Every time I came to this site, something would stick a virus in my computer. A friend said it was because I was using IE and should switch to Firefox. I have switched, for the most part. It took a while for me to get used to FF.

At any rate, over the next month I plan to work on a book intended for publication, so I won't be uploading that. Hopefully I'll be working on some independent projects (and uploading those) as well, if nothing else to keep my mind flexible. Working on a single book can be very tiring. Tiring in a good way, but tiring nonetheless. Also, tiring.

Since DrugInducedDuck brought it up in his own journal, I've found myself thinking about the unrealistic way characters respond to crisis situations in fiction. They're rarely even a tenth as affected by traumatic events as we are in real life. I left a stupidly long comment on that journal entry, but it won't keep me from writing about it again here. I thought of a third reason why writers tend to leave their characters relatively unharmed by terrible things.

In order to make an interesting story, a character must be put through the wringer. Nobody buys a book or watches a movie whose characters deal with *normal* problems. Because honestly, we can watch *normal* problems at home for free. No, people want characters to experience terrible things- and then conquer those terrible things. (Unless it's a horror movie, in which case people want to see the characters *succumb* to terrible things. Horror movies kind of turn a lot of writing standards on their heads.)

So a writer flings the worst of the worst at their characters, giving them ever more difficult knots to untangle. TERRIBLE THINGS that would, in reality, reduce a person to something no one would want to look at. No one wants to know a person who is too angry, or too nervous, or whatever.

Not even the person's creator.

That is, the character's writer. After subjecting a character to the worst of the worst, it is fairly automatic for a writer to see to it that their characters are not outright traumatized. You started writing about this character to begin with because you liked them in some way. Then, in a godlike fashion, you threw that character into hell. For no other reason than because it would entertain the masses- and would entertain you, the writer, who had to stay interested in the book to write it.

At the very least, you owe that character a happy ending.

A few years ago, I was writing bits and pieces of a chess story. It was about a 19-year-old girl and a 93-year-old man. They came across each other in the park, because the story was set in NYC and chess in the park is still a bit of a tradition there (that's also where chess players gamble over the board for cash in a less-than-traditional fashion). The dynamic of a 19 year old and a 93 year old was very cool. I avoided stereotypes and cliches. There was also this additional stuff, like the fact that the 19 year old was a native Puerto Rican whose entire family had gone back to Puerto Rico after 9/11 and kept nagging her over the phone to go back too (the book was set in 2003 or thereabouts). The 93 year old was well-defined by 93 years of living, and wondering if he were actually going to turn out to be immortal or something. There was this excellent story about how he and his wife met in the early 1930s.

Anyway. Once, I was just writing, minding my own business, and I found myself doing some math. It would not be unreasonable, I decided, to say that the 93 year old had fought in World War 2. He would have been a little older than some, but it was probably still realistic. So I wrote some dialogue in which the 19 year old asked the 93 year old about it.

...After he was finished relating just how he had felt about signing up for WW2 and what had happened there, I didn't know who was more remorseful about bringing the whole thing up- the 19 year old or me.

Unfortunately, it didn't feel like the sort of thing I could take back. The only way I could get the 93 year old out of the war was to find out that my math was off or give him some kind of disability that would render him 4-F. But you know... some things in fiction just feel like history. Not make-believe.

Point is- to get back to the point of the whole topic- when characters go through terrible things it's because we the writers make it happen. It's then natural for us to cheat. So the character isn't hurt too badly by the things we put them through.

Because in the end, we know that it is all our fault.