Am I Being Too Nice To My Creations?

Sometimes I seem to forget my characters can't actually protest any of my imagined cruelty. Somehow, I always seem to end up wanting to see them to a happy ending. This isn't always a problem, except when I want to write something a little on the darker side of things.

Oh sure, I can brutally maim and injure, inflict horrible emotional trauma, and other insidious shit, but here's the problem. It never sticks. Once I get attached to a certain character, I'd better hope I'm not trying to write a horror story, because I just cannot bring myself to do any lasting physical or emotional damage to them. Somehow, they always end up a-okay, or at least on the road to recovery.

Does anyone else have this problem?

edited 20th Aug '11 11:46:05 PM by KSPAM

I have the opposite issue; people always have to restrain me from beating the ever-loving shit out of my fictional characters.

Which is funny, because I enjoy happy stories as a rule.

The lack of emotional scars, even small ones, can strain realism depending upon the context, but that doesn't mean that your characters have to end up sociopaths or gibbering wrecks by the end of it all. People are pretty resilient, contrary to popular belief.

Physically, you can get away with more even if you logically should get away with less, mainly because utterly crippling your characters kind of eliminates a lot of plot possibilities. This said, even a slight limp can do wonders for the feel of your work.

I'm pretty horrible to my characters, really; it sometimes makes me a bit sad, as I rather like them all. Regardless, I do as my plot (and other nastier characters) demands.

@ OP: Eh, I wouldn't say that's being too nice. Isn't that what Earn Your Happy Ending is?

I do tend to put my characters through a lot of shit, but it's usually Played for Laughs these days. True Art Is Angsty is out, Gallows Humor is in.

edited 21st Aug '11 12:18:24 AM by Merlo

My usual rule is that the only characters who lose all their dignity are ones who're fatally flawed. This doesn't guarantee survival, but it provides decent chances.

edited 21st Aug '11 2:48:32 AM by feotakahari

In my opinion, there is too much of a True-Art-Is-Grimdark attitude in lit at the moment. So no, don't feel bad. You should never apologize for not brutally maiming a character and running them into the ground without any hope of happiness just to make you characters lives miserable. Then again if it serves a purpose to rough up your characters, you shouldn't necessarily hesitate, either.

edited 21st Aug '11 3:05:54 AM by NoirGrimoir

I think a character can have a happy ending, so long as your remembered that the trauma doesn't go away overnight and the events of the story had an effect on their lives and out look.

In my Legend of Zelda fanfic, I made it a point that Link had to bleed once a chapter at least.

edited 21st Aug '11 5:22:24 AM by TheEmeraldDragon

Depends. Are you writing stories with in-universe reasons for it? Or characters with reasons for it? (I am, amusingly enough.)

To be honest, trauma is a very finicky thing, and encountering it and coming out the other end unharmed is more of the rule than the exception.

KSPAM: I do. But at the same time, I don't think it is that big of a deal. It just depends on the story you want to write. Tone is everything. Characters who overcome obstacles are just as interesting as ones who are changed forever.

It's worth having your characters change due to their experiences, and if it's particularly traumatic then it should be an effect of realistic magnitude. I do like happy endings eventually, though. My current writing is a Naruto fanfic in which Naruto, in the course of things, ends up personally killing the giant mob of mercenaries that threaten Wave after Gatou's death. That's going to have quite some effect, most of it not good, but it's not going to torpedo all his chances of happiness.

As other people have said, as long as it doesn't break the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for your characters or story it's okay. But you really should take in consideration what you intend with these traumas. Don't damage your story with your love for your characters. It's not worth it.

I always end up being absolutely evil, but I pick plots where it doesn't stretch the believability and the audience doesn't go, "how does that much shit even happen to these people?"

Case in point: World War One = License to fuck with my characters. When you're in a setting where pointless death is the rule, not the exception, a million is truly a statistic...

I do the most horrible shit in backstories though, it seems. A prominent example is someone who was crucified, set up in the middle of town, and forced to watch from the cross as his town and neighbors burned to cinders. He managed to live, but that was not much consolation when the perpetrators pinned the deed on him.

Oh, and the maniac responsible was his brother. As you can imagine, the story finds him to have already become one fucked-up individual.

edited 21st Aug '11 10:47:06 PM by KSPAM

There is a distinct trend recently in literature criticism of the young adult genre and beyond: How serious, and therefore well-written, a work is proportionate to the amount of pain and number of deaths from the front to the back cover. This is one noticeable portion of the criticism of both Twilight and Eragon, followed by many young authors who bash those work deciding to prove their worth by including as much character death and suffering as possible into their work and wear it as a badge of honor.

However, personally I think this trend has run full circle. It is not impossible to write a good story without massive amount of death and trauma. Instead of major character death to create an epiphany/resolve in the protagonist, for instance, some sort of dramatic enough reveal might work just as well. To create a sense of real danger for a protagonist, near-death experiences/severe injuries can help. To show that the entire business is pretty damn serious, show that both sides are resorting to drastic measures.

My point is, I'd only include character deaths and trauma when it makes sense. There is as little justification to kill off as many people as possible for the sake of grimdark as there is to keep everyone alive because you are incapable of hurting your characters.

Thread hop:

I frequently wonder how people manage this.

Manage what?

Umm, what?

The main criticisms of Eragon and Twilight concerning deaths is the character not responding appropriately to mass death, making him seem like a sociopath, and killing onesself over a boy, which is stupid, respectively.

Or maybe that is just the specific site I was on. There were ample criticism directed at the author's inability to kill off characters.

Then again, it is possible that it is a circle-specific criticism.

I'd think so. In Eragon, Eragon seems to react to death according to how Paolini felt that day. For a while because he was "so connected to the life around him" he would cry when ants died but think nothing of slaughtering thousands of people.

KSPAM: Manage to have a problem with being too "nice" to their characters.

Perhaps you should try? I mean, everyone has different reactions to their creations. It is not particularly hard to discover the entire spectrum, with the right questions.

Take being "nice"

Some, see it as a weakness because it means that it's a super sparkly world of super sparkles.

Others, see being "mean" as being unncessarily cruel and not what they signed up for.

To be nice to a character just means you get to enjoy the current state they are in, for an indefinite amount of time. Plenty of very popular and successful things indulge in this.

On the other hand, to be mean to a character means that you can evoke a wider range of emotions from the reader.

edited 23rd Aug '11 10:27:40 AM by MrAHR

I'm extremely averse to inflicting any kind of lasting trauma on my characters, let alone killing them off. I get too attached to them.

I don't think this is a positive characteristic. I've read death scenes that, while on some level distressing, were necessary, I think, in terms of good storytelling.