I want the reader to dislike/hate this character, but I also want her to be real. This means she should have at least one or two endearing qualities. I seem to be stuck here. The character is a middle-aged woman who has never had a job outside the home. She's overweight and has over-processed copper-red hair. She spends most of her days in a dressing gown watching TV shows. She is cruel to her adult daughter, who she lives with. Her bitter attitude about her situation spills over to almost anyone she has dealings with. Can any of you help me find a couple of positive qualities for her?
She'd take out a second mortgage to fund her cat's cancer treatment. She chained herself to a tree to fight deforestation.
One question: Why does her having good qualities means she is a character which feels real? I would ask you to elaborate your thinking a little here.
Bitter overweight women with poorly dyed hair who sit in front of TVs all day are about as cliché as it gets. Their male counterparts are balding, have beer bellies, and wear wife beater tee shirts, usually with food stains on the front. They also sit in front of the television all day. Maybe rethink this one?
Although my project is a thriller, it happens in the real world where even though we knew there are terrible individuals, I would think all have one or two positive traits. I want my characters believable.
I know this character is an all around stereotype. She is more or less a secondary character until the climax of the plot. This is one of the reasons I want to give her a couple of decent traits. As the mother of the main character, what would you suggest to liven her up?
I don't think that would work. The setting is in Kansas City. Still, maybe she fights to have trees put into the courtyard of the apartment complex she lives it. Does that sound plausible?
It sounds like what you really need is to understand why she is the way she is, not pin on arbitrary good qualities. Being real isn't about some random balancing act of good and bad qualities. Real people can be complete saints or worse than the devil himself. What makes them real is that they always have reasons they are the way they are, even if those reasons aren't readily apparent. As a writer it's important for us to understand the character's motivations for why they do what they do. If the reader can understand why she behaves the way she does, even if she isn't traditionally likeable, they might find her interesting enough to be invested in her story.
I don't dislike this character based on her description; I feel sorry for her. Being cruel to her daughter is really the only "bad guy" trait, and even that's something I'm already chalking up to a miserable existance and a desire for control -- and it already sounds like the hero will be redeeming her before the end. Presumably you want us to hate her so much to show just how saintly or composed the hero is by comparison? The most important thing to remember when creating believable villains is that everyone is the good guy in their own head. Villains aren't "evil" but simply have the motivation (and ability) to do harm for either selfish desires or what they, in their warped thinking, consider to be a greater good. Morover, evil disguised as benevolence is particularly enticing, because we despise hypocrisy most of all. So rather than creating a fat, lazy stereotype but who also donates to charity or whatever, consider creating a well-rounded individual first, then figuring out how their villainy seems moral or correct in their own mind. Their cruel to their daughter? Why? In what way do they justify their cruelty to themselves? Do they perceive it as an act of kindness, or are they afraid what their daughter might become if they don't intervene? Are they doing it to excercise control in order keep their daughter around? As mentioned in earlier posts, motivation is key. It's very rare we meet sadists in real life, and they're not usually very interesting.
I envision her as being a person who has always felt she's entitled, and now she lives in poverty. It explains her general attitude and mannerisms, but it still doesn't give her any positive qualities. Everyone has at least one good trait in them. I just can't find hers.
At the climax of the plot, she is killed because of the kind of person she is and the cruelty she has put upon others. I'd say yes, there's purpose to it.
Sounds like a job for the workshop - but I suspect this may be a plot device rather than a character and if she irritates readers the solution is probably to edit her out altogether and work on the conflict that's going on underneath her, between the other characters. If everyone has at least one good trait, and every character is someone, and this character doesn't have one good trait, then there's a paradox: this character isn't a character.
Actually, she's nasty to almost everyone she comes across. Her daughter usually gets the worst of it. The daughter isn't a saint by any means. As to why she is cruel to the daughter, part of it is that she believes that is the way to raise a child. She doesn't realize how over the top her actions are. As you pointed out, it has to do with the motivation of this character. I just want the reader to realize she isn't completely bad. One positive trait would do that.
I'm sure one of the workshops would be helpful eventually. I'm not far enough along yet for that. Besides, I still need to build up more credit in those forums first.
I agree with those who have said it comes down to revealing motivations, if you want to humanize her. You want to give her "endearing traits", and sure you can have her feeding nuts to wild squirrels, but that doesn't quite cut it. You have to get inside her head. You have to show how she justifies her behaviour to herself.
Maybe she shares this in common with a bully I saw once on the show Bully Beatdown—he believed niceness was a disease and he was doing the nice guys a favor by beating it out of them and toughening them up. Maybe she grew up in a really rough environment and had to be really strong and tough (probably verbally mostly) in order to survive.
What is it that leads you to entertain this obvious delusion? I've been on the planet to know that there are some people in this world who do not have ANY redeeming social qualities. NONE. If your character is such a person, and you try to plaster some positive attribute onto them, it's going to come across as being false and artificial -- which it will be.
Have you known anyone, even very indirectly, who's like this character? The best characters are usually based on actual people. Even if it's just someone you briefly worked with once or the mother of a friend's friend or something. Trying to come up with characters from nothing can result in flat ones that don't feel very real.
Luckily you've already done the work for yourself. What luck. So she's had jobs inside the home. She keeps the home. Maybe others don't notice but she was always house proud. She raised her daughter. Hardly an ideal upbringing but she's here isn't she? Even that wasn't easy for someone sinking further and further from prosperity every year. Give a girl a break. Like @Xoic said she's a bully because she fears for her daughter. You said later she felt entitled and is now in poverty. That has left a scar and she can't bear to think of her daughter being so soft that she lets herself fall in the same way, even if she doesn't rationalise it quite so clearly to herself. She loves cooking, eating. She could tell people things about flavours and dishes that they had never thought of, if she wasn't always pushing people away with her abrasive manner. She longs to cook a huge five course spread for all the people she knows she has been a monster to over the years. A real fucking mediaeval feast. Not to apologise. She won't accept she needs to apologise, not even to herself. But just so they know that she can do things other than bring people down, she does have qualities. But its never going to happen now. She is a romantic who knows who she wants to look like and imagines being the actress in her favourite film and does her hair accordingly. She knows it doesn't work on her and she doesn't have the figure or the complexion for it, and her hairdresser is, frankly, no-one's idea of shit-hot. She does it because she's mostly given up on what other people see when they see her, so she doesn't care that it is obviously a bad look. She does it because every now and then, when she's down, she will catch glance of herself in the mirror as she passes the bathroom door and just for a second she will see herself as the actress in the film. If anyone ever told her she looked like the actress she'd tell them to go fuck themselves and probably spread shit about them around town if she could, because she'd know, just know, that they were mocking her. And she couldn't take that, not on that topic. See above. Also, she knows more about the Amazon rainforest and all its unique frog species than you can imagine, and about the Aztecs, and the people of the Sahel, and she could write a fifty page tear down of the last series of Game of Thrones, if she thought anyone cared, and if she wasn't chronically depressed. Err. We haven't read it so maybe it is justified elsewhere. But there's eye-for-an-eye and then there's slaughter-for-a-bullying.
Or how she hates herself for doing them but does it anyway. Everyone's wanted to change the way the behave to at least one person but just don't seem able to. Imagine being someone who know's what wrong with how they treat everyone. Like being stuck in a copper-haired fat suit with a very mouthy bastard who you hate. That's pretty relatable (well, I can relate).
SapereAude, I have to agree. There are people who don't have any redeeming qualities in this world, but they are rare. I don't want to give this character that type of fame.
What you say is so true. Yes, I do remember someone from long ago that would be like this character. Her one good quality was she made sure her kids went to church even though she didn't. But is that a good trait. After all, many evil people go to church each and every Sunday. I'm agnostic so church doesn't hold that positive aspect for me. Still, at least some of today's society thinks this would be a positive trait, right?
