Craft: Why Readers Love it When You Torture Your Characters
Turning Up the Heat: Stakes and Sympathy
Memorable characters are the most important elements in your story. Compelling characters can carry readers through even the most complex (or so-so) plot—readers will keep turning pages just to see what happens to someone they care about.
I’ve written before about what your characters’ internal and external motivations are and how that helps you craft your plot. Once you have a good understanding of that, the next step is to deepen the reader’s emotional connection. Today we’re looking at a powerful tool for keeping readers hooked: raising the stakes and using that to create sympathy for your characters.
Why We Torture Our Characters
Turn up the heat. Make things uncomfortable for your hero. Make it so that if she fails, the results are disastrous.Why do we torture our beloved characters? Because readers love it. I know, that sounds cruel. But a well-crafted story works on an emotional level, and nothing creates emotion like watching someone we care about struggle.
James Scott Bell, in Plot and Structure, identifies four ways to bond readers with your Lead: identification, sympathy, likeability, and inner conflict. Your Lead needs to feel like a real person—someone trying to make it in the world, a little fearful at times, and definitely not perfect.
Bell offers several ways to build sympathy: put your Lead in jeopardy, give them misfortune that seems impossible to overcome, make them an underdog, or make them vulnerable. If you’re writing suspense, you’re already doing the first one. The others give you room to deepen that connection.
What Are You Afraid Of?
Fear is a powerful motivator. It can make people do things they otherwise wouldn’t do. It can make them go to great lengths to avoid things they dread. What does your character fear?
Fear takes many shapes. It can be a phobia like heights or dogs. It can be fear of someone discovering a secret. It can be fear of pain or fear of change.
Fear doesn’t just create tension in individual scenes—it’s often what stands between your character and the growth they need.
Your characters, whether they like it or not, will have to change. They need to be different in some way at the end of the book than they were at the beginning. And as is typical of human nature, we resist change. The pain of staying the same has to become greater than the pain of changing.
A couple of writers have some fun takes on this. One asks: in what ways do your characters try to cheat to achieve their internal goals? In other words, they try to get what they want without going through all the pain and growth. They take shortcuts. And they just make everything worse.
In my historical, The Road Home (Tandem Services Press, April 2016), the heroine, Emily, tries to cover up her past when it comes back to haunt her, instead of just confessing what happened to her close friends. She thinks she is achieving her goal of acceptance by hiding the truth. But, you guessed it, she gets found out—and now her friends feel lied to and betrayed. The very actions she tried to use to achieve her goal backfired.
Another writer says he likes it when things get worse because the hero tried to fix the first problem. Instead of solving it, she makes it worse. Each attempt to escape digs the hole deeper.
Questions to Get You Started
If the above ideas didn’t spark new ways to get your main character into trouble, here are some questions to get your creative juices flowing.
About stakes:
- What’s the best thing that can happen to them?
- What’s the worst?
- What do they have to lose?
- What do they have to gain? (The stakes have to be high enough for us to care.)
About growth:
- What needs to change about them?
- Where do they need to grow?
- What’s their blind spot?
- What do they miss by not changing?
About pressure:
- What decision do they have to make?
- What event forces them to change—or to choose to change?
- What secret don’t they want anyone to know?
Make Them Suffer (Your Readers Will Thank You)
The more thoughtfully you torment your characters, the more your readers will thank you for it—by staying up late to finish the book. Memorable characters aren’t the ones who have it easy. They’re the ones who struggle, fail, try again, and finally earn their transformation. Give your readers someone to root for, then make that person fight for everything they want.
One Last Thing
This article is adapted from my free ebook, Jumpstart Your Writing, which includes more techniques for improving your writing. If you found this helpful, you can download the full ebook here: Jump Start Your Writing: Short Bites to Improve Your Writing Today
And if you’re ready for a deeper dive into structuring your novel—characters, plot, and all the pieces that hold them together—here are some links:
Eat the Elephant: How to Write (and Finish!) Your Book One Bite at a Time
Learn more about developmental editing
I’ve been on a couple of podcasts recently talking about how to turn what you know into a book:
🎙️ The Thoughtful Entrepreneur with Josh Elledge: Proven Strategies for Entrepreneurs to Write a Transformative Book
🎙️ Business Roundtable with Dave Carr: How to Turn Your Expertise into a Book
📺 Tandem Services has a YouTube page! Check it out at YouTube.com/@TandemServices
