As a writer, I spend so much time in the heads of my viewpoint characters that I can’t help but like them. So it sometimes comes as a surprise when readers get frustrated and want to slap my characters around.
To be fair, sometimes I do that on purpose. For example, in Stars of Blood and Glory, Princess Hikaru does some incredibly stupid and naive things that end up getting everyone else in a lot of trouble. There’s a reason for it, though: she’s been sheltered in the palace all her life and knows nothing of the outside universe. Over the course of the story, she comes to realize just how naive and sheltered she’s been, and has something of a transformation.
Jeremiah from Star Wanderers is another character that readers sometimes get frustrated with. He’s very passive and lacks a strong backbone, at least at the beginning of the series. I did try to make sure that each story in his viewpoint was driven by his choices, rather than the things that happen to him. But he isn’t your typical alpha male starship pilot—far from it.
With Jeremiah, I tried to lean towards writing an “everyman” rather than a “superman.” In a lot of ways, he was also a case study in human nature for me, since I’m not a passive person and in real life tend to get frustrated with passive people. When I dove into Jeremiah’s head, though, I found it almost impossible not to like him, even with all his flaws.
Another good example from Star Wanderers is Mariya. Some of my readers absolutely hate her. Given her role in the story, it’s not hard to see why: she basically tries to steal away the love interest from the main female protagonist of the series.
In her head, though, she’s not stealing—she’s sharing. Everything she does makes sense for her perspective, and when she realizes how much she’s hurt everyone, she feels genuine remorse and regret. As a character, she fascinated me so much that that was one of the main reasons I decided to write a book solely from her point of view.
To be fair, one of the other reasons readers get frustrated with her is because she’s an angsty teenager. Her life is either amazingly awesome or on the verge of falling apart (the latter being much more common). I can’t fault readers at all for getting frustrated with that—all I can do is hope that the payoff is greater than the pain.
Looking back on all this, I think that one of the potential traps of being a writer is falling in love with your characters more than your readers ever will. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t love your characters, but that you shouldn’t let that love make you blind to how your readers are going to respond to them.
It’s kind of like the central paradox in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game: in order to know an enemy well enough to defeat them, you have to know them well enough to love them as well. But just when you can’t help but love them, you have to destroy them. It can be the same way with your characters: even when you know them well enough to love them in spite of their flaws and weaknesses, you still have to give the readers their moment of schadenfreude.
Of course, a lot of it ultimately comes down to skill. If you truly excel at bringing readers into the character’s head, then perhaps you can get them to love that character as much as you do. But it also depends on the reader. If the reader isn’t particularly interested in falling in love with a character (or in falling in love with that character), then your writing skill probably isn’t going to change that.
It’s interesting to think about, and something I’ll definitely keep in mind as I continue to write. In the meantime, if you have your own thoughts on the subject, please leave a comment—I’d very much like to hear it!
I think it’s important to love your characters and feel strongly for them because then you’ll know that the audience will also hopefully feel some of those feelings. It’s interesting that you mention how the audience felt very differently than you did about some characters.