Eccentric Flower:200003/The Error of the Detestable

I also did my taxes today. I owe the feds $170, but my state refund will be $150. So I'm waiting to file the federal until I get the check from the state - they cancel each other out neatly.

I mention this only because it amuses some quiet corner of my brain immensely.

I cut off the previous entry just as I realized it was segueing into this one, and that this one was becoming something I've wanted to write ever since getting comments on my film notes.

At the end of my response to Election - and you were getting my first response here, literally minutes after turning off the television - I wanted to add "What is it with writers filling their scripts with such intensely dislikable characters?"

Then I remembered I have a series of stories with a character that some people find very dislikable - and a novel - and thought: Oh, yeah, I forgot. They're more fun to write than Nice Folks.

It's true. Characters with some essential rudeness or deep-seated torment in their nature are a lot of fun to write. My decent, upstanding characters are usually the ones who get the complaints about "no characterization" (because I don't often bother; they bore me and I assume everyone can fill in the blanks anyway).

But the unpleasant or broody characters are only interesting if you can see the inside of their head and know why they react the way they do. On the surface, they're not a joy for the reader to be around.

The movies I like to see always have a Good Guy. He can have problems or faults, often big ones - he's allowed to have a Dark Side, that makes him human - but he's indisputably the Good Guy and the audience should want him to triumph despite his faults. He can get kicked around, Bad Things can happen to him, but he always has to appear intact, bloody but unbowed, at the end. Call me simplistic.

So why don't I give my Telepath character (she doesn't have a name, so pardon the capitalization) a happy ending? Well, I probably will someday, but then the sequence ends. Once someone settles into a happy resting state, that's always the end of the story, right? They live on in peace and become boring and no one wants to read about them - which, if you change the final verb, is also why there are so few blissful couples in the movies.

I'm not ready to end the Telepath's story yet. I can't, because my work is obviously not finished if so few of you understand her. It really shook me that so many people find this character so hard to take. I find myself saying, "Oh, but if you only knew ...."

And of course it's my fault you don't know yet. I'm the only person who can tell you.

When someone doesn't react to my characters the way I expect them to, it means I'm falling down on my job.

A friend of mine read Exchange Student and really had a problem with the main character (most readers did, but his reaction was one of the more vehement and articulate). He wrote in his notes:
What do you see in Aedie? He lacks any interests, passions, tenderness, kindness, ability to make connections, sense of humor, ability to joke about himself, silliness, moments of grace, fantasies, spark, aspirations, memories, horniness, whimsy, or interest in his own body.
Sputter. Sputter. Fume. Of course he has some of those things. Not all of them - Aedie is notoriously cynical about the world (although he has his reasons) and he is asexual because I believe he should be, but he has plenty of the rest. He just doesn't show those things in his journal, which is what the book is. That's no excuse. I have to fix that.

Can't have people hating the main character. It just doesn't work. (The profits of American Beauty and Being John Malkovich notwithstanding.)

Anyway, I think the point of all this was that I've become aware that there's a big gap between what I like to write and what I like to see or read. And if I do it, then other writers do it too.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to force myself to like their books or films! To me it just means we share a common weakness.

I will not make their mistakes. Not too many more times, anyway.