One time I caught the season finale to a show that finds needy families and then rebuilds or replaces their homes. In this case, the father in the family seemed to be a great coach and a great person, but he was suffering from ALS, a disease that will take his life within a year or two. He also had a six-year-old son, who was as cute as could be, who suffered from spina bifida, which has left him paralyzed. The show was a tear-jerker from start to finish as we saw the courage, the nobility, and the real suffering in these people.
Orson Scott Card has said that when we tell a story, our viewpoint character should usually be the person who is “in the most pain.” Very often that pain is caused by others, but in the real world the truth is that so many of us suffer from various ailments and mishaps that we have no one at all to blame. It’s simply misfortune. As authors, we are typically hesitant to write about characters who suffer from horrific ailments. After all, we don’t want to be accused of being maudlin. Yet one of the best ways to gain a reader’s sympathy is to put a character in pain.
There are a couple of rules that you have to follow, though, in order for this to work. First, look at the cause of the pain. If another character is causing your protagonist pain, your character needs to confront the source. That means that if a boss is abusing women, your female protagonist needs to talk to him directly or even take legal action in order to resolve the issue. In fact, you can create a perfectly satisfactory tale in which your protagonist commits murder in order to put an end to the abuse.
If the pain is caused by nature—by an illness, for example—the character still must do all he or she can to resolve the problem.
If the pain is self-inflicted, the reader isn’t likely to give a hoot. At least here in the United States, we expect people to take responsibility for their own actions. Let’s say that you write a story about a fellow who likes smoking crack so much that he robs the home of a friend and accidentally shoots his friend’s son in the process. Are we going to care about that protagonist’s pain? Absolutely not.
Self-inflicted pain is weak—unless the pain motivates the protagonist to change. In that case, the protagonist must recognize his problem, confess to himself or some other character, and actually carry through with his plan to change.
Whatever problem I have—whether terminal disease or sociopathic neighbor or anything else—the problem must be faced with courage. This means that your character can’t cry about it, no matter what the source of pain. Now, Scott Card points out that when we let a character cry, it gives the audience permission to cry, too.
But it does something else. Any time that a character breaks down, we as an audience may cast judgment upon that character. Different cultures have widely varying standards about who should cry and when. I used to have a Latin American/Italian friend who would cry about anything—the weather, his shoes being too tight, a girlfriend that left him, or the people he’d had to kill when he was in the CIA.
In some cultures, crying is all but forbidden. Here in Utah, I once saw a little boy, perhaps three, who began crying after he tripped on the sidewalk. His mother gave him an angry look and said, “Cowboy up, Michael. Cowboy up!” In this part of the country, that’s an order to “Quit crying and get back on the horse that threw you.” The boy kept crying, so his mother slapped his face. She wasn’t going to tolerate a son who bawled in public.
So we tend to judge people who cry, admiring those who show great tolerance for pain, and disliking those who don’t. So we love a cancer patient who faces her disease stoically, battling it all of the way.
Which brings me to what I call a “deadly combination” in storytelling: the character that is suffering from self-inflicted pain and then whines about it. Now, for me at least, that combination will kill any story. I not only don’t empathize with such characters, I actively detest them, and I suspect that the majority of other people do, too.
Writing Course Bundle
This week I am going to put all of my writing courses on sale in a huge bundle and at a super low price. I’ll be selling 16 online courses and books that normally retail for more than $1,600 for only $89, and the sale will only last for a few days.
The bundle will include my most popular courses—“The Story Puzzle,” “Writing Mastery 1 and 2,” and “Editing to Greatness,” along with my seminars and books on writing, including #1 Amazon Bestseller Million Dollar Outlines.
I’m creating the bundle so that I give you information on everything from what makes a bestseller to how to brainstorm a novel, to how to write your opening scenes and avoid common errors, and even how to revise a book. There are hours of video with the courses, along with assignments that will help you internalize the lessons. This is the same information that I taught to writing students like #1 bestsellers Brandon Sanderson (The Way of Kings), Stephenie Meyer (Twilight), and James Dashner (The Maze Runner), so I hope that it can help you in the same way.
Unfortunately, for this sale, I won’t be able to look at your individual assignments myself. It would take thousands of hours to do that. So I encourage you to do the assignments with your writing friends. (Heck, tell them about this offer.) Think of it as a college course on writing, but just remember that my goal in creating this material was to teach you all the things about writing that you probably didn’t get in college.
To check out the bundle, go to http://mystorydoctor.com/online-workshops/ and scroll down. You’ll find the bundle there.
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