Attachment to characters.

[ihatepeas]

I don't think you can really write well about a character you're not attached to. Whether people want to admit it or not, character is what draws us to stories. Reflections of ourselves or what we would like to be. And if you are distant from your characters as you write, your reader will be too. The more removed you are from your character, the easier it is for the reader to put down your book and walk away from it.

I get pretty attached to my characters, but not so much that I can't put them in tough situations or walk away when the book is finished. I do tend to have crushes on my male characters, but hey, they're much more fun to write that way.

--Sarah

[Spectacular Sameth]

Yeah, some of my female characters have quirks or appearances or whatever that I find attractive. There are a lot of red heads in my stories.

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I don't think you can really write well about a character you're not attached to. Whether people want to admit it or not, character is what draws us to stories. Reflections of ourselves or what we would like to be. And if you are distant from your characters as you write, your reader will be too. The more removed you are from your character, the easier it is for the reader to put down your book and walk away from it.

I'm not at all convinced that for a character to be interesting and keep the reader's attention requires emotional attachment, and particularly not the forms of emotional attachment that make them sympathetic or likable.

Do you ever do stories from the POV of the villain ?

I get pretty attached to my characters, but not so much that I can't put them in tough situations or walk away when the book is finished.

I have to care about them and what they want to be able to write about them in the first place, but the logic of the story comes first, and they have to bear with the consequences of what happens around them and what they do.

[ihatepeas]

I'm not at all convinced that for a character to be interesting and keep the reader's attention requires emotional attachment, and particularly not the forms of emotional attachment that make them sympathetic or likable.

Assuming we're talking about main characters, I think one has to be somewhat likeable to keep the reader's attention. (Unless you're going the opposite direction and creating an antihero.) And for me, personally, I have to have a main character that I somewhat like, or it's just one more thing that makes the story harder to write. On one occasion, I had to chuck 125 pages because my main character was flat, irritating, and completely boring, and I had written myself into a corner. So I changed the main character, instead focusing on a formerly minor character who was much more dynamic.

And no, I haven't really written from the point of view of the villain. I mostly write murder mysteries, and when I read other murder mysteries, it drives me crazy when the writers tries to get inside the villain's head because most of the time they don't get it right. Murder mystery villains tend not to have a lot of dimension, which is pretty unfortunate. For myself, I would rather not do it than do it badly, especially when it's not vital to the story.

--Sarah

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

Assuming we're talking about main characters, I think one has to be somewhat likeable to keep the reader's attention. (Unless you're going the opposite direction and creating an antihero.)

To my mind, that just makes it a more interesting challenge. Protagonist of my current primary WiP is going to be a fun sell on that account, because he is a highly trained, highly motivated person, committed to making the world a genuinely better place, and vehemently anti-democratic; he reckons a feudal system just needs people to keep their word in order to work, whereas a democracy needs them to be wise as well, which seems less plausible to him.

On one occasion, I had to chuck 125 pages because my main character was flat, irritating, and completely boring,

But do flat and completely boring have to go along with not likable ?

[quote[
I mostly write murder mysteries, and when I read other murder mysteries, it drives me crazy when the writers tries to get inside the villain's head because most of the time they don't get it right.
[/quote]

In what sort of ways do you feel they get it wrong, then ?

[ihatepeas]

To my mind, that just makes it a more interesting challenge. Protagonist of my current primary WiP is going to be a fun sell on that account, because he is a highly trained, highly motivated person, committed to making the world a genuinely better place, and vehemently anti-democratic; he reckons a feudal system just needs people to keep their word in order to work, whereas a democracy needs them to be wise as well, which seems less plausible to him.

But do flat and completely boring have to go along with not likable ?

No, that's just how it happened for me. It was just this whiny girl who never did anything except react. The fact that I didn't like her either certainly didn't help. I have another main character who is extremely abrasive, just grouchy and sarcastic and not very nice. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time with her in real life, but she is oh so fun to write about.

[quote[
I mostly write murder mysteries, and when I read other murder mysteries, it drives me crazy when the writers tries to get inside the villain's head because most of the time they don't get it right.


In what sort of ways do you feel they get it wrong, then ?

[/quote]

Well, if a villain is a flat character, it's just not going to work to try getting inside their head. I think that's the case in Mary Higgins Clark mysteries (which I mostly like--don't get me wrong). She has this bad guy who is a very minor character and has little dimension or backstory, and then when she writes from that person's point of view, it's just cliche after cliche. I think if someone's going to spend the time writing the villain's point of view too, they should spend a little more time making that character three-dimensional enough to warrant his own point of view.

I've been trying to think of books written strictly from the villain's point of view, and I'm not coming up with much.  The ones I do think of, the villain could arguably be seen as the hero, such as Elphaba in Wicked, or Dexter in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Yeah, it's the Wicked Witch of the West, but she's kind of the hero of her story. Same with Dexter.

I'd love to know if anyone has any examples of stories written from the villain's point of view. Undoubtedly someone will mention something totally obvious and I will feel stupid, but I can take it.

--Sarah

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I've been trying to think of books written strictly from the villain's point of view, and I'm not coming up with much.  The ones I do think of, the villain could arguably be seen as the hero, such as Elphaba in Wicked, or Dexter in Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Yeah, it's the Wicked Witch of the West, but she's kind of the hero of her story. Same with Dexter.

I'd love to know if anyone has any examples of stories written from the villain's point of view. Undoubtedly someone will mention something totally obvious and I will feel stupid, but I can take it.

I really don't know how many people see themselves as the villains from their own POV, though.  Have met a couple in reality, and they are worth staying well away from, but I'm not sure they have the protagonist nature.

I also have the feeling there are obvious examples I am missing.  Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory is really as far as I can remember reading of an anti-hero being pushed into villain ground; both Dexter, and Bradley Denton's Blackburn in the novel of the same name, are a) applying some sort of stringent moral standard such that their victims are even less sympathetic than they are and b) lightening the impact of the brutality with humour.

I suppose there's the demonically possessed Max the Assassin in Gerard Hourner's The Beast that was Max and Road to Hell, but those are not overly deep nor unmitigatedly successful at what they are doing.  The Wasp Factory is brilliant, though.  In first person, too.

[Nessus_Wyndestrike]

Oh gosh, my own characters are my children, metaphorically speaking. I kind of see myself as their God [no, not in a conceited way]. I create them with a basic image in my head and they take their own shape and shape their own personalities as I write. One of my characters, who I described as an all around good guy in the beginning...well, by the end he had the most unstable, secretive, possessive, power-hungry personality of the bunch.

And then there's my Incubus Prince, Salen. He went in an entirely new direction. I tried to keep to the fact that he is a Daimon [an alternate spelling for daemon; Greek origin meaning more of a demi-god than an evil entity] in mind as I wrote him. Daimons, as it were, care little about lasting emotional attachments and whatnot. Sure he's not one for any type of romantic relationship [aside from bedding someone once and feeding off of their lust-energy], but he is a loyal friend to the main cast. Which ended up surprising me in my third draft.

I also like to sit down and discuss my ideas with my characters. And if they do not like the direction of the story, they usually either change it or change something else along the way. It's fun.

But, anyway, that's my input on the matter.

~N.W.

[Erlkoeneg]

As a roleplayer, and writer, there are characters that I am intensely attatched to. Often these are the ones with the histories of terrible things that happened to them.
and, as many have said, it is much easier/ often better to write/play a character you are attatched to.