This week’s video explains how portraying your character’s faults, as George Eliot did in The Mill in the Floss, will make them more sympathetic, not less.
Video Transcription: We often discuss the importance of presenting realistic characters, whose personalities are neither entirely good, nor entirely bad. But sometimes putting this principle into practice can be more easily said than done. When in the thick of writing our first drafts and forming our characters on the page, we can sometimes get so caught up in making certain that readers will empathize with these characters, that we quiver before the thought of doing anything that would make them unlikable.
A reading of George Eliot’s classic The Mill on the Floss
should be more than enough to give us the courage to paint on both the weaknesses and strengths of our characters with a broad brush. Every character in this story shows us both sides of his personality. We see the good points of characters we dislike, such as Tom Tulliver and Stephen Guest, just as we see the flaws of the more sympathetic characters, such as the heroine Maggie Tulliver. Eliot obviously didn’t feel that her readers needed her to hold their hands throughout the narrative by protecting them from the dichotomous nuances in her characters’ motives and actions.
Perhaps one of the best characters in the book is Tom and Maggie’s father, whose flaws and virtues are both obvious on the page. His foolishness, anger, and pride are on display in the scene in which he forces his son to inscribe in the family Bible a perpetual curse against his long-time enemy, the Lawyer Wakem. But his kindheartedness and generosity are just as obvious is another scene, in which he forgives a debt against his sister’s husband, even though he’s in desperate need of the money to pay off his own debts. Eliot presents all these facts without passing judgment on the good or the bad—and the result is a striking portrait of real humanity, the honesty of which makes its characters sympathetic in their very faults.
Tell me your opinion: What less-than-likable traits have you given your hero?
Related Posts: What Dickens Can Teach Us About Complex Characters
Characters: Likability Is Overrated
11 Dichotomous Characters - And Why They Work
Video Transcription: We often discuss the importance of presenting realistic characters, whose personalities are neither entirely good, nor entirely bad. But sometimes putting this principle into practice can be more easily said than done. When in the thick of writing our first drafts and forming our characters on the page, we can sometimes get so caught up in making certain that readers will empathize with these characters, that we quiver before the thought of doing anything that would make them unlikable.
A reading of George Eliot’s classic The Mill on the Floss
should be more than enough to give us the courage to paint on both the weaknesses and strengths of our characters with a broad brush. Every character in this story shows us both sides of his personality. We see the good points of characters we dislike, such as Tom Tulliver and Stephen Guest, just as we see the flaws of the more sympathetic characters, such as the heroine Maggie Tulliver. Eliot obviously didn’t feel that her readers needed her to hold their hands throughout the narrative by protecting them from the dichotomous nuances in her characters’ motives and actions.
Perhaps one of the best characters in the book is Tom and Maggie’s father, whose flaws and virtues are both obvious on the page. His foolishness, anger, and pride are on display in the scene in which he forces his son to inscribe in the family Bible a perpetual curse against his long-time enemy, the Lawyer Wakem. But his kindheartedness and generosity are just as obvious is another scene, in which he forgives a debt against his sister’s husband, even though he’s in desperate need of the money to pay off his own debts. Eliot presents all these facts without passing judgment on the good or the bad—and the result is a striking portrait of real humanity, the honesty of which makes its characters sympathetic in their very faults.
Tell me your opinion: What less-than-likable traits have you given your hero?
Related Posts: What Dickens Can Teach Us About Complex Characters
Characters: Likability Is Overrated
11 Dichotomous Characters - And Why They Work
- March 30, 2011
21 Comments
- K.M. Weiland
- Posted in antagonist , Characters , protagonist , verisimilitude
editor Jessica Strawser, 
said:
.
share? In the classic episode “In Palm Springs,” Lucy and her gang drive each other up the wall with their irritating habits: Ricky’s finger tapping, Lucy’s coffee stirring, Ethel’s noisy eating, and Fred’s key jingling. Writers aren’t much different. We tap, stir, slurp, and jingle our way through our stories, gleefully unaware that we’re driving readers crazy with our personal writing tics.
; 
; and 
. But you can take you pick among the whole lot of them. The winner will receive a hard copy of the book or the Kindle version, whichever he prefers.
