I have a confession to make…

I’ve read a lot of blog/internet articles lately about the use of certain tropes in storytelling. Not genre tropes, but things like rape to make a story edge, to put a strong female character in danger. Or the use of the Male Gaze and other elements.

The truth is that being a storyteller is about manipulating your audience. While manipulating “gaze” to lead the audience to make judgements about the main character or the story being told can be a very powerful tool it can also be a stake in the heart of your story. Take George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. I hear many wonderful things about it. I hear some criticism too, mainly about how Martin handles female characters.

I watched the first episode with a friend and found it to be enjoyable, but I was annoyed at how the women were only there to be manipulated, sold, to trigger certain feelings. Sure the men aren’t pillars of happy-squishy feelings, and sure it was one measly episode. But it was enough to make me  put off watching the next episode.

So here’s my confession, I once did the same thing. I packed on a laundry list of bad stuff into a book to prove I was a tough-as-nails horror author who could hang with the brutal big boys. I wasn’t afraid of killing off my characters. The book was called Moon Madness. It was about a reluctant werewolf who joined a pack, fell in love and watched her world fall apart.

A few years ago I reread it. Parts of it I still liked. But I realized I wasn’t letting the characters tell their story, I was shoe-horning my own bad-ass into it. There was entirely too much author intrusion in the form of violent rape, brutal on screen murders and a whole character that was just designed to be gang raped. Almost forgot to mention she was underage and kept in a dog kennel…

Between the first version and the reread I’d come to realize that it wasn’t about putting the character through something extreme enough to make the readers feel for them. Instead it was about making the characters real enough that readers felt even the little things like break ups and family betrayals.

So the second version of Moon Madness was born, with 100% fewer rapes and 60% fewer tortures and rapes. I retitled it Wolf Heart, and sold it to Violet Ivy Press.

The thing is, I didn’t need to make my lead the victim of rape. I didn’t need to make her witness to brutal slaughters of kids. What I needed was to make her normal worries real. To make her a sympathetic, powerful character. Vulnerable yes, but because she’s imperfect, not because she’s a woman and can be beat and raped. And that girl in the basement…why the hell did I need her at all?

While keeping a child in a dog cage for rape parties does make one a bad guy, so do other things, like just being a selfish asshole. The first actually eeks readers out of the story with overkill. Are you listening, authors? Piling on a bunch of torture on your characters just for the sake of extremes only succeeds in making readers tune out. All the good authors I’ve talked to say that every scene must add something to the story, they must maintain a momentum. This is especially true of violence. (And sex scenes.)

There’s a handful of books that go too far. The author, maybe because of insecurity, tries so hard to make you sympathize with a character by making you watch them endure such hardships. Maybe they go overboard trying to explain a character’s tragic past. The trauma, the violence, starts to have no point other than increasing in intensity trying to convince you this is the most broken, most screwed up character ever.

That doesn’t make an audience sympathize or even root for the character.

On to antiheros. I hear Lolita being mentioned a hell of a lot, but when I think Antihero I think of Alex from A Clockwork Orange. The man has no redeeming qualities. You want to see him fall. But then he does, and the story switches as he becomes a victim. The point is play on the audience’s own emotion, making them feel bad for rooting for him to get his comeuppance. THAT is making an audience uncomfortable.

If you want to make your lead a terribly flawed person (an alcoholic, an addict, a racist) they still have to have a redeeming feature (you know, like saving the world. See Stacia Kane’s Downside series for an example.) If you want to make them an antihero, someone who should be a villain, but still have the audience connect with them you can do so, very effectively by making the audience question themselves, or give into their own darker streaks.

Think Magneto, who knows the darkness of humans far more than even the other mutants and has tried to be the bigger man and suffered for it.

Think Lestat, who is a killer, a rule-breaker, a Brat Prince, yet chooses to love and protect (at least eventually.)

Think The Punisher who blurs the lines constantly, but there’s no doubt he takes out really bad people.

There has to be something else there, some redemption, some charm, some inner revenge fantasy. If you want your character to survive terrible things that tear them apart, then make the things that happen to them tear them apart, don’t pile on the bad shit until it’s enough. If you want people to experience the point of view of a bad guy struggling to do the right thing then show that they CAN do the right thing, rather than writing the whole world around them into accepting them and expecting the audience too as well.

Know where you’re sending people with your gaze, and know what you’re inflicting on your characters with things that are easy to downplay into just buzz words like rape and molestation. Know what you mean, then study your work and decide if that’s really where you’re putting your audience.

THAT is what we mean by kill your darlings. Don’t get so distracted by your own writing that you can’t make it more effective.