Use This Empathy Check When Writing Your Problematic Characters

Mia Farrow and Elizabeth Taylor in Secret Ceremony 1968.

I’m sure you know your memoir shouldn’t be filled with Disneyesque do-gooder princesses and wicked villains. That’s lazy writing.

You know and I know that people have nuance.

My guess is your grasp of nuance is one thing that led you to want to write your memoir in the first place. You want to explain yourself and fill in some of the gaps between what people may believe versus the truth of your experiences.

But when you’re writing about a slice of life, you’re only able to convey a limited range of possibilities. It can be hard to not pigeonhole characters into bad guys and good guys. 

When it comes to your first drafts of writing, let the chips fall where they may. Get everything you know to be true out of you. Put down those terrible feelings about that middle school bully or your ex-boyfriend.

Don’t hold back.

Go ahead and write down every awful thing that bully said and did to you. Write out descriptions of how narcissistic your ex acted. These people aren’t in the room with you now and won’t be reading your writing anytime soon. So, you’re safe to get this off your chest and into written form. 

Once you get everything out of your system and start working on revisions, you’ll need to look over your writing from a new perspective. If you ever want to publish your memoir or even if you just want to finish a well-written story for future generations, this is where you’ll need to make sure your writing is fair. 

All people are human.

No matter how truly terrible anyone appears to be, your characters must be full representations of real people. Outside of serial killers, how many people possess no redeeming qualities? Heck, even Ted Bundy was likable enough that he befriended famous writer Ann Rule.

No one is all good or all bad.

The more you can showcase well-rounded characters in your memoir, the more you’ll be taken seriously as a real writer rather than someone with an axe to grind.

Currently, I’m estranged from my father. It’d be easy for me to paint him as my enemy. To see him strictly as the bad guy. But the truth is when I look back on my childhood, I can remember him doing some great dad things. Like when he took notice of me watching a lot of Bob Ross on PBS. He came home one afternoon with an armload of painting supplies.

To my 9-year-old artistic self, I was amazed as he unloaded canvases, paintbrushes, oil paints, turpentine, acrylics, watercolors, and even a huge easel. It felt like Christmas in July. And his interest in building up my artistic abilities helped shape who I am today.

Most people in our life function in this way. Good people have bad moments and bad people have good qualities. Or rather, people have a lot of different qualities that make them hard to pin down as good or bad.

So, if you’re writing about someone in your memoir who has done you wrong or you’re building up tension towards a climatic showdown with your archenemy, you have to find ways to make these characters feel more complex—and well, just human.

Use this Empathy Check When Writing Your Problematic Characters:

1.    Finish Writing First

Think of your empathy meter as a pair of X-ray vision goggles. Don’t even reach for those glasses until you’ve written out everything you need to say about this person first. This will ensure you’ve fully fleshed out your emotions about this individual. And you’ve purged yourself of all those bad feelings and any lingering thoughts of revenge.

2.    Identify The Character’s Role

Prepare yourself to see this person in a new light. What do you think this person represents in your story? Memoirs should only be a slice of life, not an autobiography. All characters have a role that moves the story forward or functions within a theme. So, what is your bad guy’s role?

Is he the personification of gluttony or malice? Maybe he’s the manifestation of all your worst fears.

Name it.

3.    Find Their Opposite Traits

Recognize that whatever role a character embodies, they often embody the opposite traits, as well. Did you ever have that friend that everyone else hated, but together you were two peas in a pod? Whatever terrible qualities other people saw just weren’t a factor in your friendship. Or maybe because of you, this person was able to overcome some negative behaviors. After you’ve listed the role your character serves in your memoir, jot down the opposite traits of that role.

Consider your bully. Of course, you don’t like him picking on you. But could you imagine that in certain circumstances, instead of being a bully, this character could also be someone’s protector?

How might your bad guy also have good guy traits?

4.    Envision Your Bad Guy in a Good Scenario

Now let’s expand on #3 . In what ways might this person serve the opposite (or positive) role for someone else? Maybe your bully is used to dealing with an abusive parent and feels like he must protect a younger sibling from a mean father. Is your character a great mom to her kids, but a terrible friend to you? Might your character value her family even though she thinks it's fine to be a shrewd and sketchy work colleague? You may have to use your imagination here but consider any possibilities where this person might be seen in a good light.

5.    The Backstory

Consider what happened before your story started. Did you have a positive interaction or relationship with this person before things soured? If so, find ways to include small suggestions of this backstory in your memoir. If you have no exposition with this character, give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that at some point they weren’t all bad.

6.   Re-Read

Now, go back through what you’ve written in your memoir and re-read the parts of your story related to this one character. Does it read as if this person is a cartoon villain? Or are there places where the light breaks through and the character’s positive qualities shine? If not, in what subtle ways might you add some of those traits?

7.    Add a Story Arc

Consider giving your bad guy a small story arc. Start this character off on a positive footing. Then begin to add in small problematic traits or issues until you’ve established that the character is in need of some kind of redemption. Now come full circle and show your bad guy’s redemption.

You see this storyline of redemption often when it goes to alcohol and drug addictions. Good people may fall into the bad guy space due to a dependency on substances. And even with bad traits we root for this person to regain our trust and their own power.

8.   Leave Some Space

Don’t let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. You don’t want to make this person appear all bad. But you also don’t want to wrap your narrative up in a perfect little Aesop’s Fable bow, either. Leave room for your audience to question whether this person is good or bad. Or just not know.

You do not have to explain away all bad behavior. In fact, we often never know why people are bad to us. And leaving these experiences as ambiguous is a fair choice when writing a memoir.

9.    If You Can’t Say Anything Nice… End with a Dash of Hope

Provided that you aren’t talking about a serial killer, try ending on an upswing. Maybe you don’t know where your adversary ended up but suggest that a life lesson was learned. Consider ways to use the other character’s negative actions to show how you’ve grown as a person.

Writing about your interior life is never an easy feat. Therefore, guessing about someone else’s interior life will be nearly impossible. We don’t know why anyone acts the way they do. But we can always assume it was because they encountered some difficulty in life not because they were born bad.

Despite what George Thorogood sings, b-b-b-bad seeds don’t really exist.

Take note that you aren’t making up anything here. We want to relay a character’s behavior as accurately as possible. But just as we want to give motive to that perpetrator in your favorite true crime mystery, we don’t want to turn other people into unbelievable monsters, either.

Everyone has a reason for doing what they do. And most people think they are doing things for the best. Even if it’s not the best for you.

You may even write all the bad parts of this character first. Then you do some big revisions with empathy in mind. Remove most of the positive stuff you added in, leaving only a subtle suggestion as to motive.

This might get you much closer to the truth.

The more intimate your relationship with the person, the more dynamic you’ll be able to make their character. If you had a narcissistic mother, she might have been mostly awful to you. But I bet you can recall at least one or two great moments with her.

Love relationships parallel family relationships. Most love relationships have romantic or happy backstories. Who would get into a relationship with the devil?

Keep in mind, if you’re writing about someone you chose to enter a relationship with like a spouse or close friend, your falling out could show us as much about you as the other person. Choose your words carefully.

The relationships with the least exposition would be people like co-workers or school bullies. People whose select behaviors are revealed in a limited environment. But if you reach deep enough, you’ll be able to remember that person offering to get you a cup of coffee once or you’ll recall your middle school bully was stuck in bad foster care.

Even a small moment can enlighten how you think about that person’s behavior.

What if your enemy isn’t a person?

The heart of all conflict is facing ourselves.

Sometimes that shows up as us first dealing with somebody else. But eventually, we learn what we don’t like in another person are the qualities we don’t like in ourselves. And understanding your adversary means more fully understanding yourself.

But often our enemies aren’t even human.

Consider:

A job you hate.

An addiction you can’t overcome.

A terrifying event you must attend.

Intrusive thoughts you can’t control.

Some mental or physical illness you can’t escape.

I think my biggest enemy over the last several years has been chronic illness and feeling trapped in a body that doesn’t seem to be working correctly.

The nice thing about having an enemy in your memoir that isn’t an actual person is you’re much closer to examining yourself on the page instead of laying blame with someone else.

That’s exactly what a good memoir should do.

It should force you to analyze yourself before it transforms you.

So, if you’ve positioned yourself against your ex-husband and can’t identify where your behaviors have gone wrong, you may be writing an angry letter of retaliation, not a memoir.

The more willing you are to see yourself as part of the problem, the more likely you can address the situation fairly and the more likely your audience will accept the story as an accurate depiction of your life.

Narratives in which the real enemy is us are some of the most terrifying stories ever told.

Think of the narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.

He killed a man, but that man was never the narrator’s antagonist. The narrator was wrestling with his fear, acted out of that fear, and spent the rest of the story shrouded in guilt. 

Or consider the movie Cake with Jennifer Anniston. In the early portion of the film, we think the real enemy is the drunk driver who hit her in a car wreck. We’re unaware until much later that she’s wracked with guilt over the loss of her child.

Think of yourself as the boss of the company called your memoir.

Yes, you can take a little credit for the positive things that happen at this company.

But you also need to be responsible for the negative things, as well.

A beta reader is a great resource here.

If you aren’t sure how other people are reading your challenging characters, ask someone who is a reader—not another writer or editor—to give you honest feedback.

Ask These Questions:

1.     What do you think about X's character?

2.    Do you like or not like X? Does he have any likable characteristics? Do you have mixed feelings about the character? Why or why not?

3.    Is the main character’s relationship with this X character believable?

4.    In what ways might the relationship with this X character feel more real?

5.    Do you have any suggestions for making this X character feel more dynamic or interesting?

6.    What would you like to see the main character learn from this adversary?

7.     What would you like to see happen to the adversary?

Remember, in a memoir, all roads should lead back to you, the main character.

Your adversary is there to help you transform.

Despite how you see this person in real life, the bad guy’s role is only there to support your main character’s journey. And for that reason, your memoir’s adversary can’t be all bad.