Fiction Scribe

I feel like the antagonist of a novel, posting with a title like this.

I was reading my Christmas present today, Crusader by Sara Douglass, to find to my great dismay my two favorite characters were killed off! Just like that and in a rotten, terrible way, no less. I was upset by this turn of events so much I had to put the book down for a while.

Now, this doesn’t happen with ever book I (or you) read, but I have been reading this series for six years. It’s no wonder I don’t exactly appreciate the death of the two. (Don’t worry; I won’t betray any spoilers.)

However, through my great annoyance, I found an interesting blog topic.

Character love is something many a writer has fallen into. However, such a thing (besides being somewhat hard for the non-writer to understand) can be quite detrimental to your story.

When you love someone, you want the best for them. Before you realize it, your loved character or characters may find themselves getting an easy route away from the enemy, a gorgeous man or woman to love, or inexplicably finding out he, she, or they is/are royalty!

I don’t mean to insult anyone who has used one or more of those situations – I have. If you can do it well, by all means, go ahead and do it.

What I am getting at is if you love a character too much – yes, it is possible – then you will likely, at least on a subconscious level, want to make things easier for them.

I can already hear someone saying, “Yeah, maybe other writers, but not me.�

There is another side to character love as well. Perhaps, just to prove me and other people who have pointed this out wrong, you throw many conflicts in your character’s way. He, she, or they constantly run into the enemy, only less than lovely people in appearance and personality will fall in love with him/her/them, and they were royalty, only to find out there was a mistake and they are actually peasants!

While amusing, this doesn’t quite work either. (Well, it could if you try hard. I invite you to prove me wrong.)

What would most often happen in that instance would be your character(s) would have a lot of meaningless battles, and/or your character(s) would suddenly have powers or abilities which just don’t make sense in respect to the pace of the plot.

Conflict makes your story universe go round. Letting character love influence your writing unbalances the universe.

I’ve fallen in love with a few of my characters before, and it makes for bad writing most of the time. I promise. It’s okay for you to care about your characters while you’re writing, but keep in mind you should be willing to kill them at any moment to further your plot.

For the sake of the universe.

So carry on writing with that in mind. I know some are protesting, saying the character or characters can’t die because they have to do a, b, and c. That’s perfectly fine. But let that be the only thing that keeps you from being willing to shove them off a cliff at any moment.

Remember, you’re doing it for the universe.