About a year ago I found myself watching television shows and reading books concerning eccentric, difficult to understand characters. Even now, long after I remember the storylines to do with the characters, I could probably write lengthy essays on their conflicting personalities; their issues with their moral compasses; their reason for being. Out of every story I've ever experienced, there are only a few characters who spring to mind from most of the tales but for same tales, an entire array of people jump out in my head. They're memorable - I'm drawn to them.
This thread has lead me to consider the characters I used to write about myself. When I was younger, I wrote about various friends' animals. I suppose I liked the mystery surrounding them as they couldn't talk. They couldn't confuse me. But just like any human, I liked them most because I could build up my ideal version of them in my head and they could never do anything to disprove it. Then I moved onto a story about people and the main character was pretty much me, except with slightly more bravado and recklessness. Back then I was fairly self-obsessed.
Now, starting work on planning my novel... Every character I've built is directly inspired by my personal favourite characters, whether I came across them in real life or in other creative works. I don't mean to say I'm stealing the characters' personalities and using them under a new name, I mean I'm taking the idea of my favourite characters and using that to make my characters more memorable. To make them more thought-provoking and interesting. The best way I can think of conveying this is the movie Pulp Fiction: what made that movie good enough to develop its own cult following and be critically acclaimed? This question is technically subjective because there's a lot of things that make it universally appealing but the one thing I always think of is the characters: they're damn interesting. None of them are ordinary at all. They're larger than life. And whether I liked them or not (I hated about fifty per cent of the cast), I know well that I cared about what happened to them.
Characters don't have to be likeable. They just have to be interesting enough to pique people's attention. Maybe to a lot of people being interesting and being likeable are the same thing but I don't think it is. How many of your favourite characters do you love to contemplate about in-depth to yourself? How many of them, if they were real life people, would you like to end up having a drink with some day?
It's not about liking or even loving your characters. It's about being able to develop characters that are interesting and add to the story.
Obviously there is that mental thing where you're not going to write about a character you don't like. Would anyone write about a villain if they personally didn't like him? Why, when I was stuck in some rites-of-passage limbo writing Pokemon fan fiction, did I only use my favourite Pokemon and favourite Pokemon characters? We naturally want to write about personalities that are appealing to us. But I've realised something after finding myself in a position of conflict regarding my favourite characters: being interesting is more important than being likeable.
Reading back on this I'm not sure if I conveyed my message correctly. What I'm trying to say is you can like the idea of a character but you don't have to like the character. Just like we romanticise the idea of Heath Ledger's Joker but when it comes down to it, he's a mass murdering psychopath. You can't like that but you can be interested by it. I guess the reason we're drawn to characters like that; repulsive, conflicting characters, is because it's fun to try and empathise with them.
