Category: Uncategorized

Like many writers, I dream of the day when I might be able to quit my day job and write full time. Unfortunately for me, that day has not yet come. Fortunately for me, my day job is fairly rewarding and mentally stimulating. Most of the time, I even enjoy it. That said, my job is mentally and emotionally draining, and sometimes it takes a lot of effort to still pull out my computer, night after night, and work on fiction writing.
What do I do? I’m a teacher, a high school English teacher to be exact. And yes, we teachers are have it rough — we generally work long hours, are under immense pressure to produce standardized test result, and are notoriously underpaid. In my case, on top of my teaching duties, I’m also our districts testing coordinator and technology manager. I have a pretty full plate, and as a result, what free time I have is often split between caring for my two kids, writing, and then taking the time to relax and wind down that we all need. Therefore, in order for me to be productive a writer, I’ve had to develop some habits when it comes to writing and scheduling. Some of this might run contrary to the usual received wisdom, but hear me out. I’ve managed to finish a first draft in roughly seven months and have begun the revision process, all while juggling a demanding job and a young family. If I can do it, anyone can.
It might surprise some readers to learn that I don’t adhere to the standard “you must write every day” advice. I do, however, set aside time every night for writing, after the kids are asleep. Every night, from about 9:30-12:00, I bring out my laptop and I attempt to work on my manuscript. Some nights, I might not manage more than a couple hundred words. Some nights, I might not manage any. If the mood strikes me, however, I might write several thousand. What I do not do is give myself pressure, particularly on weeknights, that I must write a certain number of words. I have found that focusing excessively on word count, while it can work for some people, can be demoralizing for those of us who sometimes just do not have the mental energy to write 1000 words a day. Better to write no words on a day when you’re just not feeling it, and one thousand quality words on a day that you are. And when you are feeling it, you’re much more likely to meet and even exceed your goals, more than making up for the days you had to take a writing break. However, the key to this more relaxed approach is still making sure to carve out the time every night, pulling out your computer, and trying to write. If you end up zoning out in front of AuthorTube videos, then you’re still working on your craft. In fact, time spent planning, or brainstorming with a critique partner, or researching travel routes or fighting styles, is all productive time spent.
Somewhat connected to the above point, at some point in the process of writing my manuscript, I stopped tracking my word count altogether, except to occasionally look at it and make sure it wasn’t getting too long. Now, I do not stress about having a certain number of words, instead, I give myself different goals. For instance, I wanted to start my revision process before summer vacation ended, and now, my goal is to have my revision process done by December. Sometimes I set goals in terms of chapters — I want to get this chapter at least halfway finished by the end of the week, or I want to revise this chapter over the weekend. Giving myself more flexible goals, instead of setting a hard and fast word count mark that I had to hit daily or weekly resulted in less stress overall. I have enough stress in my day job, and writing, something that is supposed to be fun, shouldn’t cause more of it. Furthermore, for my overall progress, these sorts of goals are more meaningful. 1000 words might be usable, or not, but a chapter represents definite progress.
Another strategy I utilize is to make absolutely certain that I use my true downtime wisely. That means weekends and holidays are quality writing time, and I would plan ahead of time to set aside at the very least a good five or six hours a day on weekends or holidays. Figure out whether you’re a morning person or a night owl and get into the habit of either waking early or staying up extra late in order to give yourself extra writing time. For me, late nights are especially productive because my kids are asleep, the house is quiet, and I can focus my mind. My critique partner, Bruce, prefers the morning. To be a productive writer with a day job, however, you may have to get used to the idea of keeping rather odd hours on the days when you’re not working. If you have kids, talk to your partner about letting you sleep in on those Saturday and Sunday mornings so that you can stay up a bit later writing. My husband does this without complaint because he’s supportive of my writing goals and is willing to sacrifice a bit to help me be successful (well, and now, our kids are old enough luckily to fend for themselves weekend mornings — I thought the day would never come, but it did!). The point is, when you have time, grab ahold of it. For us teachers, summers are golden. I probably got a good half of my manuscript finished during the summer because I knew, going into the vacation, that this was my best chance to knock out a huge chunk for the next year. If you don’t have summer vacation, but have vacation time, think about taking a writing vacation. Use that paid time off to get productive writing done for a whole week or two.
I’m a busy person. Being a full time writer sounds like a dream to me, but right now it is just not financially feasible, and it may never be. That’s okay though. Even with my day job I manage to be a very productive writer by using my time wisely and setting useful goals, and building writing time into my downtime, whether I use it or not. No one should be too busy to write, and if you find yourself thinking so, instead think about how you might change your process to facilitate your writing goals.

The past few years have witnessed a major call for diversity in the publishing industry. From #ownvoices to #divpit to We Need Diverse Books, the message to publishing, an industry long dominated by white males, usually of the cishet variety, has been that publishing needs to make room for people of color, for women, for trans folk, for queer folk, for disabled people, for writers from all marginalized groups. And certain sectors of the industry have responded. Currently, there is more representation in literature than ever before, but it is concentrated around a certain sector — young adult and children’s literature.
Young adult, as a publishing category, has evolved rapidly, and diversity is now prized and sought after by agents and publishers alike. On Twitter agent manuscript wishlists often include diverse books or ownvoices offerings, and while I haven’t compiled the data, I would be willing to bet that the past five years in YA publishing have been more diverse than the previous twenty. Children in schools all over the country will have brought home fliers from Scholastic Book Clubs with the words “We Need Diverse Books” — the September book club theme – written in colorful letters across the top, and kids and parents will have found great deals on books by diverse authors (I myself snagged copies of Amina’s Voice, by Hena Khan, which I plan to read with my my 6th grade class, for $2.00 apiece). Outlets such as the New York Times and the Atlantic have covered the push for more diversity in children’s books, and the increasing diversity in Middle Grade and Young Adult publishing extensively. The movement is clearly mainstream.
And yet, we hear very little about the need for diversity and representation in adult books, even though adult readers need diversity just as much as children do. What’s possibly more troubling, however, is that when authors do write diverse adult books, those books are often shelved as Young Adult anyhow.  Even when the publishers nominally have categorized these books as adult, the marketing is clearly geared towards YA, and the books end up on YA lists. This is a trend that most women authors, particularly women sci-fi and fantasy authors, will recognize well. Books written by women featuring female leads have long been pushed into the YA category, regardless of the actual age of the characters. The received wisdom goes something like this: male readers will not read a female lead, and adult fantasy readers are a majority male. So, for a women-centric fantasy to do well, it needs to be marketed towards women, and that leaves two categories open — YA, and romance (in contemporary literature, there’s another option, so-called “chick-lit,” the main requirement of which being that the book features mostly women). And now, with the rise of diverse books, the same thing is happening. The corollary seems to be that white men want to read white worlds, or that straight men do not want to read queer stories. The reasoning aside (which doesn’t particularly interest me — the reasons amount to not much more than excuses), the trend seems to be that books written by  marginalized authors, particularly women of color, seem even more likely to be shelved or marketed as YA.
You might be thinking, well, if it sells the books, then so what? Who cares what marketing category the book gets put in? There are a few problems with the “call it YA” phenomenon. First, by relegating diverse books to YA, adult publishing absolves itself of the need to change. The implicit message seems to be that adult fantasy needs to cater to the “typical” white Tolkien nerd, the kind of guy who knows his way around a twenty-sided dice and also, quite possibly, Reddit’s incel community (my apologies to Tolkien nerds and dice fans who do not find themselves in that portion of the Venn diagram). Fantasy publishing says we can throw bones of representation into our YA imprints, whose readership are mostly women anyhow, and keep our core adult readership, who don’t want their grimdark spoiled by feminism or queer relationships or diversity. Only women and children really care about this diversity stuff anyhow, right? Certainly serious fantasy fans don’t.
If I sound a bit cynical, that’s because I am. My current manuscript is a diverse piece, featuring a non-white cast. Although my cast of characters are not teenagers, I’ve often wondered whether or not I should market my manuscript as YA, and target YA agents and publishers when I start querying. Am I doing myself a disservice by writing my piece as adult when it will likely be shelved and reviewed as YA anyhow? The thing is though, my piece is not YA — the only thing that makes it resemble YA is the diverse cast and female main character. Do I really want to send the message, with my own book, that diversity is just for kids? That diversity doesn’t belong in serious literature for serious readers? Certainly not.
The thing is, mainstream adult fans of fantasy — dare I say it, straight cis men — need to read these books too, and not just because everyone needs exposure to diverse books, but because they’d probably actually like them. Take R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War, for instance, one of the books that often gets classed as YA by bloggers and bookstores (I didn’t realize it wasn’t YA until I bought it). The book is gritty, dark, and action packed. It’s also based on the Japanese invasion of China in World War two. There’s nothing YA about it, and in fact, has all of the ingredients that a typical fantasy reader should enjoy. The Priory of the Orange Tree also showed up on a lot of YA reading lists. In fact, in a Facebook discussion group about YA literature that I’m a part of, I defended this book several times against confused teenagers who found this book “hard” and “slow.” It was not the book’s fault — the book is an 800 page epic fantasy multi-POV tome, written in a fairly literary style, of course those who were expecting a young adult book would find it slow. What led to the case of mistaken identity? A female author and a lesbian romance. But the book also has intricate world-building, dragonlore, chivalric knights, and epic battles — things that should be right up the alley of an adult fantasy fan.
So, ultimately, I won’t pitch my book as YA, although I’ll have no real control over whether others decide to do this for me or not. I would encourage the powers that be in the publishing industry, however, to take a look at the message they send when they promote certain books as YA (this can include the types of interviews the author does, what bloggers get sent ARCs, and eventhe type of cover the book has), and ask themselves, if this book was written by a straight white man, with a straight white protagonist, would I be marketing it to teenagers? Don’t get me wrong, YA is a great category — some of my favorite reads are YA. But it does both YA and adult readers a disservice when we decide that books written for adults should be marketed to teenagers. Because the real message is not that adults won’t read these books, it is that straight white cis men won’t read these books, and the accompanying implication, that these men are not, and do not need to be interested in diversity, is simply untrue.

Recently my critique partner and I were discussing the age of his main character, and whether or not he might age his character up a year or two. His main character was a young boy of sixteen years old, and we had both realized that sixteen just sounded young. But why? Was there really much difference between a sixteen year old and a seventeen year old? As it turns out though, sometimes a year or two does make a difference.

To YA, or not to YA?
Most writers probably have an idea of whether they’re writing an adult novel or a young adult novel, but what some writers may not realize is that the exact age of the protagonist directly influences whether a publisher will publish it as adult, or young adult. A young adult novel must, generally speaking, have a main protagonist that is no older than eighteen years old, and generally, that protagonist will be closer to sixteen or seventeen. This does not mean that every novel with a teenage protagonist is a young adult novel, but what it does mean is if you intend to write a young adult novel, you have to limit the age of your protagonist. There may be exceptions, but an unpublished author shouldn’t count on being one. It also means that if you have an older protagonist, like mine, you might find your novel in a bit of an awkward place — not quite adult, not quite young adult. There was a point when it seemed like new adult may take off as a publishing category, but the category fizzled a few years ago. However, there is a growing market for books with protagonists on the younger side of adult — young adult crossover books, they’ve been called. Books such as the Daevabad Trilogy and the Winternight trilogy, featuring young women who are in their early adult years, their late teens and early twenties.

Explicit Content
If your manuscript has sexual content, particularly sex scenes that are more than just fade to black, consider aging your characters up to at least seventeen. While it is true that teenagers do have sex, and there is nothing really wrong with teenagers having sex, as long as it is consensual, some readers are going to feel uncomfortable reading about the sexual exploits of minors. If I think about smutty scenes, generally the older the character is, the more comfortable I feel with the smut, but if I had to draw a hard line at a particular age, seventeen seems to be, for me, where my comfort level is. Perhaps this has to do with the age of consent. While the age of consent is different in different countries (and in the United States it even varies from state to state — in my state the age is 17), by age seventeen a person has reached the age of consent in most places. And, before anyone says “yeah but back then,” remember that first of all, while it is true that in medieval times marriages were often arranged for young teenagers, those marriages were frequently not consummated until both parties were older. Second of all, regardless of what the norm might have been in medieval times, you are writing for a contemporary audience with contemporary sensibilities. A contemporary audience is likely going to find a sexually explicit scene involving a young teenager at best, awkward and at worst, disgusting. The television version of Game of Thrones famously aged up the main protagonists, the Stark children, as well as Daenerys Targaryen, from the young teens that they are in the novels, to older teens for precisely this reason. If you plan to have sexual content, think about the necessity of making your character young enough that having sex with them in our world would land their lover in jail.

Maturity Level
Teenagers are teenagers. While it is true that people may have matured faster in the “old days” than they do now, an adolescent was still an adolescent. A sixteen year old is not going to be able to make decisions as carefully as a twenty year old. A twenty year old will not make decisions as carefully as a twenty five year old. Teenagers are going to be, to a certain degree, impulsive and emotional, no matter how mature they are. In the historical series by Sharon K. Penman following the lives of the Plantagenet dynasty in Europe, Penman writes the true story of how young Henry II invaded England with a group of his friends at age fourteen. He did this without his mother’s permission and ran out of money to pay his mercenaries while in England. Then, Henry had the audacity to turn to Stephen, then king of England, to ask for money to pay his troops and return home. Stephen was so amused by the whole thing that he actually agreed! In the novel Penman brings to life for us this young man who, despite being a prince and despite being born in the “old days” when teenagers were supposedly so mature, did an incredibly boneheaded teenage thing. Even medieval teenagers still need to act like teenagers in order to be believable. If you want your sixteen year old to be mature and levelheaded, give them a reason to be. Make it a part of their character, why they are unusually mature. Don’t assume, however, that a sixteen year old will handle things like a grown man. If your reader forgets how young your character is, then you’ve probably not done a good job portraying their age.
Age, in writing, isn’t just a number. Just like our age and maturity affects us as individuals, it will affect your characters as well. Not only that, it will affect the way the reader sees your characters, and the way your market sees your characters. So before you just pull a number out of thin air, think about the implications of this choice.

My first attempt at a novel was a thinly veiled Star Trek fan-fiction that I wrote at age thirteen. This was pre-internet, and I had no idea fanfiction was even a thing, much less that people my age wrote it. Had I known, I probably would have been all over it, but I didn’t, and so I wrote my novel. It reached nearly four-hundred handwritten pages, kept in a massive three ring binder. The plot was relatively aimless, and I don’t remember a whole lot of it, except that the main character was a half-human half-alien girl who was a cadet at something roughly akin to Starfleet Academy. Because of course she was. There was a romance. A war. A possible pregnancy. Betrayal. All of the tropes thirteen year old me, drunk off of Peter David and Robert Heinlein (Time Enough For Love rocked my young world, dear reader), couldn’t get enough of.

My best friend Karen and I wrote our novels together, sprawled across her bedroom floor, for all of seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. Karen and I were the odd kids in middle school. I’d arrived at C.E. Williams Middle School in seventh grade, fresh out of my Montessori bubble and terrified beyond belief to be in this new and frightening public school world. I had never so much as kissed a boy, nor did I even know what detention was, but in this world, kids gave each other blowies in the back of the school bus,  my seventh grade classmates talked openly about their abortions, and there was once a knife fight in the hallway between classes. C.E. Williams was a difficult place to begin my public school career. In Montessori school I’d spent my days researching and writing a play about ancient Egypt and learning Swedish. I’d performed in an opera at Spoleto Festival when I was nine called The Burning Rice Fields in which I portrayed a young Japanese girl (yes, I now cringe at the appropriative implications of this role) and my mother had portrayed a tsunami. My Irish teachers taught us to sing IRA fight songs, and my brother and I would spend weekends at the beach with the other teachers’ children, listening to adult conversation, piping up about politics, and watching the adults get hammered. Public school, needless to say, with its strict no-talking rules, with its hawk-eyed teachers and low expectations, with its meaningless homework (that I made a habit of doing on the bus on the way to school) and standardized tests, was a culture shock, to say the least.

When Karen and I found each other, we stuck together with the kind of desperate tenacity that only terrified twelve year old girls could muster. Karen was a Jewish girl who had gone to Hebrew School in her earlier years and was on the J.C.C. swim team. I was on the J.C.C. gymnastics team (even though our family was not Jewish). It seemed serendipitous at the time. Not only that, but Karen had a hippie aesthetic that appealed to the side of me that was raised by heathen Montessorians. She wore leather sandals, save the planet t-shirts, and she loved tree frogs. And Karen was smart. She was one of the smartest people I’d ever met, and I quickly learned that in this entire godforsaken middle school, she was the one person with whom I could carry on a meaningful conversation. We both loved science fiction, and I introduced her to my favorite — Stranger in a Strange Land. She had me read Sphere. We talked about physics, about singularities, multiple dimensions, and the possibility of ancient aliens. Karen, like me, loved to write. We were star English students — and although Karen outshone me in math and science, we were equally gifted writers, albeit with different styles. First, we wrote poetry together, but then one of us had the idea to write a book. And so, our great project was born, the endeavor that would last into high school, that became a map of our friendship, and for both of us, our first ever fully finished novels.

Karen and I wrote together. We would have sleepovers on the weekends — usually I’d show up at her house on a Saturday evening, as Shabbat was drawing to a close, and Karen and I would sit in her room trading our stories.  Sometimes her mother would bring us snacks, baking having started up once again after a Saturday of rest. We’d munch on chocolate chip cookies and write. I’d write a chapter, and she’d write a chapter, and then we’d switch off, each reading the other’s work, glancing up surreptitiously to catch a glimpse of a reaction. Had she smiled at that part? Laughed? Did she like it? Karen’s own novel was shorter than mind, less Star Trek and more A Swiftly Tilting Planet. There was a sentient dolphin and a mysterious child with frizzy white-blonde hair and forest green eyes. There was an alien abduction, telepathy, and space magic. Both of our books were derivative, perhaps mine slightly more obviously so. It didn’t matter. Those days spent writing and reading not only solidified us as friends, it solidified my purpose as a writer. For three years, we worked on our novels. We had no clear idea of what we might do with those novels, we simply wrote.

When I moved away from Charleston five years later, at age seventeen, Karen and I had drifted apart somewhat due to high school foolishness that was entirely my fault (don’t worry reader, we later reconnected, and she’s still my best friend, despite said foolishness). However, when I said my goodbyes to Karen before getting in my family car and making the long drive to Texas, where I would spend my final years of high school, she handed me a blue cloth binder. Even now, I remember the look and feel of that binder in my hands — the rough fabric cover, slightly frayed around the edges, the title carefully penned on the center. Karen had handed me our shared adolescence, our days spent sprawled on the floor, pen to paper; she had handed me our dreams. It was the most precious gift I’d ever received, reminding me not only of the power of our friendship, but of those two little girls who became, improbably, novelists.

Now, as I near the completion of my second full novel (my first as an adult), I think back often on that first novel. When writing  seems tough, I often remind myself that if twelve year old me could write a novel, a novel at least good enough to hold the attention of my twelve year old best friend, surely thirty-nine year old me can do the same. Moreover, I think back to those days when writing was a pure pleasure — I had no thoughts of publication, of query letters, of agents or contracts. I wrote because I enjoyed writing. I enjoyed giving life to the characters in my head, to the places I dreamed up, to the situations created by my impossible imagination. When writing seems hard, I try to recapture the spirit of those two little girls, who wrote for no one but themselves and each other, whose novels were the source of three years’ worth of joy, laughter, and friendship. If writing now can still give me joy, especially in this world where joyfulness often seems in short supply, then regardless of the eventual outcome, writing has served its purpose. Perhaps one day I will be published — I have faith in myself and my abilities, and I’ll work hard to achieve that dream — but even if that never happens, for the sake of twelve year old me, I’ll keep finding my joy in the written word.

*Spoiler Warning — This post contains some light spoilers for The Merciful Crow, by Margaret Own.*

I haven’t felt compelled to write a book review in quite some time. In fact, I’m more likely to write reviews when I hate a book, usually writing out something scathing on Amazon or Goodreads which I then erase once my rage has passed. This time though, I’m writing good review, and I don’t plan to erase it.

The Merciful Crow, by Margaret Own, is a Young-Adult fantasy novel, part coming of age tale, part romance, part adventure, and part social commentary, about a young chief-to-be, Fie, who makes an oath with the heir to the throne in order to secure protection for her people, the Crows, who are the lowest caste of twelve castes in the world. The Crows are the undertakers of the realm, charged with disposing of the world’s plague-dead, and the prince Jasimir and his guard and body double, Tavin, have just faked their own deaths to escape the capital. They hope for the Crows help in disguising them and falling in with one of their nomadic bands, allowing the pair to seek out allies to help prevent the queen from using a group of religious radicals (who happen to want to see the Crows exterminated) to usurp the throne.

The Merciful Crow’s world-building is intricate and unique. With twelve castes all named for different birds, from the highest ranking Phoenixes (the royal caste), to the lower caste Sparrows, to the untouchable Crows, each caste has its own “birthright,” or magical gift that those born as “witches” in each caste are able to use. The Crows’ birthright gives Crow witches the ability to call magic from bones (usually in the form of teeth, which are often paid to the Crows as payment for their mortuary services), utilizing the birthrights of the other castes — fire for Phoenixes, disguise for Peacocks, invisibility for Sparrows — all in all twelve different abilities. The Crows are also the only caste, besides the Phoenixes, who are immune to the deadly Sinner’s Plague. It is their proximity to the plague and death, moreso than their magic, which makes Crows reviled throughout the kingdom.

And this is what prompted me to write this review. Many novels have attempted to incorporate social justice themes into fantasy worlds, with varying degrees of success, but rarely do they incorporate do it as well as The Merciful Crow. Owen makes certain that the reader understands that prejudice is more than just slurs and violence, and has her privileged characters, Prince Jasimir and his guard Tavin examine and come to terms with the reality of their privilege over the course of their journey. There are many little moments — in one particularly poignant scene, Tavin speaks with Fie about a game that is played in the palace. In the game, there are pieces which represent each caste. The pieces which represent the Crows, he says, are worthless, and if you want to win, you need to get rid of them. Fie isn’t surprised, she’s been dealing with this all of her life, but Tavin begins to realize all of the ways in which hatred for the Crows has been entrenched into their society. As Jasimir and Tavin walk the road along with the Crows they see firsthand how brutally they are treated. When the group encounters trouble, Jasimir repeatedly suggests going to the Hawks, the realm’s protectors, and cannot understand why the Crows scoff at this idea. The Crows know that the Hawks are just as likely to engage in violence against the Crows as the rest of the castes, and when Jasimir indignantly proclaims Not All Hawks (!) Fie and Tavin point out to him that while, true, perhaps not all Hawks are bad, all it takes is one.

There are other small touches that set The Merciful Crow apart from other books. The world seems broadly tolerant of various sexualities — Prince Jasimir is gay, Tavin has had liasons with both men and women, and polyamory seems common, with some of the royals having both husbands and wives at the same time. The Crows themselves marry sometimes, and sometimes they don’t. There is a character who is referred to by the pronoun “they,” presumably because the character is genderqueer or genderfluid, but no explanation is ever given, because none is needed. The author slips these details in as simply a given in this world, no fanfare, no big reveals. In The Merciful Crow, these characters are normal people, living their lives, no explanation required.

Being a young adult fantasy, of course The Merciful Crow has a romantic subplot which could broadly be categorized as enemies to grudging allies to friends to lovers. The main romance is a straight love story, between Tavin and Fie, a love which crosses caste boundaries, Tavin being a Hawk, and Fie a Crow. Initially suspicious of Tavin’s motives, Fie moves past her initial distrust of the Hawk caste when she realizes that Tavin’s care for her is sincere, and that his respect for her people is not an act. The relationship between the two is satisfying — we aren’t tortured with endless reasons why the two shouldn’t be together, or manufactured misunderstandings, nor do they treat each other horribly in order to deny their feelings. The two are honest and mature with each other, and the resulting romance is something the reader can really feel good about — a healthy relationship the likes of which is not seen very often in YA fantasy.

The Merciful Crow is the kind of book that, as an English teacher, I want my students to read. While the world is entirely original, not really based on any true life settings or cultures, it still manages to examine ideas about prejudice and privilege that are very pertinent to real life. The Merciful Crow never claims that the problems of its world will be solved easily. At the end of the first installment of this planned trilogy, Fie realizes that the oath that she’s sacrificed so much for will not be as easy for the Prince to uphold as either of them had thought. Even though Fie has won over Jasimir, who has come to see her as a friend and the Crows as his subjects, and equal to the other castes, Jasimir realizes that fighting against entrenched prejudice isn’t as easy as issuing a decree. Fie and her band of Crows have no choice but to put their faith in the Crown and keep fighting for a better world, even if that world might not be achieved in their own time, even if the prejudice against the Crows might never entirely disappear. This isn’t some savior tale where prejudice ends, the good guys prevail, and everything ends up happily the end — this world and the people in it, like our real one, are complex and often disappointing. For those of us who want to see change, sometimes change comes too slowly if it comes at all, and sometimes we have to settle for less than ideal solutions to the problems plague society, and learning that too, is part of growing up. Most of all, The Merciful Crow reminds us though that while we may have farther to go than we thought, and sometimes making sacrifices hurts, fighting for justice will always be the right choice.

A few weeks ago I encountered a woman online who was struggling with what to do with her manuscript. She’d been trying, unsuccessfully, to get this thing published for a good couple of decades. She’d signed with a small publisher a few years back, but the publisher allowed her contract to expire without ever publishing her book. She’d been querying it again, but so far she had no takers.  I suggested, as gently as I could, that perhaps it might be time to move on to her next project, but she adamantly refused. This novel, an epic fantasy, was her life. The characters had been in her head for thirty-five years, she said, and it was this book, or nothing. Although this attitude is not uncommon, I nonetheless found it pretty counterproductive. To an extent, I get it: writing a whole novel takes an awful lot of time, energy, and effort, therefore, most of us don’t give up on our manuscripts easily, and rightly so. A completed, or near-completed manuscript represents potentially thousands of hours’ worth of work, and setting it aside might seem almost sacrilegious, disrespectful to your own work and to yourself. However, there are times when holding on too tightly to the wrong project can only hinder your progress as a writer.

Time is Up

While there is no magic number to tell you exactly how long is too long to spend on one manuscript, if it is taking you a decade to finish your first book, the problem may be with the book you are trying to write, and not with you as a writer. I know some people will point to the examples of literary greats who slaved over their manuscripts for years upon years, always adhering to their vision, and it is true, these exceptions exist. What is also true is that we have limited time on this earth, and spending decades on one book is not the best way to make our writerly dreams come true. Whether you write at a glacial pace, or you’ve re-written the same book seven times, consider calling “time” on your novel if you’ve been at it for years and it is still going nowhere. It is entirely possible that you’ve spent so much time on this concept that you’ve lost whatever it was that made you passionate about it in the first place, and you may need some fresh material to kick start your creativity. Consider shelving the project, and coming back to it later with fresh eyes.

You Don’t Like Your Own Work

If you’re bored by your own writing, if you have to force yourself to write, or if you know deep down the work has major fundamental flaws, then there is a chance that this manuscript is not the one. Whether or not the problem is fixable depends on how big an issue is. If your manuscript has structural issues that require a total re-write, then that can sometimes take as much time as writing the initial manuscript itself. I re-wrote a manuscript, changing the main point-of-view character, and the novel ended up being an entirely new story, but I had gotten to the point with my former manuscript that it was no longer enjoyable to write it, and it had become more of a grind than anything else. I decided to re-write, changing the basic structure of my book down to the very bones, and suddenly I was excited to write again. A rule of thumb is that if you’re bored by your story, your readers will be too. If you find your own story boring, either figure out where you’re going wrong, and fix it, or write something else.

The Reviews Are In

Finally, this bit of advice is something that no one wants to hear, but it needs to be said. While no one should ever give up on a manuscript after one instance of negative feedback, if the feedback is consistently negative on a manuscript that is already finished and polished, then it is possible that the manuscript is never going to work. It can be hard to admit to yourself that the manuscript that you love is a dud, but it happens. What you need to ask yourself is, are you going to continue polishing this turd, or do you move on? Sometimes, no matter how much you re-write, your book just does not have what it takes. Perhaps the premise is flawed, or the idea is cliched, or the characters are just aren’t believable. Sure, you can re-write, but how many times can you truly re-write the same story, and are the re-writes actually helping? Consider that you could re-write the same book five times, but you could also write five new books in nearly the same span of time. If you’ve given your novel a fair shot, you’ve re-written, you’ve revised, and still, the feedback is not great, then there is no harm in setting aside your project and working on something new.

The Starter Novel

Consider the possibility that your novel may be your starter novel. Statistically, most writers are not successful on their first try. Often, we need to write a whole book before we become really familiar with story structure, characterization, pacing, and all of the important aspects of novel writing that are hard to learn without experiencing them directly. While no one goes into the writing process thinking that their book may be a starter novel, and there are always exceptions, if you’re hitting the point where for whatever reason, you’re starting to think this book may not be your debut novel, I think it is good to keep the concept of the starter novel in mind. Just because your first book doesn’t work out, that doesn’t mean you’ll never succeed as a writer, and it doesn’t mean your time you spent writing this book was wasted. In fact, your starter novel might have been the very book you needed to write to turn you from a mediocre writer, to a great one.

First person present tense is a much maligned point of view. Generally, on twitter polls that ask, “what’s your favorite point of view to read?” poor first person present tends to score near the bottom. I will be the first to admit that, until about a year ago, I too was a hater. What changed my mind? I decided to write an entire manuscript in first person present.

To defend this social pariah of a point of view, we first must understand why it is so hated. First of all, first person present tense is found overwhelmingly in young adult novels, and in the eyes of some, that is enough to condemn it. After all, young adult novels are by and large read and enjoyed by women, and we all know that books and media primarily consumed by women are often looked down upon as being lesser than. Not only that, but first person present has what I tend to think of as a sort of breathless quality that lends itself to angsty reflections. Lots of cringey fanfic is written in first person present. In the hands of less competent writers, first person present can also degenerate into aimless recitation of day to day events. In a present tense narrative, many authors seem to forget how to jump forward in time, and mistakenly believe they must narrate every single action or thought the character has, no matter how mundane.

So, there are some pitfalls to writing first person present, and when I first began writing my current manuscript, I was aware of them. In fact, I wrote the first chapter and sent it to my critique partner (the other half of this blog, Bruce) and asked him “does this work, or should I switch to a more conventional point of view?” Only after reassurance that the point of view was not going to hold my project back, I went ahead and wrote about 150,000 words in first person present, the most I have ever written in this particular point of view. Am I entirely converted, only to write in first person present now and forevermore? No. In fact, my next project I plan will be written in a very conventional third person limited past. But would I tackle first person present again? Yes! There are some real advantages to this point of view, and I have come to believe that it is largely undeserving of the poor reception it receives.

The first thing I noticed about writing first person present is that the writing came quickly and naturally. Perhaps because the point of view and tense mirror our own natural thought processes, the words tend to flow easily for me, from my fingers to the page. First person in general, for many writers, tends to be an “easier” point of view to write than third person. Writing in first person is akin to journaling, except instead of writing about yourself, you put yourself in the shoes of your characters and imagine how they might narrate their lives, what thoughts and observations they might have about the events that take place. While third person sometimes can be a bit laborious to write, first person is quicker. Now, that doesn’t mean that all of those words are quality words, and you may need to do a bit more editing on subsequent drafts. However, if you are the sort of writer who struggles to get words on the page and has yet to complete a whole draft, you might consider trying first person (past or present) because you’ll likely find the words flowing with relatively less effort than other points of view.

First person present is probably the most immediate of all points of view and tenses, which means you can get very close to your characters, and experience events as they are experiencing them. How close or far the narration is from the events taking place is called “narrative distance.” Many readers tend to prefer points of view that are close to those that are distant. While third person can be written with a close narrative distance, most first person narratives are, by necessity, the most close and intimate of all (with some exceptions – in The Great Gatsby, for instance, the first person narrator, Nick Carraway, tells the story of the protagonist, Jay Gatsby, creating a first person narration with a degree of narrative distance). If your manuscript is more character driven than plot driven, if the main conflicts of your narrative tend to be emotional conflicts rather than external conflicts, then a first person present tense narrative will give you greater access to your narrator’s emotions and feelings, which can make for a more compelling story.

While both of the above points can apply broadly to first person narratives in general, there is one point that is unique to present tense: it much easier for me to write lyrically in present tense. While in third person past I often struggle with the feeling that my prose falls a bit flat, in first person present I feel free to be as lyrical as I imagine my characters to be. Remember how I mentioned that first person present can have a sort of breathless quality? I realized, after writing for nearly a year in first person, that this quality does not have to be a negative thing. First person present is great for creating a character voice that is at once earnest, emotional, and reflective, and, because of the way my character sees the world, her reflections are more poetic than they are practical.

First person present, perhaps more than some other points of view and tenses, requires a delicate hand. It is very easy for the writer to become grammatically confused and switch tenses within the narrative. I’ve read books, particularly self-published books, in which misuse of first person present made the author’s writing appear amateurish. However, if this problem can be avoided by hiring a good editor, and writers who have a strong natural sense of grammar usually won’t have any problems. Overall, first person present has acquired a poor reputation I think partly due to snobbery and partly due to the received wisdom of the masses. After all, when advice like “avoid first person present” gets repeated often enough it has a tendency to become gospel, much like “show don’t tell,” and “avoid passive tense” – advice meant for novice writers as guidelines, but which were never meant to be definitive rules. First person present can be a lovely way to write, and if you’re thinking of using it, give it a try before you rule it out. You just may find yourself pleasantly surprised with the result.

Note: This discussion focuses mainly upon the bad boy in cis-het romance. While the trope may exist in non cis-het relationships, I purposely left that dynamic out of this discussion.

We all know the trope. Our plucky female main character has a nemesis, and boy is he ever a piece of crap. He’s casually insulting. He’s condescending. He’s emotionally unavailable, and more likely than not, he’s done some Very Bad Things in life — he’s maybe an assassin, or a hardened soldier who has lost the ability to feel, or maybe he’s a thief or a crime lord, or maybe he’s a self-indulgent royal used to getting his own way. He’s got flaws galore – he’s mean, maybe he has a drinking problem, or he sleeps around, or he’s selfish and narcissistic. He definitely doesn’t trust easily, and, more likely than not, he’s got a few traumatic skeletons in his closet. But he’s hot. And so, in spite of herself, our main character just can’t stop thinking about him. Eventually, the two move from hate, to grudging tolerance, to grudging friendship, and then, finally, love.

If you’re a fan of this dynamic, my intention is not to shame you. Confession here: I am a huge fan of the “enemies-to-lovers” trope and I’m a sucker for the “bad-boy” type. I had my own bad boy phase, and there are reasons why twenty-three year old me found my bad boy so attractive. He tapped into all of my own more reckless impulses, for one, and it was just plain fun for young me to tag along with him on wild adventures. He also, in true bad boy form, carried a fantastic amount of personal baggage that unlocked a well of empathy inside of me. In fiction, often our main character is the only one who can see the true goodness of the bad boy, the proverbial “heart of gold,” and I believed this whole-heartedly of my own relationship. And while there is a lot of hand-wringing in modern fiction about the harm this trope does, and how it teaches young women to accept abuse in relationships, I, like many young women who perhaps made some unwise relationship choices in youth, ultimately married a man who bore no resemblance to the bad boys of my past.

I am not one to say that any variations on the bad boy theme – enemies to lovers, the jerk with the heart of gold, the lovable rogue, and all of the seemingly endless variants – needs to perish. I’m rather fond of the trope myself, and, done well, it can lead to some great writing. The bad boy trope gives us not only the potential for some great romantic tension, it also usually leads to character growth, since being a hateful bastard is, as mentioned before, is generally not sustainable in the long run for a main character. However, authors (particularly authors writing for a Young Adult audience) need to tread carefully when writing their bad boys. Not only do you want to avoid writing a character that is an empty cliché, you want to avoid writing the dreaded problematic romance. While your enemies to lovers bad boy romance will probably always have its detractors, there are a few things you can do to make the romance a bit more palatable to readers.

Avoid One-Sided Meanness

Being mean sort of comes with the bad-boy territory, so readers will forgive you if your character acts like an asshole. What is less forgivable is if your female character is routinely the object of scorn and derision, takes the bad-boy’s meanness to heart, fails to defend herself, and yet falls in love with him anyway. Although the series is often criticized for glorifying bullying, Holly Black’s Folk of the Air, whose first and second books, The Cruel Prince and The Wicked King avoid this pitfall. The main character, Jude, who is tormented by Prince Cardan, is nearly as bad as Cardan is and, while she is at a magical disadvantage to the Prince, she is, throughout the first two books, portrayed as his equal in wit, and is capable as giving as good as she gets. Even before she truly comes into power, she antagonizes her would-be bullies and does not back down from the challenge. As the series progresses, both characters are shown to have major issues to work through, and struggle with being vulnerable with each other. It is unclear whether, in the end (the series’ finale does not release until this November) Cardan and Jude will finally learn to trust each other, but what is clear is that their relationship is, for the most part, a relationship of equals. While Jude one-ups Cardan on occasion, and he one-ups her in return, they each have power over the other (their feelings for each other making each of them vulnerable). This is a tried and true formula though, extending far into the literary canon. Pride and Prejudice is great example of this dynamic. Darcy is our arrogant jerk with a heart of gold, but intelligent, witty Elizabeth tells him exactly where he can shove it

It isn’t fun to read a story in which one character is bullied into submission by another character. What can be fun to read is a character who thinks that they have found an easy target, or who thinks that they are certainly the smartest cleverest person around, being put in their place. When the character’s expectations are subverted, fun things happen. This doesn’t mean that your female lead needs to be your typical female badass stereotype either – softer characters are just as capable of standing up for themselves and raining on someone’s meanness parade as bad-asses. This is a profoundly satisfying take on the bad-boy trope because not only is it great to see an asshole get their comeuppance, but it shows that the budding couple are on even ground. It is easier, and more pleasant, to imagine a future in these sorts of relationships, than it is to imagine one in the types relationships which result  in one party being  browbeaten into submission.

Avoid Lack of Consent and Physical Abuse

While an anti-hero main character may be able to come back from almost any sort of moral misstep, your romantic leads are different. The audience’s sympathy, in most cases, inherently lies with the main character, and if your bad-boy romantic lead is abusive towards the main character, the audience will never forgive him. In fact, some writers, knowing how hard it is for a love interest to come back from abuse, have written a character as abusive in order to kill of one side of a love-triangle relationship so thoroughly that even the most die-hard shippers must give up hope for their favorite couple. In Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series, in which love-interest Tamlin becomes an abusive boyfriend, who throws things at and physically threatens his fiancé Feyre, in order to make room for bad-boy Rhysand. The irony is, of course, Rhysand himself, however, is pretty problematic, although Maas tries her best to rehab him in the second book of the series, it is hard for an astute reader to forget that this guy once drugged Feyre and forced her to dance half-naked for a roomful of people, and not only that, he also physically tortured her while she was injured in order to get her to accept a bargain. The book has many fans, but as an adult woman I can’t make excuses for a guy who roofies the woman he claims is his soulmate.

Consider this: if your characters were alive in today’s world, would your bad boy be criminally liable for his actions against his so-called loved one? Is this behavior that could land him in jail? If so, you’re not writing about romance, you’re writing about abuse. Physical abuse and rape aren’t light topics, and they’re not things that are easy to get past. If your bad boy is physically mistreating his love interest before they’re ever even a couple, why would she develop feelings for this man, and if she did would those feelings be healthy? Also consider – someone who hurts others so casually, or who thinks nothing of engaging on non-consensual behavior, may not be capable of engaging in a healthy and loving relationship, at least not without a lot of therapy.

Avoid Gaslighting, Humiliation, and Intimidation

Aside from physical abuse, gaslighting is probably one of the cruelest things a person can do to another person. Gaslighting is when a person makes another person question their version of reality, to the point that the person ultimately questions their own sanity. While enemies to lovers often involves manipulation (perhaps our hateful bastard initially set out to seduce our main character for his own nefarious purposes, but eventually the ruse became real love, he confesses to his ruse/his lover finds out, drama ensues), manipulation that crosses the line into psychological torture isn’t a comfortable read, nor is it something that should be considered swoon worthy. Take Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush Hush, whose protagonist, Nora, falls in love with a fallen-angel named Patch. Born in the Twilight era, Hush Hush is very of its time, and feels reminiscent of Twilight in many ways, except, if possible, the angel Patch is worse than vampire Edward. Not only are there some iffy moments in Hush Hush in terms of sexual consent, in the very first book Patch makes Nora question her sanity. He routinely manipulates her with his angel powers, sends her visions and hallucinations, and Nora herself claims that she is terrified of Patch, at one point she is even terrified that he might rape her. Patch humiliates her, threatens to kill her, and belittles her – he isn’t just mean, he’s awful.

Think, if you will, about the future of such a relationship. A relationship with a foundation built on terror, threats, and manipulation probably does not have a very healthy future. The rules of romance tend to state that if not a happily ever after, then the characters need at least a happy for now (note – other endings are possible, but then, writer, you’re not strictly writing a romance, you’re writing a tragedy, a comedy, etc.). Imagine how your characters are meant to achieve their happy ending if the very relationship itself has been traumatic. Bad-boy love interests work better when they are written in such a way as to inspire empathy, rather than fear. The very appeal of the bad boy is often uncovering the heart of gold underneath, but if uncovering that heart of gold is simply too much work, and results in actual emotional trauma for the main character, the reader may find little worth in that relationship.

The enemies to lovers and bad boy tropes often skirt the line of acceptable behavior, but remember, by having your main character ultimately fall in love with and have a happy ending with the bad-boy, any behavior the bad-boy displays is tacitly condoned by the main character. Put yourself in her shoes – how much would you accept from a love interest? Roofying is probably out, right? Would you put up with a man who hits you? Who threatens to kill you? Imagine you have a daughter – how would you feel if she told you that she was terrified of her boyfriend? You would want her to leave, right? That’s not a healthy romance, and should be no-one’s end game.

If intend to outright write an abusive relationship you’re not writing a romance, but rather exploring the nature of relationships and the human condition — perhaps in a tragic way, but the distinction between the two should be crystal clear to the reader. The relationship might be romanticized by the participants, but not by the writer. The caveat being, if you want to write a toxic or unhealthy relationship, then you must signal to the reader that the relationship is toxic. Perhaps the characters know this, perhaps they don’t, but it should be completely clear to the reader that this behavior is not healthy. Otherwise, reader, indulge in those lovely bad boys all you like, you’re certainly not alone in enjoying the type or the tropes that come with it.

Recently someone in a writing group asked a question that amounted to “if my character is sort of racist, and doesn’t really change her views by the end, will readers still enjoy the book?”

The general consensus answers seemed to be “I would read that, go for it!” and “we like complicated characters!” However, I had a rather a few more reservations. I thought on this, and thought on it some more. You see, reader, I keep hearing people say that they like dark characters because they’re more realistic, more interesting, more fun. Your character can be a cold blooded killer, they say, a rapist, a racist, an overall bad-dude, and we will read it because we like flaws. Does the character have to change, and realize the error of their ways? Nope, they say, because in real life people don’t change,  so do your worst!

And, after thinking and thinking, I decided I wasn’t sure if I really believed that this was the case. Because despite what people in the writing group said, most successful anti-heroes have one thing in common, and that is that they manage, on some level, to get me to care about them. Perhaps they don’t have some grand epiphany, during which they realize the error of their way and turn over that new leaf,  perhaps they aren’t full of remorse, but on some level, they do struggle. The nature of these struggles may change — some may struggle with their own actions, some may struggle with their own nature, some may struggle with their own desires. Things are never too easy for these characters, and they do not avoid consequences for their actions. A character who struggles, and who brings us along for the ride, may be allowed a great many more sins than a character who blithely hurts others with no self-awareness or consequences.

So, are there any lines a protagonist cannot cross? The short answer seems to be a resounding “no.” Readers seem to have an almost infinite reserve of forgiveness for the skillfully created character. The longer answer, however, is, it depends, and perhaps, certain lines should only be crossed carefully, and by writers who are certain they have the skill to pull it off without triggering any proverbial land-mines.

Murder, for instance, seems relatively easy to forgive, particularly if the murder is done in self-defense or self-preservation, or in the name of protecting the protagonist’s loved ones. We can even forgive those who kill innocents, if the killer is say, an assassin (all in a day’s work?) or a soldier. Sometimes we can even forgive serial killers – Dexter anyone? But even our most murder-y protagonists have one thing in common, and that is that they understand and ultimately accept the consequences of their choices. Perhaps sometimes their mental health deteriorates – Tony Soprano famously sought out therapy for his job related stress and depression, and clearly struggled with balancing his life in the Mafia with his role as a father and husband. Sometimes they struggle to find meaning in an uncaring world. Our quintessential anti-hero, Meursalt in Camus’s The Stranger, who murdered someone in cold blood for no real reason whatsoever, is someone who feels frustration with the meaninglessness of life, and despair that no matter what he does, or how he feels, the universe is ultimately indifferent. The murder he commits isn’t excusable, but his despair is relate-able. Perhaps what it comes down to is that killing, is a line that many people can, on some level, imagine themselves crossing given the circumstances. When characters offer up mitigating circumstances, or even feelings of turmoil, we are able to accept these in a way, and offer up our sympathy, even if we may still condemn the act.

There are other lines, however, that we have a harder time sympathizing with, particularly if we have a certain sort of faith in our own moral alignment. Rape, for instance, is hard to imagine as being motivated by anything other than pure selfish desire (in fact, literary theorist William Flesch suggests that our very interest in a narrative arises primarily from our desire to ascertain whether each character has inherently selfish or altruistic motives for their driving action). Unlike murder, rape is singularly unjustifiable, and it is nearly impossible to muster any sort of sympathy for a rapist, no matter how conflicted the rapist may be. And yet, Alex, the anti-hero protagonist of Burgess’ seminal novel, A Clockwork Orange, is a violent serial-rapist who knows, intellectually, that what he is doing is wrong, and yet does it anyway. While we do not forgive Alex, the way his “reform” is handled does make us pity him. Burgess’ first person narrative invites the reader into the world of a severely disturbed young man, a child really, carefully building trust between the narrator and the reader. This makes it hard for us to witness Alex’s torturous punishment, and on some level we may even find ourselves wishing he could somehow escape, even if it meant a return to his old ways. Reading A Clockwork Orange is an ultimate exercise in cognitive dissonance for any thoughtful reader – we know we should despise Alex, but somehow we don’t, not quite.

Violence against children is similarly hard to forgive – children, after all, are particularly vulnerable and our very nature tells us to protect them, not hurt them. There is something repulsive to the soul about people who hurt children, and it is no surprise that, when you read news stories involving deliberate (and sometimes even accidental) harm to children, the comments sections are often filled with people who firmly believe that the deepest pits of hell are still too good for someone who would hurt a child. Is harm to a child a line that cannot be crossed? Not every author seems to think so. George R.R. Martin famously had incestuous twin Jaime Lannister push a child out of a window, and then later went on to write for Jaime perhaps one of fantasy’s greatest redemption arcs, taking a universally loathed character and turning him into someone we actually sympathize with and even root for. Martin’s Jaime is revealed to be a broken man who has lost his faith in the institutions and people to whom he was previously devoted – including his sister-lover, the woman who inspired the act of attempted Child-murder. Once a idealistic and devoted young knight, Jaime was eventually universally reviled for what he considered his greatest act – murdering the abusive, murderous mad king. Later, Lannister’s devil-may-care attitude is revealed to be a façade hiding a much deeper sense of self-loathing. The further Jaime grows, the more he distances himself from his sister, the more his regrets for his past actions begin to surface, and Jaime himself begins to hope that he might regain his lost honor. It is hard not to sympathize with this character who actively wants to do better and who tries to distance himself from the people and mindsets that caused him to lose his altruism.

Indeed, perhaps in the hands of a skillful enough writer, there truly is no line that cannot be crossed. And indeed, one harsh reality many of us writers must face is that sometimes we aren’t quite ready, as writers, to tackle the book we want to write. When an amateur writer in writer’s group says that she’s writing an unrepentant racist, a child murderer, or a rapist, my first reaction is generally to cringe rather than say “go for it!” While it is not out of the realm of possibility that the writer may manipulate the reader’s emotions so skillfully that even the most hateful bastards will be redeemable, it is unlikely that an amateur writer will accomplish this feat. More likely than not the writer might succeed in creating a hateful bastard, but will fail in making this person sympathetic enough for the reader to actually give a damn whether said bastard succeeds or fails, lives or dies.

Sympathy isn’t about likability. Characters do not have to be likable, but in order for the reader to invest in the story, we do have to care about what happens to them. At the heart of every story is a character with a goal, and certain people or circumstances that get in the way of that goal. So, how are you, writer, going to make readers care about whether or not your hateful baster gets his way or not? Because if the readers do not care, they will not finish your book.  And while you do not have to create likable characters, you do have to create characters that are worthy of our care – in other words, sympathetic. What makes your characters worthy of our care? Do we see some small flicker of humanity deep in their broken and tortured souls? Do we simply pity them? Does their humorous and personable voice make them likable against all odds? When creating your unrepentant racist or your serial killer protagonist or your heartless assassin, these are the questions the writer must ask.

Further, you must ask yourself, with all the humility you can muster, is this the right story for me to write right now? It is perfectly alright to save your more ambitious stories for later in your writing experience, when your skills are more developed, and when you have a firmer grasp on how you might do these characters justice. Whatever you choose, know that there will be people who will find your characters actions to be beyond the pale no matter what, and that all of your hard work at redemption will, occasionally, all be for naught. But, then, as my co-blogger Bruce often remarks, no one ever said this writing stuff was supposed to be easy.

The appeal of morally grey anti-heroes is easy to understand – characters with flaws – real flaws, big flaws, flaws that sometimes cause them to do awful things – are realer than characters who always act morally all of the time. After all, most real people make mistakes, and sometimes we even make big ones. We might not, most of us anyhow, be as flawed as Tony Soprano, or Arya in A Song of Ice and Fire, but we struggle too. so naturally, we want to read about characters who also struggle, not perfect heroes to whom everything comes easily. Creating characters who sometimes cross the line into amorality, or even immorality, while also making sure those same characters elicit the reader’s sympathy is no easy task either, and astute readers know it, and will applaud the story that makes them feel for someone they should hate. However, characters who act without any regard whatsoever for others, or any sort of awareness of the consequences of their actions, are hard to get behind. As readers, we enjoy seeing characters struggle, but we do not enjoy seeing assholes get a free pass. Writing these types of characters takes a delicate hand, because it is easy to go too far in creating a character whose actions are simply unredeemable, or, alternately, to try too hard to find sympathetic motivations for character behavior. Below are a few common errors that writers make that make the motivations behind characters’ bad behavior feel instead more like excuses.

The Tragic Childhood

Creating sympathy in morally grey characters is not necessarily simply a matter of giving them a childhood trauma – an abusive mother, an absent father – particularly if the morally grey character mistreats those closest to them. While trauma is terrible, it does not excuse abusive behavior, not ever. We see this particularly often in the young adult market, in which a “bad-boy” love interest treats the object of his affection terribly and yet, when a tragic backstory is revealed, all is forgiven by the love interest, and the expectation is that the reader will forgive this character too. After all, haven’t they suffered? In reality, we don’t usually care why people treat us terribly, what we care about is whether they recognize their behavior as wrong and take steps to correct it. Knowing about the character’s tragic past is important because the character cannot heal if they don’t acknowledge the root of their actions, it is important for the reader because it adds depth to a character, just as any backstory does. However, other characters (and the readers) are under no obligation to forgive a character for poor behavior because of this tragic backstory. Beware of using a sad story to fish for sympathy when your character has not yet done any of the hard work towards redemption. Keep in mind too, plenty of people have tragic and traumatic childhoods and yet do not grow into abusive adults and teenagers, so a traumatic childhood alone isn’t going to get your character off the hook.

I Did it All for You!

We’ve all read this story: Our anti-hero, let’s call him Bob, has done some pretty bad things, despicable things even, but, as we learn more about Bob’s story, it turns out that the bad things he did were really done because he was trying to protect Kevin, the man he loves. Bob feels bad about said actions, but he really had no choice, see? He was only doing what he had to do. He may have taken agency away from Kevin, he may have killed innocents, he may have betrayed trust – but it was all done to protect Kevin, and what’s more, Kevin better appreciate it. Of all of the copout excuses for morally grey behavior, this one is probably my least favorite because it creates a great false dichotomy between choosing the moral path, and keeping others safe, which is rarely realistic. On top of that, it is incredibly manipulative – Kevin can’t really reject Bob now, can he, not after Bob has given up his very morality for Kevin’s sake? It paints sacrificing one’s morality as the ultimate act of love, which it isn’t. Ultimate acts of love treat our loved ones as equals and partners, and do not require us to make terrible decisions on their behalf. Furthermore, often, when we sacrifice our morality we are doing it for much more selfish reasons, so ask yourself some questions. Did your character really do it all for someone else, or did your character gain anything personally from their actions? Were there really no other options? If Bob  had discussed the situation Kevin beforehand, what would Kevin have said? If you can’t answer these questions, perhaps you need to rethink your character’s motivation.

Addiction

Don’t misunderstand — addiction can be compelling, and a great many books, shows, and films have tackled the subject and done it well. Addiction can, in itself, be a way to show your character’s struggles to do the right thing, and addiction can certainly make people act in amoral and immoral ways. Addiction is also hard to overcome, and can wreak havoc on a person’s life, and can be a source of great personal tragedy. What addiction is not, however, is an excuse to treat others poorly. If you want to write a character with addiction, and still maintain sympathy for this character, it is imperative that this character not get a free pass due to their struggles. This is mostly addressed through how other characters react to your character struggling with addiction, but it can also be addressed by the addicted character too. Does the character feel remorse when their actions harm others? Does the character want to change? Does the character try to change, but ultimately fails? A character with an addiction who has no interest in changing can make for a great tragic character, but that character is also going to cause a world of hurt for their loved ones, so how do the characters react to this? Does your addicted character care about the people they hurt? If they know their actions cause hurt to others and they simply don’t care and do it anyway, it will be very hard for your reader to muster any sympathy for them. Further, beware of perpetuating damaging ideas that the loved ones of a person suffering from addiction somehow are responsible for saving that person, or even that someone else can, in fact, save someone from addiction.

Mental Illness

Similar to addiction, mental illness is a realistic situation that can add nuance to characters. People with mental illnesses exist in the world, and they also deserve representation. However, even people with mental illnesses do not want to see those illnesses treated as catch-all excuses for hurting others. My husband, for example, struggles with depression. Sometimes his depression causes him to say hurtful things, but he has never asked me to accept him saying hurtful things to him just because he suffers from depression. When his depression has caused him to say hurtful things, he acknowledges it, and apologizes.  I may forgive him, but I don’t give him a free pass, instead, I ask him to work on himself and try harder next time not to be hurtful. Because there are a lot of misconceptions surrounding mental illness, it is a topic that needs to be handled particularly carefully, and should never be used simply as a plot device. And remember, mentally ill people can still be jerks. Have your other characters call them out on their jerkiness if they deserve it. Don’t send the message that just because someone is mentally ill that the people around them have to put up with all manner of abusive behavior.  Your other characters can be understanding, and they might even be more tolerant than they would be with a non-mentally ill person, but they should have their limits too. And if your character is just too involved and cannot see how the mentally ill character is crossing the line, introduce another character who can. And remember, you can also write mentally ill characters who are not abusive too. In fact, “madness” as a motivation for immoral acts is more than a bit overdone.

Revenge

While revenge is a valid motivation for a character, beware that readers generally have a limited tolerance for the extent to which they will accept revenge as an excuse for a character’s amoral or immoral behavior. Generally, watching a character wallow in misery due to some past wrong done to them is not particularly interesting unless the character is on a path towards acceptance, if not forgiveness. Revenge can work in the short term, but in the long term, a character that holds onto revenge, particularly if that revenge is directed anywhere other than at the people who directly caused your character harm, your reader is going to lose sympathy. Personally, next to “I did it all for you,” revenge is one of my least favorite character motivators simply because it is so unsustainable. How long can you hold a grudge? Let’s say you can hold a grudge pretty long — can you hold it for years? Decades? And how many of us go from relatively well-adjusted people to single-minded revenge driven killers just because of one tragedy? Lots of people experience loss without turning to revenge, so what is it about your character that makes him choose this particular path? Personally, I like to think about the afterwards. Let’s say your character gets revenge, what next? Do they live life on the straight and narrow? Do they feel guilty because they’ve perpetuated a vicious cycle? These are the more interesting questions to ask of a revenge-motivated character. But keep in mind — revenge generally isn’t a good look for anyone. While we might feel sad for a character whose husband and child were slaughtered, that sympathy is going to be fairly limited if your character never shows any growth.

A final word of advice: don’t be afraid to write a character that is simply a human being struggling to always do the right thing.  We don’t always need a fancy backstory or a convoluted reason for the character’s actions. Even people with relatively “normal” childhoods, or pasts without any obvious traumas can still make mistakes and act in amoral or even immoral ways. While you can explain actions in a number of ways, sympathy comes, above all else, from making sure your characters themselves understand the nature of their actions. Make sure your characters recognize their own faults, and struggle with them, struggle to make the right choices, or struggle to somehow right past wrongs. Characters who don’t recognize their own faults aren’t morally grey, they’re just assholes, no matter how many excuses they make.

Next week I will discuss how far a character can go before they lose all reader support. Are there any lines a character simply cannot cross if the author wants that character to remain sympathetic?