Sympathetic characters

The talented and lovely Lauren talks about sympathetic characters in her blog, Book in the Oven.

This is a post worthy of study to the writer.

Courtney Summers’ book, Cracked Up to Be also is a good study. Her main character, complete with appalling behavior, was sympathetic almost immediately. She did this is a sneaky fashion. Courtney, let it be known, is sneaky.

But I digress. Creating sympathetic characters is, I am convinced in a “hack writer” kind of way, a non-trivial literary accomplishment.

The Experts tell us the books people like to read need to be show and not tell. In doing so, it is easy to form a character in our minds that is almost as real as an actual person. So we place these literary people in our book, yet, in the guise of rushing to and fro for momentum and plot, it is easy to leave off the parts we know, as the writer, that the reader does not know.

Such as, why one should care about the character in the first place.

This is why having a beta reader or two is so important. It is not an easy thing to realize a character is unsympathetic, not because she actually is, but because of an unintentional error storytelling.

Check out Lauren’s post!