These insights are so helpful - thank you! When I consider the issue of likeability, I always think of Larry David's character in the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The first few episodes, I could not figure the show out. Larry is an asshole and bad things happen to him and you're just kind of like, "well, yeah, of course annoying things happen to him, he has it coming!" But a wonderful thing happens the more you watch the show: you are pulled in so close into the minutia of Larry's life, that you kind of... get him. You don't really *like* him, but he's like a hilarious friend you roll your eyes at and apologize for. So when bad/annoying things happen to him, you kind of go "awww, Larry! HAHA". You want to help him, but you also want him to get what he deserves, and feeling that contradiction is really magic! Once that clicked for me, I switched "likeability" for something like "familiarity". Familiarity can breed both love and contempt - and sometimes both! - but either way, it's definitely not boring.
This has made think about the difference between writing for sympathy vs writing for empathy. I believe that I heard once that a good story can make you feel sympathetic for a character, but a great story can make you feel empathetic for them. But I don't know if I buy that. I think it wholly depends on the specifics of the character, but if a hateable character truly has done something awful, I think there can be possibly be some ethical issues with trying to have your reader empathize with them. By attempting to put the reader in that awful person's shoes you're also sort of asking the reader to forgive them. Whereas, if you make this awful person sympathetic in some small way or manor, I think the reader can see and appreciate the complexity of their actions, but still at the same time not defend them. But a little voice inside of me wonders if there is a way to artfully and skillfully create a truly awful and despicable character that can be empathized with. Can that be moral? Because I agree that empathy does feel stronger than sympathy, and I think we should probably always be shooting for the former when we can.
This question reminds me of reading George's story "Victory Lap." The story has a clear villain, the predator. But he gives the guy just enough detail and background that I recognize him as a real person. It definitely didn't make me like him, but it at least allowed me to recognize him.
Also, I totally recognized myself in the question writer, especially after George diagnosed the problem. I have so many big ideas I've attached to my story that I haven't given my characters enough room to make organic decisions. In Draft #1, I have to let the chips fall. I hear you.
Thank you George and thank you Loveless in Las Vegas. Great question and a great, insightful answer, as usual. Both reminded me that this idea of being interested or intrigued is ultimately more important than liking or not. It suggests engagement rather than judgement. Perhaps we are talking about a sort of Buddhist detachment and presence. Events and characters happen and I am interested in seeing, knowing and feeling. I don't really need to judge them in order to benefit from understanding or empathizing, or in order to participate in some way. A beautiful concept really. Thank you again George and StoryClub for my weekly dose of group therapy. Like, not like, all I know is it's great here.
I often find myself comparing how I'm living my life to how I write. Slow and plodding some days, rushing in without looking others. This idea of "pre-judging" is dear to me.
About the questioner - "She has put herself, it seems, in the position of sort of pre-judging what the reader will find “likable.” So, in a sense, she already knows what she thinks about them. "
I am slow to judge others, which has led me into a lot of trouble with people. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, too many times. In younger day, when someone has, say "stolen from me 10 times," I might then say, "hey maybe you can stop stealing from me?" It's not lack of courage. It's wanting to believe in the goodness of people who maybe aren't so good, or see the world differently than I do.
All of this is wrapped up in my strong ethical sense that aligns well with The Four Agreements. When I read Ruiz's book, I found I was already living them - it was confirmation bias, of course. I hate lying, including self-deception. But what I found is worse than lying is "assuming." Assuming is insidious in that it encompasses all other kinds of false judgments and leads to seeing the world through a glass darkly, or seeing the world through dark glass.
I consciously try not to assume much, especially about people, so when I'm caught assuming, it's a shock to my system. Not assuming is very much related to not judging. (I don't know if I'm so much an acolyte of The Four Agreements anymore - 2 of the precepts are stated in the positive and 2 in the negative. I've been working toward having only positive statements in my life. I try to "find a way to say 'yes'" in my life, which precludes "Don't" statements.)
But it's second nature to me to withhold judgments and to not assume. And so this part of George's response resonating strongly for me ... we're intrigued by characters because of "the writer’s refusal to make a judgment."
Whether that character is a good person or a bad person or does a good thing or does a bad thing - if you write it with that good/bad intentionality, so many assumptions get encoded into the creative process that it's impossible for some of those ideas not to seep in and infect the character in a way that they become less fully realized. They become stereotypes and one-dimensional creations of your own authorial assumptions.
When I first started writing back in the neolithic period, and my creative writing teacher said, "let the characters have a life of their own," I guffawed to myself in that young hubristic author way - "I'm the author, I can write her anyway I want. She does what I say she does. I AM...the puppetmaster." That didn't work so well.
But when I finally let go of the strings, writing became similar to how I deal with people in my life, non-judgmental, non-assuming in order to think and hope for the best for them.
"Let's see what this character does....." I tell myself. I'm willing to withhold judgment long enough to give someone or some character a chance to do the right thing or the true thing for them.
"He will be read long after these times have passed." That's such a wonderful note from another amazing writer. I'm reading Zadie Smith's "Swing Time" now. Sad that I'm almost done with it. I don't want it to end!
Another great, thoughtful, smart question and answer with so much for us to chew on and think about. I didn't "like" the mother-in-law character in Hurston's story, but boy, did she pop up in only a few short scenes and explain so much to us! She's the character that opened up the past–– we learned that the mother-in-law perceived Missy May's mother as the town floozy, and thought maybe Missie May was "a chip off the old block," didn't want her son involved with women like that, etc. She seemed harsh, and I got the feeling she caused Missy May some grief. Hurston used this complicated mother-in-law to show the reader so much of what was going on, not only in the past, but also during the labor and after the baby was born. A great motivation for Missie May to go back to her husband when she ran into her mother-in-law on the street, not wanting to give her what she "prayed for nightly." This MIL character intrigued me, made me curious, and made the story better.
This post hits straight to the heart of something I see a lot in (particularly) new writers who get stuck. I have an opinion about it but, as I'm continuing to learn myself (especially about short stories), your mileage may vary.
The main issue I see over and over is that the writer has made a commitment to plot over all things including character(s). In other words, a great deal of energy, effort and planning goes into creating and making the story "work", that is in building a beginning, middle and end and all those points in between to tell a complete story. To be sure, there's an entire industry devoted to plot structure. We've all heard those buzzwords: exposition, rising action, falling action, inciting incident, climax, false ending, resolution etc.
When a story fails for me, it's almost never the plot itself but in the disconnect between plot and character.
I'm not saying plot isn't important. I want to be clear about that. But I believe that the best plots are built FROM character not TO character. As George says here, when we create interesting characters and "follow" them, they often will show us where to go. And, I think, they will reveal plot to us at the same time.
Regarding the problem with pre-deciding “what comes next”: I once dreamt some text I thought would make a great final line for a story. Over the next few weeks, I wrote a story to stick in front of it. When I got to the last line, of which I was so proud, I (perhaps inevitably) realized I had to change it. I wonder, then, where that story came from?
Your vulnerability within your analysis is so helpful, Story Clubber "Loveless". We love you.
Dark, twisty psych thrillers are my indulgent viewing genre, but I tend to read heavily in memoir. You'd think there would be no overlap, or at least might hope not if a film is dark and sicko enough, but if you view these two genres in differing forms from the side (like from that fifth dimensional tesseract in Interstellar, peering into a familiar room and time period through the unfamiliar backside of the bookcase), these two different genres in different froms are often templates for each other: little studies into the complexity of character psychology. I trust the characters that clearly made the writer write them into being, hand-to-throat style.
Characters that feel honest in their exposure (you tell me your secrets and I'll tell you mine) can drive me compulsively (I tend to assume anyone) through even a bland story plot. Don't we just want to be inside those other heads, experiencing old views in new ways, or even new views in new ways, with other people of all kinds and not feel the manipulation of a writer's hand or their organized plot motivations? If I remember a writer when in the midst of a story I tend to feel manipulated, and will begin to pull away. Kind of like a bad marriage. Being controlled as a reader or viewer feels slimy and wrong. The truths characters have to tell in order to deliver a story honestly necessarily take us into places that feel universal even if not personally relatable, and not every storyteller follows their characters' honesty over plot intentions, though that's my seduction as a viewer or reader. Seduce me with those honest, complicated characters and keep it real. That is, tell the parts that try to hide!
Let the judgments fall away and let me hear what that character needs to tell me. Get out of the way, Writer. (I say this to myself when I get scared.)
So much power in a single word, though: "likability" is helpful until its limiting. Then we need a new one for the new dare we write. Vividness, intrigue, familiarity, habitation, sympathy/empathy (those are two very separate things in psychology), visceral––I might just make a reference list to remember today's post and some of the words you all used here. Riches. In this comment I used "seduction". The section of work I have to write in later today about a character for whom I feel so many different things, will perhaps need the term "crash". Whatever that character does, it's hard to look away.
I’m glad you wrote this post at this particular time, as I have chosen to try to write a character who seems at once very good and very bad. I also love the notions of being as vivid and as open as possible. Thank you for this perceptive and awe-inspiring response!
Feeling empathy for a character does not stop them being villainous. I find it makes them more horrifying. I am thinking of Humbert Humbert of Lolita. We empathise with his tortured life and yet hate what he does. What George is saying, I think is, make the character more believable in flesh and blood, but still doing things true to his character.
I loved this. The questioner expressed so well the annoyance I feel when I’ve made a first section better and thus created a ton of work for myself re-writing the rest to match! For me, the consolation is I always feel better once I’m in the midst of that re-writing. I dread it and curse it and refuse to do it and then at first it’s a slog but then it opens up to this peaceful clearing where everything is right with the world. It might even get exciting again.
Reserving judgment is always a precarious dance for me. And I thought that I wasn't a very judgemental person. Although, I think that often worry more about other's judgement of my characters and by simple association myself.
My characters tend to be "unlikeable" for lack of a better word, although I try to hold in my head that that they are neither good nor bad, but sometimes do things that are questionable and sometimes do thing that lean more towards noble. The closer I can stay in that middle range between the two extremes of good and bad, the better.
I try to remember something I heard you, George, say in one of f countless YouTube videos that I have watched, quoting an old movie: The time to make up your mind about someone is never.
It can be tough when you're trying to figure out a character—what traits make them likable, unlikable, or unlikely to do what you want them to do. Characters need to have some consistency, but we want them to be not only interesting but capable of change, since the story demands that they either change or fail to change (and if they aren't capable of change, we already know the ending).
The mention of Scrooge made me remember something I'd written about A Christmas Carol. Part of what makes us interested in Scrooge—such a cold, greedy miser—is a great detail that Dickens gives him: a sense of humor ("There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are"). I'm a sucker for any character who can appreciate the absurd. Not only does it make Scrooge more interesting and fun to be around, it enables us to believe in his transformation. After all, anyone with a good sense of humor can't be all bad.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started stories with a purpose in mind only to throw it out because that purpose is too transparent.
There are things I want to explore and discuss by way of a story, but I almost have to ignore that completely and find a way to begin and hope that what’s on my mind seeps in (I think George talked about this before).
I am not good at it and it will take a lot more attempts before I come close.
This was a really good question and a very helpful and instructive answer.
I really want to work harder at letting a story develop without putting too many limitations or boundaries on it. The exercises we’ve done in the past here have helped with this. Writing fiction is still new to me and it works an unfamiliar muscle. I love writing essays, but I really want to be a better storyteller.
Great question fellow Story Clubber. It’s reassuring to know that this likeability compass is something we all suffer from.
Great answer George although I’m going to mull over it a few times over the next few days and really get to grips with what you’re telling us.
On another note, I have tickets to see you in London. Yay! Would love to come and say hello afterwards if not too much trouble. I guess these events are always very busy and everyone is clamouring to meet the writer afterwards but I shall certainly try!
These insights are so helpful - thank you! When I consider the issue of likeability, I always think of Larry David's character in the show Curb Your Enthusiasm. The first few episodes, I could not figure the show out. Larry is an asshole and bad things happen to him and you're just kind of like, "well, yeah, of course annoying things happen to him, he has it coming!" But a wonderful thing happens the more you watch the show: you are pulled in so close into the minutia of Larry's life, that you kind of... get him. You don't really *like* him, but he's like a hilarious friend you roll your eyes at and apologize for. So when bad/annoying things happen to him, you kind of go "awww, Larry! HAHA". You want to help him, but you also want him to get what he deserves, and feeling that contradiction is really magic! Once that clicked for me, I switched "likeability" for something like "familiarity". Familiarity can breed both love and contempt - and sometimes both! - but either way, it's definitely not boring.
This has made think about the difference between writing for sympathy vs writing for empathy. I believe that I heard once that a good story can make you feel sympathetic for a character, but a great story can make you feel empathetic for them. But I don't know if I buy that. I think it wholly depends on the specifics of the character, but if a hateable character truly has done something awful, I think there can be possibly be some ethical issues with trying to have your reader empathize with them. By attempting to put the reader in that awful person's shoes you're also sort of asking the reader to forgive them. Whereas, if you make this awful person sympathetic in some small way or manor, I think the reader can see and appreciate the complexity of their actions, but still at the same time not defend them. But a little voice inside of me wonders if there is a way to artfully and skillfully create a truly awful and despicable character that can be empathized with. Can that be moral? Because I agree that empathy does feel stronger than sympathy, and I think we should probably always be shooting for the former when we can.
This question reminds me of reading George's story "Victory Lap." The story has a clear villain, the predator. But he gives the guy just enough detail and background that I recognize him as a real person. It definitely didn't make me like him, but it at least allowed me to recognize him.
Also, I totally recognized myself in the question writer, especially after George diagnosed the problem. I have so many big ideas I've attached to my story that I haven't given my characters enough room to make organic decisions. In Draft #1, I have to let the chips fall. I hear you.
Thank you George and thank you Loveless in Las Vegas. Great question and a great, insightful answer, as usual. Both reminded me that this idea of being interested or intrigued is ultimately more important than liking or not. It suggests engagement rather than judgement. Perhaps we are talking about a sort of Buddhist detachment and presence. Events and characters happen and I am interested in seeing, knowing and feeling. I don't really need to judge them in order to benefit from understanding or empathizing, or in order to participate in some way. A beautiful concept really. Thank you again George and StoryClub for my weekly dose of group therapy. Like, not like, all I know is it's great here.
I often find myself comparing how I'm living my life to how I write. Slow and plodding some days, rushing in without looking others. This idea of "pre-judging" is dear to me.
About the questioner - "She has put herself, it seems, in the position of sort of pre-judging what the reader will find “likable.” So, in a sense, she already knows what she thinks about them. "
I am slow to judge others, which has led me into a lot of trouble with people. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, too many times. In younger day, when someone has, say "stolen from me 10 times," I might then say, "hey maybe you can stop stealing from me?" It's not lack of courage. It's wanting to believe in the goodness of people who maybe aren't so good, or see the world differently than I do.
All of this is wrapped up in my strong ethical sense that aligns well with The Four Agreements. When I read Ruiz's book, I found I was already living them - it was confirmation bias, of course. I hate lying, including self-deception. But what I found is worse than lying is "assuming." Assuming is insidious in that it encompasses all other kinds of false judgments and leads to seeing the world through a glass darkly, or seeing the world through dark glass.
I consciously try not to assume much, especially about people, so when I'm caught assuming, it's a shock to my system. Not assuming is very much related to not judging. (I don't know if I'm so much an acolyte of The Four Agreements anymore - 2 of the precepts are stated in the positive and 2 in the negative. I've been working toward having only positive statements in my life. I try to "find a way to say 'yes'" in my life, which precludes "Don't" statements.)
But it's second nature to me to withhold judgments and to not assume. And so this part of George's response resonating strongly for me ... we're intrigued by characters because of "the writer’s refusal to make a judgment."
Whether that character is a good person or a bad person or does a good thing or does a bad thing - if you write it with that good/bad intentionality, so many assumptions get encoded into the creative process that it's impossible for some of those ideas not to seep in and infect the character in a way that they become less fully realized. They become stereotypes and one-dimensional creations of your own authorial assumptions.
When I first started writing back in the neolithic period, and my creative writing teacher said, "let the characters have a life of their own," I guffawed to myself in that young hubristic author way - "I'm the author, I can write her anyway I want. She does what I say she does. I AM...the puppetmaster." That didn't work so well.
But when I finally let go of the strings, writing became similar to how I deal with people in my life, non-judgmental, non-assuming in order to think and hope for the best for them.
"Let's see what this character does....." I tell myself. I'm willing to withhold judgment long enough to give someone or some character a chance to do the right thing or the true thing for them.
"He will be read long after these times have passed." That's such a wonderful note from another amazing writer. I'm reading Zadie Smith's "Swing Time" now. Sad that I'm almost done with it. I don't want it to end!
Another great, thoughtful, smart question and answer with so much for us to chew on and think about. I didn't "like" the mother-in-law character in Hurston's story, but boy, did she pop up in only a few short scenes and explain so much to us! She's the character that opened up the past–– we learned that the mother-in-law perceived Missy May's mother as the town floozy, and thought maybe Missie May was "a chip off the old block," didn't want her son involved with women like that, etc. She seemed harsh, and I got the feeling she caused Missy May some grief. Hurston used this complicated mother-in-law to show the reader so much of what was going on, not only in the past, but also during the labor and after the baby was born. A great motivation for Missie May to go back to her husband when she ran into her mother-in-law on the street, not wanting to give her what she "prayed for nightly." This MIL character intrigued me, made me curious, and made the story better.
This post hits straight to the heart of something I see a lot in (particularly) new writers who get stuck. I have an opinion about it but, as I'm continuing to learn myself (especially about short stories), your mileage may vary.
The main issue I see over and over is that the writer has made a commitment to plot over all things including character(s). In other words, a great deal of energy, effort and planning goes into creating and making the story "work", that is in building a beginning, middle and end and all those points in between to tell a complete story. To be sure, there's an entire industry devoted to plot structure. We've all heard those buzzwords: exposition, rising action, falling action, inciting incident, climax, false ending, resolution etc.
When a story fails for me, it's almost never the plot itself but in the disconnect between plot and character.
I'm not saying plot isn't important. I want to be clear about that. But I believe that the best plots are built FROM character not TO character. As George says here, when we create interesting characters and "follow" them, they often will show us where to go. And, I think, they will reveal plot to us at the same time.
Regarding the problem with pre-deciding “what comes next”: I once dreamt some text I thought would make a great final line for a story. Over the next few weeks, I wrote a story to stick in front of it. When I got to the last line, of which I was so proud, I (perhaps inevitably) realized I had to change it. I wonder, then, where that story came from?
Your vulnerability within your analysis is so helpful, Story Clubber "Loveless". We love you.
Dark, twisty psych thrillers are my indulgent viewing genre, but I tend to read heavily in memoir. You'd think there would be no overlap, or at least might hope not if a film is dark and sicko enough, but if you view these two genres in differing forms from the side (like from that fifth dimensional tesseract in Interstellar, peering into a familiar room and time period through the unfamiliar backside of the bookcase), these two different genres in different froms are often templates for each other: little studies into the complexity of character psychology. I trust the characters that clearly made the writer write them into being, hand-to-throat style.
Characters that feel honest in their exposure (you tell me your secrets and I'll tell you mine) can drive me compulsively (I tend to assume anyone) through even a bland story plot. Don't we just want to be inside those other heads, experiencing old views in new ways, or even new views in new ways, with other people of all kinds and not feel the manipulation of a writer's hand or their organized plot motivations? If I remember a writer when in the midst of a story I tend to feel manipulated, and will begin to pull away. Kind of like a bad marriage. Being controlled as a reader or viewer feels slimy and wrong. The truths characters have to tell in order to deliver a story honestly necessarily take us into places that feel universal even if not personally relatable, and not every storyteller follows their characters' honesty over plot intentions, though that's my seduction as a viewer or reader. Seduce me with those honest, complicated characters and keep it real. That is, tell the parts that try to hide!
Let the judgments fall away and let me hear what that character needs to tell me. Get out of the way, Writer. (I say this to myself when I get scared.)
So much power in a single word, though: "likability" is helpful until its limiting. Then we need a new one for the new dare we write. Vividness, intrigue, familiarity, habitation, sympathy/empathy (those are two very separate things in psychology), visceral––I might just make a reference list to remember today's post and some of the words you all used here. Riches. In this comment I used "seduction". The section of work I have to write in later today about a character for whom I feel so many different things, will perhaps need the term "crash". Whatever that character does, it's hard to look away.
I’m glad you wrote this post at this particular time, as I have chosen to try to write a character who seems at once very good and very bad. I also love the notions of being as vivid and as open as possible. Thank you for this perceptive and awe-inspiring response!
Feeling empathy for a character does not stop them being villainous. I find it makes them more horrifying. I am thinking of Humbert Humbert of Lolita. We empathise with his tortured life and yet hate what he does. What George is saying, I think is, make the character more believable in flesh and blood, but still doing things true to his character.
I loved this. The questioner expressed so well the annoyance I feel when I’ve made a first section better and thus created a ton of work for myself re-writing the rest to match! For me, the consolation is I always feel better once I’m in the midst of that re-writing. I dread it and curse it and refuse to do it and then at first it’s a slog but then it opens up to this peaceful clearing where everything is right with the world. It might even get exciting again.
Reserving judgment is always a precarious dance for me. And I thought that I wasn't a very judgemental person. Although, I think that often worry more about other's judgement of my characters and by simple association myself.
My characters tend to be "unlikeable" for lack of a better word, although I try to hold in my head that that they are neither good nor bad, but sometimes do things that are questionable and sometimes do thing that lean more towards noble. The closer I can stay in that middle range between the two extremes of good and bad, the better.
I try to remember something I heard you, George, say in one of f countless YouTube videos that I have watched, quoting an old movie: The time to make up your mind about someone is never.
It can be tough when you're trying to figure out a character—what traits make them likable, unlikable, or unlikely to do what you want them to do. Characters need to have some consistency, but we want them to be not only interesting but capable of change, since the story demands that they either change or fail to change (and if they aren't capable of change, we already know the ending).
The mention of Scrooge made me remember something I'd written about A Christmas Carol. Part of what makes us interested in Scrooge—such a cold, greedy miser—is a great detail that Dickens gives him: a sense of humor ("There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are"). I'm a sucker for any character who can appreciate the absurd. Not only does it make Scrooge more interesting and fun to be around, it enables us to believe in his transformation. After all, anyone with a good sense of humor can't be all bad.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started stories with a purpose in mind only to throw it out because that purpose is too transparent.
There are things I want to explore and discuss by way of a story, but I almost have to ignore that completely and find a way to begin and hope that what’s on my mind seeps in (I think George talked about this before).
I am not good at it and it will take a lot more attempts before I come close.
This was a really good question and a very helpful and instructive answer.
I really want to work harder at letting a story develop without putting too many limitations or boundaries on it. The exercises we’ve done in the past here have helped with this. Writing fiction is still new to me and it works an unfamiliar muscle. I love writing essays, but I really want to be a better storyteller.
Great question fellow Story Clubber. It’s reassuring to know that this likeability compass is something we all suffer from.
Great answer George although I’m going to mull over it a few times over the next few days and really get to grips with what you’re telling us.
On another note, I have tickets to see you in London. Yay! Would love to come and say hello afterwards if not too much trouble. I guess these events are always very busy and everyone is clamouring to meet the writer afterwards but I shall certainly try!
Any other story clubbers attending the event?