Dissecting Dexter, Lecter, and Ripley

How to Make Any Character Likable

I recently read a novel with a main character I just couldn’t stand. Every time the narrative got around to her I wanted to put the book down. She was stupid, and irritating—and I just didn’t like her! The weird thing is, this hardly ever happens to me anymore in real life; I am fascinated by people and almost always want to get to know the people I meet better. So I kept wondering, as I read this novel, why the character of this woman repelled me so much. It’s not the first time I haven’t liked a character in a novel, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But the experience made me wonder:

Must we like the main characters in a novel?

It would be too simple to say we should like the good guys, and not like the bad guys. We often find ourselves secretly cheering for the bad guy in a novel. Take Hannibal Lecter, for instance. Here’s a guy who eats people. Yet Thomas Harris manages to make us kind of like him, in a weird way. Lecter’s cool; he’s a genius, he’s an epicurean, he’s wickedly clever, AND if that weren’t enough, he lets Clarice live because he likes her honesty and decency.

Or how about Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley? Here’s a character who goes through life ripping people off, lying and cheating his way into his victims lives before totally offing them. But somehow Highsmith makes us sympathize with him.

How does she do that?

I’ve read that Ripley series of hers several times, often with the intent to watch how she does what she did. I usually just end up getting sucked into the vortex of her subtle brilliance, but when I can manage to keep my analytical wits about me it’s plain she does it by making me relate to Tom: he’s an underdog, he’s vulnerable, he wants what we all want; acceptance, love, money, happiness, to live a life that means something. And so, despite the knowledge – after that first kill – that he will murder those who get in his way, if he has to – we find ourselves actually hoping he gets away with offing yet another person who is getting too close to finding out about him. Being the sneaky and clever sociopath he is, he does get away with it, and it’s . . . admirable, in some messed up way that we really don’t care to look at too closely.

And then we have Dexter.

I admit I have yet to read more than just a sample of Jeff Lindsay’s books, although I plan on reading them all, at some point, but like many of you, I have watched the series. If you’ve seen them, you know how Dex draws you in. He’s a sociopathic serial killer. But; dude’s got a code. A stepfather with the understanding to see what Dexter is, and the foresight to do the only thing he thinks might mitigate his son’s killer tendencies, he instills a code in Dexter. Dexter only kills people who are killers like himself. Aside from that, Dexter is brilliant at his job, and often unintentionally funny, by his lack of people skills and his hilarious and awkward attempts to appear to be like everyone else. And he does care for his sister, and his son. We are given these redeeming qualities to love.

So it would seem to me the way to make a bad guy acceptable to the reader—nay, dare I say endearing, is to show us how he is both like us: vulnerable and wanting the things we want; and how he is special in some way that makes us actually admire him.

Another key component of the magic here is that all three of these writers make us first dislike the person the bad guy kills. Well . . . most of the time, anyway. They’re snobs, or obsessed, or callus, or merciless killers themselves. Even Dickie rejects Tom Ripley in a pointed way that is both justified, but socially brutal—right before Tom bashes his brains in with an oar.

It seems to me as a reader that, as a writer, I better make sure my main characters are likable, if I don’t want readers like myself to loathe them and toss aside my novel. Could it be those characters we dislike are lacking in the area of arousing our sympathy, that we are unable to see ourselves in them? Would making them both vulnerable and also special in some way that makes us admire them do the trick? Can we use the same techniques with our ‘ordinary’ characters these writers use to make us accept such extreme bad guys?

Readers: how do you feel about this; do you have to like the main character(s) in a novel?

Writers: are you concerned with making your characters likable?

Guest Post at The Artist’s Way!

Today I’m thrilled to be guest-posting over at The Artist’s Way. Patrick’s award winning writing blog is one I always enjoy reading. His posts cover a wide range of topics centered on writing, and are often insightful and thought provoking. And he just recently got Freshly Pressed!

Continue reading . . .

And Then I Found You – a review

It didn’t make any sense, but she was beyond sense now. Life, she believed from living in the wilderness, was tied together by hints, whispers, and unseen fabric-makers. She imagined someone far more knowing than she, sewing together a fragile web that she wouldn’t see until time was done. She could ignore the whispers and threads, everyone could, and she often did, but this time she wouldn’t.

And Then I Found You, by Patti Callahan Henry is not a mystery. It’s about the oldest story in the world: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, stuff happens and they break up. Then they get back together again and everybody is happy. No mystery maybe, but, it’s still a yummy, somehow comforting, read. And hey, it had me teary eyed by page 77, and again before the book was done.  (I’m not going to go into that aspect of the novel, because it’s already been written about a lot, and it’s also kind of a spoiler.)

Reading this novel is like watching one of the better movies on Lifetime or the Hallmark channel at the end of a long day, where you just want somebody to tell you a sad story with a happy ending, that doesn’t require too much from your over-taxed brain. But by that I don’t mean to trivialize, because story telling like that takes quiet skill; language that isn’t challenging, yet doesn’t bore, and pacing, which is outstanding in this novel. I can honestly say I was not bored for even one page, though I expected I might be because of some of the tropes used, one example of which is the protagonist runs a trendy clothing boutique.

When I received this book, the novel of the month for Shereads, I thought I wouldn’t like it. I imagined it would be too sappy for my tastes. But Henry won me over with her writing, which after all, is the only difference between one book and another, when you get right down to it. She has a wonderful ear for dialogue and a gift for economically creating believable secondary characters, and she successfully writes about topics that could easily become overly sentimental.

From the beginning of the book it’s obvious how the reader wants it all to turn out—and not a surprise when it does. And yet . . . it’s all satisfying; a feeling of rightness falling into place like the tumblers of a lock: click, click, click.

The extraordinary happens in the exact middle of ordinary, she thought clearly and permanently. No trumpet blast to announce the moment, no parting of clouds or Hallelujah chorus. Just the simple miracle (as if any miracle is simple) between an in-breath and an out-breath, the wide-open space where the unknown was known, the lost found, and the unseen seen.

A superb example of its genre.

 This writer’s strengths: Henry knows just how much tension to apply and doesn’t go over the top into melodrama. She’s got a steady hand at the wheel and it very soon becomes obvious how she could be a NY Times bestseller. The writing is economical and doesn’t wear the reader out. Subtle humor; the ass-stealing incident is a good example that had me chuckling—if you want to know more, you’ll just have to read the book.

Who will enjoy this book: Women, mainly; it’s a rare guy who’d read this novel. This one’s for the girls.

I can’t comment on the editing since the copy I read is an arc, provided to me by the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, via Shereads.

The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow – A Review

When I first began reading this novel I was delighted by its disregard for a common reality. Rita Leganski’s prose slips through that narrow space between the seen, and the unseen but suspected world, as fluid and sinuous as an asp.

From the back cover: Bonaventure Arrow didn’t make a peep when he was born, and the doctor nearly took him for dead. But he was listening, placing sound inside quiet and gaining his bearings. By the time he turns five, he can hear flowers grow, a thousand shades of blue, and the miniature tempests that rage inside raindrops. He also hears the voice of his dead father, William Arrow, mysteriously murdered by a man known only as the Wanderer. Exploring family relics, he opens doors to the past and finds the key to a web of secrets that both hold his family together, and threaten to tear them apart.

I was excited by this book when I opened it. The element of magical realism was not something I’d encountered or expected in a selection from Shereads (for whom I read and reviewed this book). Most of the selections so far have been a more traditional women’s lit, so this one offered a welcome changeup. Unfortunately, for me, I felt the story took too long to get started, and the climax when it came, a vivid forced abortion scene involving characters who are each either insane (Calypso), self-serving and the very epitome of banal evil (Emmaline) or hateful and murderous (Suville—the abortionist) was both the best writing in the entire book, and a terrible let down in its transparent preachy-ness.

“Follow me,” she said, leading mother and daughter into a small room that held a bed draped in very white sheets and a small table that was draped in its own white cloth. Upon that table there rested a tray, and upon the tray there rested what looked at first glance like a piece of shiny cutlery. That is not what it was at all. It was a curette, a small instrument for cleansing a surface. That is the definition Suville offered to her clients if they asked; personally, she thought of it as a blade and loved how nicely it fit in her hand. Whenever she held it or even just caught a glimpse of it from the corner of her eye, Suville always thought the same thing: how feminine, how powerful, how elegant and deadly.

Really nice writing. The deceptive purity of the “very white sheets” draping the table where the abortion will take place; and the image of the difference in how the abortionist describes the curette to her clients, contrasted with how she really thinks of it, and how she enjoys (loves) using it with murderous intent. But this darkness comes to us on page 306, of an otherwise slow tale, and is an abrupt departure in tone.

Suville came to the room and began to bathe her patient, pouring water over Letice’s outer womb. Suville had entered a trance of her own, one in which she saw herself as the reincarnated John the Baptist. But Suville was nothing of the kind (a bit of author intrusion here as a judgement is delivered). Suville Jean-Baptiste brought no babies to life; Suville Jean-Baptiste took babies to death.

Again though; still pretty good writing. But, there’s a feeling of now getting to the point—no pun intended.

There’s a lot of religion sprinkled throughout the novel. It dips into Voodoo, Hoodoo, Evangelical Christianity, and Catholicism (did I leave any out?) as if straining toward a homogenization to avoid any prejudice. But none of it feels emotionally honest; more like ingredients added following a recipe, in an attempt to cover all the bases.

Some of the characters are very well done: The evil, mail-opening, homo-hating, weirdo Adelaide Roman is fun and awful, and awfully fun. And the character of Bonaventure is as lovely as the saint he is named after. It is in the character of Bonaventure that the reader gets a glimmer of what feels like authentic spirituality, through both the unforced descriptions of his awareness of beauty, and his gentleness. 

This writer’s strengths: Miss Laganski’s prose is often charming, especially her imaginative descriptions of the beauty of Creation. Her power though, came through strongest, and most honestly, when she wrote about her characters’ inner darkness.

Who will enjoy this book? Readers who enjoy magical prose, unconstrained by accepted reality. Those who like a lot of backstory and going into how a character became who they are.

Doomsday Prepping

Sometimes I like to watch Doomsday Preppers. If you haven’t ever caught an episode it’s this program that follows around people who believe the world is going to fall to pieces through one catastrophe or another and they will need to be prepared to survive the event. They stockpile ammo and weapons, water and preserved foods, alcohol and medicines and anything else they figure will be in short supply and therefore worth having. They build cool preparedness shelters and plan evacuation routes out of wherever they happen to live to areas they believe will be safer.

I always have the urge to buy an extra jug of spring water or a box of shells for my old 357 after watching one of these shows; maybe some rice or navy beans, food that will last on the shelf. Doomsday prepping looks fun. Like a test of supremacy. The flow of consciousness behind this show can feel like a tide sucking at your ankles and it’s easy to get caught up in it.

Put enough people together who all share an idea, and it can feel a little like getting caught in a riptide.

Have you ever stood in a completely darkened room with a flashlight in your hand? Everything all around the yellow beam of light is shrouded in darkness. The beam of light only illuminates a small portion of what you could see if the entire room was lit. Your focus naturally takes in only that which falls within the narrow beam. It is all you see.

Taking it a step further: Imagine you are in this dark room looking for your keys. Where would you direct your beam of light? Would you look for them in the fridge? The dog’s water bowl? The houseplant? Probably not the first places you’d search. You’d look for them in the places where you’d expect to find them, right? Your purse, the pocket of your jacket, the kitchen counter. You wouldn’t waste your light looking where you didn’t expect to find them.

Our attention is like a flashlight in a dark room; wherever we aim our attention we see only that which falls within its narrow beam. There’s a lot of stuff all around us, but we can only see what we have directed the beam of our attention on at that moment. Consequently, whatever we repeatedly aim our attention toward (our narrow beam of light) comes to seem as if it is everything—the only thing.

We cannot see what we aren’t looking for. And we see more and more of whatever we are focused on; what we expect.

This is how those Doomsday Preppers appear to me. Their belief that the world is coming to some catastrophic end effectively limits their ability to see any evidence to the contrary.

If we think something is bad we will use our attention to ‘watch out for it’. If we think a political party is bad we will align ourselves with ‘the other one’ and look for signs that confirm our belief. If, like the doomsday preppers, we think the world might be spiraling down toward some huge event, we will use our spotlight to look for proof that this is so, and we will find ample evidence to back up our assumptions.

Those of us who are writers sometimes get caught up in the changing world of publishing and use our attention to search for everything that will show us that traditional publishing is bad and should go away or, conversely, that it is the only valid way; we may decide to look for evidence that self-publishing is terrible, or that it is the best. And we will find ample proof of whatever we look for. We will find others who are looking for and finding the same thing, and will listen to them, maybe even form groups with them, because they are saying what we expect to hear, and it confirms we are ‘on the right track’.

It’s lonely in the dark and we do love company; it makes us feel safer.

There have been quantum physics studies  that show that what we expect to see actually becomes what we do, in fact, see. Some studies suggest that our assumptions actually create the reality we perceive.

This is at first a startling concept to get your head around. But think about it:

Everything that is began with a thought.

Politics, and the whole circus around our elections in the United States, is an especially good demonstrator of this idea. An artificial duality is created (democrats vs. republicans) and we as individuals are asked to pick a side. Then we are bombarded with messages from ‘our side’ about the wrongness, lack, stupidity, etc. of the ‘other’. And because we are conditioned from an early age that this is the way it is, and normal, and even ‘our civic duty’ we buy into it with enthusiasm. Much like the frightened folks who make up the changing cast of Doomsday Preppers, we identify with our chosen side and use the spotlight of our attention to seek out proof our choice is a good one, the right one, the one that will save us from harm. As a people we become polarized. Us vs. them.

As writers we have become polarized too. Self-publishers vs. traditional; Amazon vs. ‘the Big Five’.

But what if everything was illuminated?

What if we could see everything, and not just what was lit by our own narrow attention/expectation?

We would find we are no longer in a dark and frightening world, where we must stockpile bullets and food, and our neighbor is an idiot for liking the candidate s/he does, and the devil is the CEO of Random House. We would find ourselves in a place full of other people just like ourselves. Nice folks, for the most part, with good intentions.  

We suddenly realize that all this idea of separation is just an illusion. There is no good or bad, no right or wrong, except as we create it. As individuals, and as a group of people. We realize the world is created with our thoughts. And what we focus on we get more of.

Where, and on what, will you choose to put your focus today? What will you create?

Some good links to lead to further thinking. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Quantum explained: Sacred Science

I’d love to hear your thoughts and discuss this more!

Book Burning 101

Fahrenheit 451

Have you ever destroyed a book?

Have you ever hated a book so bad you just had to get rid of it? Perhaps feared it so much you had to make certain it was obliterated utterly?

If you love them as much as I do you may find it difficult to imagine, but books are powerful, and they can inspire powerful emotions. Words are powerful.

I have to admit I have thrown a book away on a couple of occasions.

I know. . . I’m not proud of it.

Looking back I can’t even recall which book drove me to it first, but I recall feeling it was worthless; badly plotted and badly written. I felt it was important that it not be allowed to continue to occupy space in the physical world.

I threw it in the trash. Not even the recycling, where some poor sweet schlub—maybe a guy whose wife is trying to learn English and who likes to read—might find it and bring it home. No. The recycling offered too much chance of redemption. Nothing was good enough but to huck it right in the trash with the eggshells, smelly banana peels and old lettuce.

When I was a teen my mother came home from work one afternoon and mentioned a friend of hers had burned a book. The Exorcist, or The Amityville Horror; it was one of those two, but I can’t recall which, all these years later. She said Moselle was so freaked out by the book, that it scared her so bad, she thought it might actually bring something evil her way, and so she took it out to her patio grill, poured lighter fluid on it, and set it on fire.

I remember my first thought was that Moselle was as ignorant as cheese. My next thought was that if something evil could follow a book, burning the book was risky and counter-intuitive, because something evil would undoubtedly enjoy a dramatic, fiery scene like that. Would possibly even be drawn to it. My teen-aged brain, all hopped up on Stephen King and Lovecraft, imagined some green, warty, frog-skinned demon with long ears and lidless eyes dancing a jiggity-jig around Moselle’s book burning, and getting so worked up by the woman’s fear as it watched her above the yellow tongues of flame it felt compelled to press its lamprey-like mouth to the throbbing pulse in her neck.

All unknown to her, of course. She’d be busy burning and never notice the sudden fatigue until the book was reduced to flaky, curling ashes that fell through the spaces in the grill. She’d feel she had to go lie down, perhaps take a little nap—but now she wouldn’t be alone.

Book burning has a long and sordid history dating back into antiquity, (Check out this list of famous book bonfires on Wiki, if you don’t believe me) and ending (but probably not) with this most recent book torching this month by Islamists in Timbuktu .

Bear in mind this list takes no notice of all the backyard barbecuing.

I wonder what will happen to this long tradition now that books can be digital? I imagine you could just hit delete, but somehow that doesn’t seem like it would be as satisfying to an Islamist extremist with a torch in his fist. Or to a National Enquirer connoisseur like my mother’s friend Moselle. There’s definitely some element of drama missing from just pressing a key.

Have you ever gleefully destroyed a book?