Nikki Loftin

Archive for March 10th, 2010

Hurting the Characters You Love

And no, I’m not talking about your kids or mine, even though they may indeed be “characters.” I’m talking about those kids we kid’s fiction writers create on the page and then — somewhere between writing The End and the call from your friend/agent/beta reader with revision ideas/suggestions/orders/demands to beef up your plot — we fall in love with.

I was sitting on my porch on Monday, wondering why I was having such a hard time revising one of my manuscripts when it popped into my head that the only thing keeping me from tearing into that revision with the necessary gusto was that I loved my main character too much.

Let’s call him Raymond, shall we? Precious little Raymond.

Raymond is just about everything I like in a kid. He’s sneaky, mischievous, funny, overly dramatic, smart, geeky, and deeply insecure. He has his own very special moral code, which might not be immediately recognizable as, well, moral to many old farts/adults. I wrote him, sure. I even found myself disapproving of his antics from time to time. Okay, not really. But I knew I *should* disapprove, if I were a “Good Parent.” Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the little squirt. He became – like Pinocchio, like so many characters from books I read as a child — a real boy. My perfect, my precious. (Go ahead, do your Smeagol/Gollum voice here; I did.)

Of course, once I realized what I’d done, that the thing holding me back from making my manuscript better (um, hello? The *job* of a writer???) was that I didn’t want Raymond to suffer, it wasn’t a problem any more. Hey, I didn’t stick that post-it on my writing desk with those three magic words just to fill the space! What three words, you ask?

Hurt your characters.

Long story short-ish? I’m applying a whole lotta Tough Love to poor little Raymond this week. I hope it’ll make the book better. Who knows? Maybe it would work in the real world, too. (cue evil laughter)

(No, no. Bad Mommy. Hurt your characters, not your children. Very important to remember.)

Write well, friends. And be vicious and brutal to your fictional children.