Characters We Love to Hate

by Nancy

Recently, a disgruntled reader emailed me to express her distaste for a character in my mystery series.  "I hate, hate, HATE Richard!!! Please kill him off in a really disgusting way.  Dismemberment is too good for him.  He is SO HORRIBLE!"

Well, gee, thanks.

I wanted my reader to dislike Richard, of course.  He's the man who comes between the protagonist of my Blackbird Sisters mystery series and her sometime lover, Mick Abruzzo, whom all readers seem to love. ("I want to bear his children," one reader wrote.  I think she was kidding.) I wanted to tease my readers with this Other Man, who---oh, forget it.  You don't need to hear all the writerly junk. Using Richard, I walked a fine line between telling a compelling story and manipulating my readers.

Tangent:  My Trusted Friend recently sent me a link to the Most Memorably Umpopular TV Characters.  Will Wheaton's insufferably smart Wesley Crusher character made the list.  So did Dawn Summers, Buffy's mopey little sister.  (My personal pick.) And the two guys who replaced Bo and Whatisname Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard for part of a season during a salary dispute. (But have you seen those guys on Broadway lately?  Damn, they're both really, really great!  Tom Wopat blew me away in Annie Get Your Gun.) The unpopularity list is amusing.  It's a little disconcerting, however, to realize you actually know who most of them are. Not exactly a testament to the sophistication of one's cultural taste, if you know what I mean.

The list got Trusted Friend and me thinking about the most despised characters in books.  Mrs. Danvers comes to mind immediately. For lots of reasons. Can we here at TLC come up with nine more?

While you mull over your list of nominees, let me admit that the subject of manipulating the reader is bugging me these days. I turned in a manuscript about a month ago, and my editor claims she felt manipulated during The Big Gloom--the next to the last chapter where the author must really try to surprise and terrify or risk writing a book that's Not Emotionally Satisfying.  (Read: Boring.) In my effort to push all the right buttons, it seems I may have written a few scenes that will crack plaster.  (Do you throw books at the wall if you're irritated with the author?) Here's what I did: I "killed off" a character who is later revealed to be alive.  Cheap shot? A soap opera trick? A plaster cracker? Did I clumsily manipulate my reader's emotions? Yeah, maybe.  Maybe I'm jumping the shark.  I'm still trying to decide whether to keep the scenes or not.

Personally, I hate being manipulated.  I'm turned off by cheap story-telling tricks.  I remember watching THE GUNS OF NAVARONE in a quiet theater--watching the exhausted heroes painstakingly climb a cliff in the dark and feeling as if I were right there with them--struggling up that cliff to foil the evil Nazis.  Earlier in the film, one character had slipped down a ravine and broken his leg--jeopardizing the whole mission, and now they were trying to scale a seemingly insurmountable cliff.  With time running out, the rest of the team climbed in the dark. The moment was incredibly tense.  And suddenly a bird burst out of a crevice in the rock!  Everyone in the theater gasped.  Some laughed nervously.  But it was a cheap trick, if you ask me. I was already completely glued to the action.  Why did the director feel the need to scare me?

To avoid blatant reader manipulation, we writers need to foreshadow, for one thing. No flapping birds coming out of nowhere.  And we don't force characters to do anything that's outside the book's sensibility.  In a Jane Austen novel, for example, characters wouldn't run amok and slaughter each other.  It just wouldn't have fit the tone of her work.

There's a fine line between successfully plucking a reader's emotional strings and manipulation.  First you have to build reader trust and love for one character--heavy on the motivation for why she wants what she wants so badly--then pull the rug out from under her. There are more techniques, of course, but that's a workshop, not a blog.

At dinner recently, The Charming Husband of a Book Tart commented that THE DAVINCI CODE hadn't appealed to him because the characters were cardboard cutouts. Many of us agreed.  THE DAVINCI CODE relies on intriguing subject matter to entertain, but also--like many "thrillers"--it manipulates readers instead of fully engaging their emotions with well-drawn, multi-dimensional characters.  The characters act in a plot that was devised for them, and the surprises are--literally--birds flapping out of nowhere at the right/wrong moment.  But the characters themselves are not fully-fleshed enough to drive the plot as they would in--say, a literary novel.

In the biz, we tend to label books either "character driven" or "plot driven."  (Here I'm talking about truly character-driven stories, not just stories the writer believes to be "character driven" because there was no real thought put into the story before sitting down to bang it into a computer.  A rambling story is not necessarily "character driven."  In fact, the phrase has come to mean "I have no plot" in many publishing circles.) Characters who live, move and grow within their own world---whose stories spring from their needs & desires (and fears and loves and whatnot) are different from those less fully-realized characters who seem to ride a roller coaster on a set of tracks they will never jump because the author has dictated it so. It's a thrilling ride, if not necessarily an emotionally satisfying experience.

At the same dinner, the Son of Charming Husband, sat with his nose in the pages of a graphic novel, distracted from our table conversation because he was completely engrossed in the story.  But "I don't like to read," he claimed when dinner was served and he put the book aside.  On the contrary, he'd been positively riveted by the story in his hands. We didn't argue with him, though.

Listening to father and son, I wondered if the new generation of readers isn't as intrigued by character as they are by plot?  Is that what the growing popularity of graphic novels means? 

And is plot-driven vs. character-driven truly the difference between what we've come to call a "thriller" and other kinds of commerical books?

There's a method used in MFA programs for writers who haven't quite learned how to create fully-fleshed characters--characters who will help deliver that all-important Satisfying Ending. It goes, "I know you, Mick Abruzzo.  You're a man who . . . " and you supply a detail that fleshes out the character. Such as, "I know you, Mick Abruzzo.  You're a man who makes a ritual out of preparing a bowl of oatmeal every morning because a stint in jail gave you an appreciation for small domestic tasks, which are symbols for what you really want in life."

Notice I've got a lot of "why" info packed into the sentence.  It establishes his key, compelling need, which has translated into a long-running theme for the books. With this information, I've made him more real or sympathetic or intriguing to the reader. (Remember the lady who wants to bear his children?)

Okay, so that wordy hogwash doesn't work here in print, but it works for me--the author who's really trying to create compelling characters who seize a reader by the heart, who drive their own story.   

Once I know what my character really wants, I pull the rug out from under him. Take away what he longs for.  Or give it to him with conditions.  Or better yet, dangle it in front of him, but force him to choose to do something else because Door Number Two is more important somehow. Heartbreaking? Engaging? Compelling? I hope so.

I think one reason we Buffy viewers despised Dawn Summers so much was that she was mostly a functionary in a plot. She had little detail to make her real.

Plus she whined way, way too much.

So . . . what characters in books do you most dislike?

Comments

[hollygee]

Mr. Collins leaps to mind. I didn't think much of Lady Catherine either, but I was repelled by Mr. Collins and thought that Charlotte sentenced herself to a lifetime of revulsion when she married him.

[Stacie Penney]

I'm read "Flirting with Pride and Prejudice" edited by Jenny Crusie. One of the essays claims that the novel is themed based, which I buy after reading her arguement, but I love the characters and always considered it character-based. Not too many theme based novels today.

My love to hate character is Raquel from Rachel Caine's Weather Warden series. She's a djinn and sort of wants to help the MC, but only if it fits in her plan. She is manipulative and you never quite know if she is on the good guys side or the bad guys.

[Josh]

Pip from Great Expectations. What an incredible Loser, with a capital "L."

[Kerry, the Martial Tart]

I'm so there with you, Nancy, about Dawn! I thought the writers came up with a really cool idea, and my husband and I both really loved the way the character worked in the season 5 arc. But I'll never understand why they decided that her role in the plot was enough and didn't bother to develop her character the way they did with others. I guess they decided that she could be plot-driven within an otherwise character-driven show.

I don't even want to think about Wesley Crusher.

I'm going to have to think about book characters I despise. For me, they fall into two catagories: the ones I really, viscerally can't stand to read about (so I stop reading the book), and the ones I can love to hate. Fun notions to occupy me this morning!

[Cinema Dave]

Keep writing this kind of stuff Nancy,
I won't have to enroll in that MFA program I was thinking about!

I am somewhat sympathetic to characters you are not supposed to like - I guess it comes from years of predisposition of "pretty boy" heroes who get the girl, while the ugly villian meets their doom.

In Graphic novels, "Frank Miller's Sin City" features a tall, bald, well spoken and polite thug named Manute. He is loyal to his master, usually some Crimelord. He is frequently beat up by the noir hero in the novel and has a glass eye from one of his beatings.

While Manute has a bit of a sadistic streak, he is very professional. Much like Sir Larry's Nazi dentist in William goldman's "Marathon Man," he talks to you kindly before drilling without novacane. Sometimes the "Sin City" heroes - or anti heroes - have personalities that are too strung out on novacane.

[Cinema Dave]

I must admit, J.K. Rowling did an excellent job creating dislikeable characters, from the Malfoy Family to Professor Snape. In "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," there is an educational burreaucrat who is the epitome of EVERYTHING wrong with education! I am convinced I worked with that fictional character when I was a school teacher.

[ramona]

It's a tie, for me: Cathy and Heathcliff. Bleh. I never "got" Wuthering Heights, didn't see the romance, didn't care about either of them, other than that they annoyed me because they were both unlikeable and boring. Evil, mean, cruel, etc., no problem, but can't take boring. IMO, they deserved their respective fates. And if Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes can't make them appealing, that's pretty hopeless.

JK Rowling does have the touch with the icky people--Lucius Malfoy is hateful, but can you beat Uncle Vernon? And that weasel Percy Weasley?

Aside to Cinema Dave: I liked Manute in the movie--the bits I saw between my hands over my face!

[Maryann]

Marianne Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in Sense & Sensability. Neither deserved the people they were fortunate enough to end up with. In fact, if it weren't for the devastation Elinor and the Colonel would have suffered, Marianne could have expired...and been buried next to Willoughby once some outraged husband or father bested him in a duel.
As for modern characters...Kate Morgan in The Intelligencer. The author wanted to make sure we knew that Kate was the 'perfect' researcher. However, her second plot was amazing well done...Elizabethan England and Kit Marlowe as 'the intelligencer' for HRH.
Oh...and I agree about Dawn. She was like that little speck you can't quite get out of your eye.

[Kathy Sweeney of Page 119, "Have Your Cake"]

"I know you, Mick Abruzzo, you're great in the sack."

I didn't volunteer to have his babies, but I did volunteer to keep him out of prison by any means possible.

More on hateful characters in a future comment.

[Margaret]

The stepmother in Elizabeth Gaskell's WIVES & DAUGHTERS gets me every time. Maybe because I actually know somebody like her. False, sanctimonious, pretending to be solicitous of others as a means of having her own selfish way.

My most loathesome literary jerk, male category, is probably Tom Ewell in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.

[Kathy Sweeney]

Tom Ewell and his daughter Mayella. Hate them. Both. (To Kill A Mockingbird);

Melanie Hamilton Wilks. She made me sick - talk about your classic enabler. (Gone With the Wind);

The entire Malfoy family, and of course, Voldemort/Tom Riddle (Harry Potter) - my jury is still out on Snape.

The wicked stepmother - and her two nasty kids. Wanted to yank all their hair out by the roots. (Cinderella). That story is full of little nasties, if you think about it.

I've got to go now - my blood pressure is rising.

[nancy martin]

Ditto on Tom Ewell.

Opposite end of the literary scale: Janet Evanovich's Benito Ramirez. The manipulative druggie boyfriend in Carrie Fisher's POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE. (I love that book.) And--oh, wait.

I'm sitting here thinking of villains in pop fiction and found myself considering how much people love Hannibal Lecter. A villain people love. Which is different from the Michael Coreleone anti-hero, huh? (See Dave, you need that MFA class just so you can tell us about this phenomenon.)

Which makes me think of the new spin on Judas. Once a villain, but a new twist in the story now makes him a hero??

[Word Nerd]

It's not a novel, but I've been watching the DVDs of ALIAS and Arvin Sloane comes to mind. As does Irina and Sark. They are such slimy characters that I have to like hating them.

[ramona]

About Bob Ewell--word.

[Kimmy]

People like Hannibal Lecter? That's scary.

Mickey Rourke seems to play a lot of evil characters: the boyfriend in "9 1/2 Weeks", for example.

John Grisham creates some noteworthy villians - especially in his early books. "A Time to Kill" had a Tom Ewell character, but it's been so long since I read it that I don't remember his name.

[ramona]

I'm sorry, but it's killing me.
Bob Ewell. Tom Robinson.
There, you can all roll your eyes and call me Miss Nit Picky...

[Kathy Sweeney]

The DaVinci Code had a bad albino - but the first albino villian (for me, anyway) is in "Foul Play" - what a hilarious movie that was - Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase and Dudley Moore in his best non-drunken role.

By the by - I hated DaVinci Code. Thought is sucked and couldn't finish it, which is very rare for me.

[Ro]

Mr. Potter in "It's A Wonderful Life".

Loved that Saturday Night Live skit where they beat the crap out of him. Dana Carvey does a great Jimmy Stewart.

[Cassie]

Elphabala from "Wicked" has to be the most annoying character ever. This book is the Wizard of Oz, told from the witch's point of view. Great premise, right?? And yet it was awful. I like my heroines to have some spunk -- my villains, too, for that matter. But this combo villain/heroine was angst-y and whining. I was hoping for a little less Melanie Wilkes and a little more Miss Piggy. I can't abide a book that doesn't have at least *some* sense of wit or humor.

Oh, and Cinema Dave, take it from a disciple: Nancy Martin is a living, breathing MFA program. Stick with her, man, and you'll never need any other writing curriculum.

[nancy martin]

The best piece of writing advice I have: Keep your butt in the chair. That's the sum of my wisdom. Pay the tuition, Dave.

I do love Miss Piggy, though. Great character!

[Daisy]

I think we're talking about two kinds of characters we hate here; villains/people we are supposed to dislike (ie Mr. Collins, Professor Snape) and characters we are supposed to like, but don't (Dawn, Wesley Crusher). In the latter catagory, I want to add the narrator from 'The Nanny Diaries' (speaking of books with unsatisfying endings...). There were some funny bits and good social satire in that book, but I almost couldn't finish it because the whole time I was reading I just wanted to scream, "Grow a spine, you jellyfish!"

I have the same problem with Hamlet.

[Joyce]

Many, many years ago I read The Bad Seed. I remember hurling the book across the room when I finished it.(Thank God it was a paperback!)

[Margaret]

Yeah, Bob Ewell. Sorry. Can you believe I was reading the courtroom scene in TKAM JUST LAST NIGHT??

Having one of those days.

When you just want to yank the keys right out of the keyboard and fling them into the forest.

I knew yesterday was too perfect. Just knew it.

[Kristin]

The first Mrs. DeWinter in "Rebecca." Oh was she twisted and evil! And she was dead! I also hated the housekeeper lady--I can't remember her name. The one that made the new Mrs. DeWinter feel all out of place.

[Kathy Sweeney]

Hi Margaret - take heart -

Tomorrow is another day.

I love Katie Scarlett O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler (did I miss one?). She's someone people also love to hate.

[Cinema Dave]

Thanks Nancy, but if I am going to solve my abdominals issue, I've got to get my butt OUT of the chair!

Thanks for the Ewell Family mention from "Mockingbird," I was thinking about them.

As for Manute, I did meet the actor who portrayed him, Michael Clarke Duncan. Nice man in real life who has a love of comic book action movies. Since he took on The Rock and beat up Ben Affleck, who else would he like to challenge in another big screen brawl. His answer was great;
Jackie Chan
Chow Young Fat
Jet Li..........and after much thought and given that this was April 2004 and "Kill Bill Volume II" was just released,added Uma Thurman to his list!

[Cinema Dave]

As for Hannibal Lechter, his profile in the movies is that "Dr. Lechter only eats the rude people." So Dr. Lechter performs a public service for our own dark sides.

Michael Corleone was everybody's favorite anti hero until he killed his brother, then he went to far. While I thought it needed one more rewrite, I thought "The Godfather Part III" did an interesting job dealing with the issue of guilt and redemption. Despite his evil actions, one felt sorry for the sinner in the final moments of the film. Heartbreaking -
the most powerful man in the world failed to protect the thing he loved most.

[dj1951]

Okay. I reluctantly admit it. I'm the one who offered to have Michael Abruzzo's babies--with the caveat, "Were I still of reproductive age," mind you. At least I think that's what I said. When one reaches the age of hot flashes memory is often incinerated in the process. I'm not a total nitwit. I do realize Michael is a fictional character, and the odds of him producing anything other than nice sweaty daydreams are somewhere around slim and none. Still, one can hope.

My most disliked fictional character--Harry Potter. I know, I know, disliking Harry is akin to kicking puppies and pulling the whiskers off kittens. But he's soooooooooo good he often makes my back teeth hurt. Give me Snape any day of the week. Snape and Michael Abruzzo. Now THAT would be an interesting evening.

[Kathy Sweeney]

We watched The Matrix trilogy last night - Mr. Smith is back near the top of the list of characters I hate.

I hate the character so much that, even though I had read the Lord of the Rings, I kept expecting him to turn into something evil when he played the Elf King.

DJ - Mick would have Snape for lunch - magic or no magic.

[Bob Liter]

Not fiction, exactly, but the first person I thought of was Captain Bligh of the movie, Mutany on the Bounty.
Bob Liter