There is a strange contradiction in writing fiction.
You spend hundreds of pages trying to make a character feel real.
You learn how they think. What scares them. What they notice when they walk into a room. The things they would never say aloud. You know which wounds have healed badly and which ones they’ve simply learned to live around.
Eventually, somewhere between creating them and writing them, they stop feeling like a collection of character traits.
You become attached to them.
And you have to hurt them.
I’m not talking about throwing in something terrible simply because the story needs drama. I’ve never been interested in suffering for the sake of suffering.
I mean those moments you know have to happen because they belong to the story.
The betrayal they need to experience.
The truth they aren’t ready to hear.
The person they have to lose.
The choice that is going to cost them something.
Sometimes you know those moments before you ever write Chapter One. Other times, you discover them along the way. Either way, knowing they’re coming doesn’t necessarily make them easier to write.
Because by then, you know the character who has to live through them.
And there is a ridiculous little part of the writer’s brain that starts looking for another way.
Maybe I could change this.
Maybe they’ve been through enough.
Maybe there’s another version of this story where everyone gets to walk away relatively unscathed.
There probably is.
It just isn’t always the story I’m writing.
That’s the difficult part.
Becoming emotionally attached to a character doesn’t mean protecting them from everything. Sometimes it means caring enough about who they are to write the hard part honestly.
Not rushing through it because it hurts.
Not softening it until it stops mattering.
Not rescuing them simply because I’ve grown fond of them.
If something changes them, I want the reader to understand why.
If they break, I want the pieces to matter.
If they survive, I want what they survived to remain part of them.
And if they don’t survive…
Well.
That is an entirely different conversation between me and my keyboard.
There are scenes I can write quickly and scenes that make me stare at my screen for twenty minutes before typing another sentence. There are characters I’ve known from the beginning I would eventually have to hurt, and somehow I still reach that chapter thinking:
Do I really have to do this?
Yes.
Usually, I do.
Because somewhere along the way, I stopped being the only person who needed to believe these characters were real.
The reader needs to believe it too.
And maybe that’s why the difficult scenes hurt to write in the first place.
If I didn’t care what happened to them, why should anyone else?
— L.A. Keane
Leave a comment