Notes on characterization: You are the puppet master

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 63

Back to the likeability question for a moment…

You should have a basic idea how you want your reader to feel about each character and you should manipulate them (both the character and the reader) in order to achieve the desired reaction. Beware of unintentionally letting unlikeable traits slip into your supposedly sympathetic character and vice versa. (A little bit of intentional gray thrown into the black and white is a different matter.)

If you’re writing literary fiction, you have more room for ambiguity, but in most commercial genres, you want your reader pulling for the good guys and shaking their fists in rage at the bad guys. If your protagonist accidentally turns your reader off and your villain starts becoming the most likeable person in the story, you have a problem. Of course you can have an antihero, but the point is you need to be in control of whose side the reader is on.

This is where a trusted second reader is essential, because you need to get an objective opinion of how your characters’ actions come across. Here’s an example: I once worked with a woman who was furious because various neighborhood cats would get into her backyard and sit on her patio furniture (the horror!). She described with relish her solution to this problem: she set up baited traps on her patio and hauled her neighbors’ beloved cats off to the pound, never mentioning what she’d done when she later saw them frantically searching for their missing pets.

It was obvious that this woman was proud of her creative problem-solving skills, and were she writing about the incident, I’m sure she would paint herself as the heroine. No matter how artfully she describes what happened, though, the cat trapper is going to come across as sympathetic as Cruella De Ville. But she couldn’t see how vile her actions would look to someone else.

So grill your second reader on her feelings about each character. Of course there will be differing shades of interpretation, but take note of any reactions that are way off your intended mark so that you can fix them in the rewrite.