think of an example (and I’ve been trying), so I’ll make up a hypothetical. A character is a widower, meaning he has already had his share of tragedy. In the course of the story, and in separate incidents, he loses his job, his car gets stolen, his new girlfriend is killed, his house burns down, and his dog runs away. That’s a lot of misfortune and, I would argue, too much for any story that’s not meant to be a tragedy. So where do we draw the line? The dog? The house?
Ultimately, I think the answer here is the same as it is for so many of these questions — does it serve the story. If the hero needs to lose everything he has in order to figure out what he really cares about in life, maybe it is all necessary. Or maybe the same thing could be achieved with a slightly lower degree of tragedy.
As with all things, some of this is subjective. Some authors are better at pulling off something so extreme, and some readers won’t care how much gets thrown at the main character. Does that mean we shouldn’t consider whether we’re going overboard (or underboard)? Of course not. Learning to write well is about learning to be mindful of these things, about keeping all the many plates spinning in order to tell the best story.
Ramp up the tension and make your character jump through hoops of fire. Just don’t forget to consider what your character will have left to hold onto when all is said and done. Is it enough for what kind of story you’re writing and what you want to say? Risk and loss make the story more exciting and gritty, but I think most readers appreciate it when the hero wins a little bit too.
(image copyright 20th Century Fox, used without permission)
