Murder Your Darlings Some More

[mariagoner]

I've a question to any and every writer out there.

What's the absolute worst thing you've ever done in a piece of fiction (original or fanfic) to a character that you've genuinely liked?

Comments

[puella_nerdii]

I'm a mean, mean writer. I freely admit this. And the more I like the characters, the more horrible I am to them. It's really a wonder that some of my OCs are functional at all. Then again, I like exploring the broken. I really like having my characters screw up and making them suffer the consequences for it. And I love seeing really fucked-up people trying to make the best of their lives without knowing quite how to do it. My default mode when I write tends to be dark, I think -- not angst, necessarily, because most of my characters either don't take themselves seriously enough to do it, don't spend a lot of time thinking about what they've done, or are just so messed-up that they don't realize the full extent of what has been done to them -- although I do insert (black) humor.

...honestly, I think I get bored with "and they all lived happily ever after." That's nice, but it's not an interesting story.

I think the key to writing darkfic, or dark anything, is to keep the characters active while you're doing it, because if you let them sit around bemoaning their situations, they'll have so many justifiable complaints to air that they'll never get anything done. They might end up failing a lot, but I think their failures are a better illustration of just how damaged they are than any three-page monologues about how their lives suck because their parents didn't love them would be.

I think my sadistic impulses are a little more muted in my fanfic, although Gabranth would disagree. (I'm just not nice to him. At all.) I'm definitely drawn to the damaged characters -- River in Firefly, the Marauders in HP, a good chunk of the protagonists in FFXII, the whole damn cast of Battlestar Galactica -- and I, er, don't exactly make their damage better. They still fare better than my OCs. My favorite OC has daddy issues that would probably make Freud pause, a dead wife and son, an inability to hold down a decent job slash stay above the poverty line for very long, a big problem with alcoholism, pretty pronounced manic-depression, and a nasty little case of lycanthropy. (Those are the big ones. He has more issues than that. I don't know if I have time to transcribe them all.) His philosophy at this point is basically, "Yeah, my life sucks, and I'm really screwed up, but I just have to do what I can before the next disaster hits."

Which it inevitably does. See my earlier point about being a mean writer.

My second favorite OC is -- really dissociated, to the point where she can't quite function in society because she doesn't understand the way people are supposed to think and feel. (Her childhood was one long horror story. I generally let people assume the worst about it and only leave hints about exactly what happened to her, because the power of suggestion is a frightening thing when you use it well. They're also generally right. Pretty much anything bad that could have happened to her did.) She's gradually recovering, but it's a slow, slow process, and there are a lot of missteps. I kind of feel bad about the sheer hell I've heaped on her, but dammit, it's made her compelling in a bizarre sort of way. Frightening, too, but compelling.

Sorry for tl;dring at you.

[mariagoner]

Tch, TLDR is always loved and welcome in my journal. And I know you're cruel already, Puel. But in a way that always makes sense, which is the saving grace of dark!fiction. Otherwise, if you heap misery on characters without any rhyme or reason-- or if you let characters act fecklessly without consequences-- you really compromise how real and how balanced your writing is.

I think the key to writing darkfic, or dark anything, is to keep the characters active while you're doing it, because if you let them sit around bemoaning their situations, they'll have so many justifiable complaints to air that they'll never get anything done. They might end up failing a lot, but I think their failures are a better illustration of just how damaged they are than any three-page monologues about how their lives suck because their parents didn't love them would be.

Mmmmmmm... very good point. I need to keep this in mind since I get sort of awful about the inner introspection at time, especially with long fics like Knots. More action, less inner introspection. That's a good way of going about things, right? ;)

I think my sadistic impulses are a little more muted in my fanfic, although Gabranth would disagree. (I'm just not nice to him. At all.) I'm definitely drawn to the damaged characters -- River in Firefly, the Marauders in HP, a good chunk of the protagonists in FFXII, the whole damn cast of Battlestar Galactica -- and I, er, don't exactly make their damage better. They still fare better than my OCs.

Dude. Don't feel a single moment's regret about Basch. The Punk Ass Bitch really deserves whatever you can give him anyhow. ;)

And I think I'm exactly the opposite of you in this one, actually. I mean, not that I do too much original writing-- I'm not a writer by trade and this fanfic thing is pretty much the only way I take my creativity out on the world. But if I had original characters, I think I would be far nicer to them than to the ones I write in fanfic. After all, you can always do whatever you like to fanfic characters and have them perk back up all happy and shiny for the next series or one-shot or what have you. But once you kill off an original, they're dead for good... unless you want to go through the cheap resurrection route.