To Believe or not to believe

So basically readers are information junkies. We hunger to learn everything from a book. If we don't get enough information or fully understand the characters, the story will give us a bad taste. Books are like food for our thoughts. The better taste, the more we will enjoy it. And characters who act like real people with beautiful emotion can satify our taste.

 

Novels are for people to just loose themselves in for a little bit of time, because their (our) lives are so full of shit most of the time that spending a quiet hour or so once a day just doesn't seem to be asking all that damn much now is it! So, writers need to learn what kind of things will jar the reader out of the state of suspended belief that they need to maintain if they are to have even the tinniest illusion of relief.

 

I'm going to rephrase this to relate to another subject:

"Food that has flavor. Maybe that's the type of food that I am sick of."

I assume that what I said about food makes no sense to you. I said it to communicate how little I can understand what you said about characters. Why wouldn't you want an interesting character? Why wouldn't you want a character that makes you care about what happens in the story?

Now, I can imagine that a person could exist who is annoyed by flavor in his food - who would prefer every food to have an identical very bland taste, maybe the taste of instant mashed potatoes, but with even less flavor. But that person might have normal or even strong preferences for texture in his food - he might want a choice of crunchy bland food, or creamy bland food, or fizzy bland food. He wants all sorts of food that is exciting in texture, but has no taste at all.

There's nothing inherently wrong about that person's preferences - it's not as if he should be ashamed of them. But they are rare, _incredibly_ rare. They are so rare that no one is going to make a line of foods, or open a restaurant, to appeal to that person.

It's starting to appear to me that you don't actually want any character in your characters. No motivation, no feelings, no background. You don't want personalities, just as that person doesn't want flavor. But you do want action and events, just as that person wants texture.

What you want is what you want. But the bland-food-seeker will rarely find the food products that he wants, and will not be able to sell bland food products if he decides to make them himself. You will rarely find the fiction that you want, and you will not be able to sell character- and personality-free fiction if you write it yourself.

But there's another possible explanation:

Let's imagine that the bland-food person has only tasted food seasoned with vinegar and garlic. He's never tasted butter, or vanilla, or bacon fat, or chocolate, or any of the other flavors in the world. He doesn't like vinegar or garlic, so he thinks that he just doesn't like flavor in his food at all.

It may be that you've read so many books with angsty, over-dramatized, soap-opera, tear-jerker characters and backgrounds, that you think that that is what we're talking about when we say 'character', and that's why you think that you want character-free characters.

For example, you mentioned that you like The Graveyard Book. That book has plenty of personality and background and motivation, but it's not angsty and hysterical. Maybe what you seek is not emotionally bland fiction, but fiction with character "flavors" that are different from the ones that you've encountered. And that's why I, at least, keep asking about characters that you like, because I will bet that, just like The Graveyard Book, those characters _do_ have character. I bet that you don't really want instant mashed potatoes all the time.

But if you do, you do. If that turns out to be the truth, that's fine, but I think that you'll need to accept that the reading audience for those mashed-potato characters is vanishingly small.

 

I wholeheartedly endorse Chicken's brilliant analysis above. (I wanted to send some rep your way, Chx, but it wouldn't let me.)

 

Most of the male characters I like are badass characters like Rambo, James Bond, and Wolverine. Female characters can be girly or badass too. And I also like humor characters who do stupid stuff that makes me laugh.

I admit, I am one of the readers who enjoy characters with interesting characterization. A character without personitly or desire can bore me to death. Even if the story is more focus on the action, the way the characters react to a situation and how they feel is what makes them interesting. Characters without emotion won't do anything. That is plain logic.

As for food, since I am a fat guy, I enjoy good food with delious taste of any favor. If it can satisfy my mouth, then I will gobble it down. The same with books too. In fact, I am still reading The Walking Dead book series. Although there is a ton of drama in it, it feels like it makes sense, and that drives the characters to do interesting stuff that helps me learn how people will react in zombie situations.

If I try to write books where characters are nothing but cardboard mindless freaks, then I will get bore at writing the story. I still write characters with their own personitly and motivation. They are my own characters, but I do hope readers will fall in love with them too.

I use to argue about over the top drama in anime and manga books. Now I am arguing about drama in teen books. I don't like characters who have too much issue, suffer too much, and make a lot of dumb mistakes. It also sound patheic with super hero characters too. We shouldn't all escape to fictional worlds with the same soap opera problems, we should see worlds where the characters are better to teach us something. But that depends on the story.

 

I think characters who have issues, suffer and make mistakes are all important things. Characters without issues have no motivation, characters who don't suffer don't matter and characters that don't make mistakes aren't human (not literally, but characteristically). They all play some part in a character's arc.

 

What about saving the world and killing the bad guys?

 

What about saving the world and killing the bad guys? And if their issues are funny, that can entertain me.

 

What about it? They'd still have issues and suffer. Like James Bond in Casino Royale tied to a chair, getting his bollocks smashed. Are you asking about the stakes?

 

You need to articulate your thoughts in a way that we can understand. You ask a lot of meaningless questions that are widely open to interpretation. I don't want to speculate on what you actually mean before I reply, so you need to be more specific.

What exactly are you asking?

 

Good luck getting an answer on that. We have been trying to understand since he first posted his "questions".

 

No. You cannot rely on a motivation such as "saving the world and killing the bad guys." Why? Because there are bad guys out there right now, and neither you nor I have signed up to fight them. You haven't enlisted in the army. You're not a member of the police force. Because it's not enough to say "I want to kill bad guys." The people that kill bad guys have a reason tow ant to do it. Maybe their mom/dad did it. Well, you need character history to explain that. Maybe they were personally affected by the bad guys. Again, you'll need to explain why. There's more to "I'm going to kill the bad guys!" then just the desire to kill bad guys, or we'd all be out there doing it.

Going beyond that, your character is going to face trials while they're "saving the world and killing the bad guys." If they're there because, as I said above, they were personally affected, then they're going to have to deal with the pain of losing a loved one or whatever that "personal affect" was that drew them into the battle. As it is, they're going to be worrying about people they care about hack home, or maybe that also joined in the battle but whom got separated from your MC. These are internal struggles that you're going to have to show your readers or they're going to make assumptions - that your MC has no emotions or their family is dead. But even if they make these assumptions, they're going to want an explanation for each of these as well. What happened to make them so cold? Or how did their family die?

Do you see what I mean?

 

Well that answered my last question.

I guess if readers can't get enough of information from a book, they will have a lot of misunderstanding. In my short story writing class, a student wrote a story about a lesbian immigrant super hero who is on the edge of getting deported. In the story, the super hero meets an attornery who explains the super hero's situation and how hopeless it seems for her to remain in the city. At the end, she flies away. Many of the readers dug up some questions about this character. Like why does she want to stay, what is the world like, how is she a super hero, and is the attornery a super villain? We adviced the student to add more explaination and make it sound believable.

 

Exactly. It's easy to understand for yourself why your characters do what they do. That's not an issue. One could assume that the author knows more about their character and that character's past than they say in the course of the story. What is an issue is making sure your readers understand the actions of your characters. Some things don't have to be explained. Your character's allowed to just hate Mondays. Lots of people hate Mondays. No one's going to question your character groaning as they slam their hand down on top of the alarm clock, throwing their head back, staring at the ceiling a moment and then murmuring, "Monday..." under their breath before forcing themself out of bed. I think we've all done something similar to this at one point or another in our lives.

But there are some things that the reader just isn't going to be able to understand without an explanation. If I was writing a story about my life, I'd have to explain to my readers why I hate Saturdays during the summer. Most people love their Saturdays, so they'll think it's unusual that I hate them, because, during the summer, Saturday is the start of my work schedule. Now, you don't have to come out directly and say this. I could simply imply it by going through my day, getting ready for work and, while at work, having one of my co-workers ask me about how my two days off were. But it's still explaining the reasoning for my thought-process.

 

That makes since. What if it isn't important for the story?

 

Something like Thornesque's example would be more important for explaining the character, not the story.

 

The everything just needs to be explained, but how would you know what the readers need to know if there are some things that they already know from similar life stuff?

 

What do you mean, specifically? An example would help.

 

Okay if you written as much information about your characters, but your readers don't get enough to understand your character, how will you know?

 

By asking a beta reader to go over your manuscript and tell you that there were things that they didn't understand.

 

Just like what I do here.

 

The reason they have to be believable is because the reader is going to invest time in your story so they want to belive in it. Do you ever show interest in something you dont believe in? You dont want them tutting and saying that would never happen.

 

Pretty much my stories are about concepts and ideas, and I use my characters to explore these subjects through conflict.

 

As you and Thornesque both mentioned, this is what the workshop section of the forum's for. For immediate feedback before you try to take it to publishers/editors.

That's what I imagine all writers try to do, but for the reader, the characters need to be believable and relatable in order for them to invest any effort into reading your story in the first place.

If you watch Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey", you'll realise that although it is a great film, it works more as a visual and auditory experience, rather than a story about characters. I haven't read the novel it was based on, but if you were to translate Kubrick's film into a book, I doubt you'd get many people who will read it from cover to cover.

 

Good one,you joker!