When Life Happens to your Characters

or, Doormats as Protagonists

A book review and not-so-veiled rant over at The Rejectionist has captured the spirit of one of my writing peeves so well that I could easily link the post, tell you to read it, and call it a day.

What we are heartily sick of, however, are feeble and inept teenage-girl main characters, whose lives come into focus only through the addition of some melodramatic attraction to a charismatic male figure who seems to carry all the personality in the relationship.

The post goes on to say:

Yes, adolescence is a volatile time, and yes, adolescents (of ALL genders, thank you) develop obsessive and incredibly intense romantic attachments to all kinds of people who do not have their best interests at heart, and no, we don’t have a problem with books willing to tackle those kinds of relationships head-on. But love that is self-abnegating, all-consuming, and totally erases any kind of independence looks a lot more like domestic violence than fabulous romance, and doormats aren’t actually very interesting as protagonists.

I’m going to widen the scope here, because this sort of “simpering victim” character isn’t limited to lovesick teenage girls, or even to girls.

We have a phrase around my house that we use for people who seem to be willing victims of their own lives, dragged from one misadventure to another by circumstance. We say, “Life happens to him,” and we don’t say it kindly.

To some extent, we all have a bit of control of our own destiny. Some of us have more control than others, but we all have at least a bit. Those people who abdicate control so that they can abdicate responsibility when things go wrong, don’t get to complain about what happens to them, especially when a bit of forethought or common sense could have sidestepped disaster entirely.

The horror-movie victim who makes bad decisions is an archetype, but it’s an archetype we love to make fun of. It’s not one we take seriously. Usually, the audience cheers her demise… and why? Because she brought it on herself.

I have no patience for people who play the victim in real life, and I have limited patience for it in fiction. Circumstances beyond the character’s control are one thing, but an entire life beyond the character’s control gets boring quickly. It becomes a chain of misadventures, usually poorly segued and with little logic or cohesiveness. The strategic blind eye that the characters have to turn for the sake of the plot doesn’t often ring true.

If your main character has no interests, no depth, knows only one emotion (usually angst) and is just being tugged along for the ride… I will also feel tugged along for the ride, instead of connected with your story.

Turning and giving that character lots of screen time to make the point (repeatedly) about how strong and in-control she is, doesn’t make her so. Often, she only protests too much, and that’s bland reading, too. A reader (or, at least, this reader) will only have so much patience for a character who talks the talk but doesn’t want to blister her sensitive feet walking the walk. A character’s self-perception can be at odds with the face she’s showing us, but only for so long. Too much, and the contrast starts to feel like flawed writing. It reads as author’s blind spot for a favorite character, instead of deliberate craft.

A strong character is one who makes decisions, who influences and changes the world around her, who exhibits interests and feelings and all those other things that make a character three-dimensional. A character like that can still be a victim, but she’s a very different flavor of victim.

Plenty of very successful novels feature the passive protagonist. I’m not saying that it won’t sell; I lament that it does. I’d rather see a character have a hand in her own destiny than be prey to it. I’d rather see a character be a victim of a villain than a victim of circumstance. Or, worse yet, a victim of herself. A little of that can have a place within a story, but a little goes a long way, and I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one whose saturation point has been reached. I’ll be over with The Rejectionist, cheering for the wolves.