In real life no person is ALL good or ALL bad, no one. The proportion definitely varies and watching our present day news reports it may be hard to think of some of the world’s villains having any tender moments.
If you want your characters to be realistic, you will make them more than a one dimensional hero or villain. Even serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was scared of facing his father’s disappointment indicating vulnerability, he married so he must have felt something akin to love, he expressed remorse during trial possibly actually feeling regret, and he was beaten to death in prison becoming a victim himself. Truthfully it was difficult for me to read Dahmer’s history and look for anything “good” about him, but you have to be able to acknowledge all sides of your characters.
In my novel, Within the Law, my hero Tom Hughes has a temper, once had an affair with a married woman and makes other normal human mistakes. Tom is probably my favorite hero that I’ve written about, but he is not perfect. In a story it would actually seem boring if no one ever did something unexpected. You can make a bad boy/girl sympathetic by tossing in a lost or tragic love, a deep hurt, or even one selfless act. Add uncontrolled rage or damaging deceit to a character, even a “good” one, and you may lose your reader’s loyalty to that character.
Round out your fictional character’s personality to make them more believable and to make the interaction between the cast real. No one comes into a room with the word evil emblazoned on their forehead, if they did we would know never to trust this person, never to put ourselves in their reach and maybe we should lock them up and keep them away from our loved ones and the rest of society. And our stories would be over as soon as the hero and villain looked at each other… boring.
You have to make your hero someone we might wag a finger at on occasion and make your villain someone who we can sympathize with at least a little. Your protagonist (hero or heroine) and your antagonist (villain) might even share several of the same traits. Perhaps they grew up in similar circumstances, even in the same family, and their motives are the same – but it is how they go after their dreams and react to events that makes the difference.
Take two men, both struggling to feed their families, both trying to keep a complaining wife happy. The antagonist might resort to taking what he feels he is entitled to or what he wants his family to have even if it means someone else does without. The protagonist is probably tempted to cheat or steal, but instead winds up doing “the right thing” and possibly gets a second job to try to pay the bills. Both men are probably frustrated, may drink or lose their tempers, and both men love their families. Their actions though are what make the difference.
Your protagonist can’t be a goody-two-shoes or he/she would become nauseating to the reader. By the same token, a “victim”, actual from crime or figurative from an emotional trauma (lost relationship, job loss, bad investment) should never just give up; if you give the victim some fight you will find that your readers will “fight” along with him and cheer him on.
Writing exercise: Create a character, build a dossier, a background – make sure you include his/her childhood, possibly a traumatic loss, and something good. Now create a present day situation, a conflict, a problem that has to be worked through. Include a relationship like family or friends. Now using what you know of your character, run him/her through the present “day” with a flow chart. For every decision your character has to make, choose two – the first is “the right thing” – the second should be driven by selfishness, insensitivity, etc. For instance, your character pays for gas at the local station and the clerk gives back too much money in change – one decision is to return the extra money, the other is to pocket it even though the clerk will eventually have to make it up out of their own pocket. Keep trying this with more complex decisions.
Writing Prompt: List up to ten of the most recent times that someone’s smile or frown changed the way you reacted to a situation. What might you have done differently if you hadn’t gotten that smile or frown?
