Heh, my husband loves to tease me when I get all sad and mopey after having tortured my characters. They lead very angsty lives. Sometimes hurting them makes me cry, and then hubby really teases (although it's all good-natured and I usually get snuggles out of the deal so it's not a bad thing). :)
But hurting them takes pain out of my own life and makes it go away, so I keep doing it.
I don't always give them enough time or energy in human terms to work through things.
THANK YOU.
Oh geez I'm so sick of people who think that characters have to be either cookie-cutter good or evil. I *like* good guys who occasionally fuck up, even big time, and then have to wade through their own messes. That's what makes them TRULY good, is that they try their best to clean up after themselves. And I like it when they can't always succeed, when there's a dose of realism in the fact that real life doesn't always wrap up in nice tidy threads at the end of an event.
But I keep reading editors and writers who say that there's some supposed "contract with the reader" where the ending MUST be happy and entirely satisfying. Bah. I hate that cheesy shit. As a reader and a writer I'm *much* more interested in something left dangling, some hurt that doesn't go away, some consequence that lingers.
I don't let my cops get all of the arrests they want. Some bad guys get away, some get got by someone else first. Sometimes good characters die, and it's not always the kind of death that would win one an Oscar...sometimes it's just *poof* they're gone, like in real life, and the point is for the reader to have to feel the same sense of discomfort and unexpected loss as the surviving characters. My princes don't always win princesses easily or vice versa, my good guys fight amongst themselves in times of stress, my heroes sometimes lose their way, my female leads are neither consistently strong nor wimpy, and at all times I strive to present humans as humans, not idealized freakballs.
And I really wish more writers understood the value of that.
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But hurting them takes pain out of my own life and makes it go away, so I keep doing it.
I don't always give them enough time or energy in human terms to work through things.
THANK YOU.
Oh geez I'm so sick of people who think that characters have to be either cookie-cutter good or evil. I *like* good guys who occasionally fuck up, even big time, and then have to wade through their own messes. That's what makes them TRULY good, is that they try their best to clean up after themselves. And I like it when they can't always succeed, when there's a dose of realism in the fact that real life doesn't always wrap up in nice tidy threads at the end of an event.
But I keep reading editors and writers who say that there's some supposed "contract with the reader" where the ending MUST be happy and entirely satisfying. Bah. I hate that cheesy shit. As a reader and a writer I'm *much* more interested in something left dangling, some hurt that doesn't go away, some consequence that lingers.
I don't let my cops get all of the arrests they want. Some bad guys get away, some get got by someone else first. Sometimes good characters die, and it's not always the kind of death that would win one an Oscar...sometimes it's just *poof* they're gone, like in real life, and the point is for the reader to have to feel the same sense of discomfort and unexpected loss as the surviving characters. My princes don't always win princesses easily or vice versa, my good guys fight amongst themselves in times of stress, my heroes sometimes lose their way, my female leads are neither consistently strong nor wimpy, and at all times I strive to present humans as humans, not idealized freakballs.
And I really wish more writers understood the value of that.