In Where the wild things are, when I was talking about empathy in reading fiction, I had to stop myself going off on a tangent about whether and how writers worry about making their characters likeable. Honestly, sometimes writing this blog is as bad as writing my MPhil critical paper, and now my PhD's commentary. The closest analogy, I remember thinking in exasperation round about this stage last time, is gift-wrapping a porcupine. Every time I thought I had everything neatly packaged, so that I was clutching a tidy parcel ready for the sellotape and ribbon, a shaft of quills would spring out through it, ripping the paper and pointing in yet another fascinating direction. Compared to that, novels are mere hedgehogs to write - a bit wriggly, a bit spikey, might give you a nip and I deal with the fleas by coming over here and scratching the itch - but fundamentally (usually) well-behaved. Anyway, now I've got time to go where that particular quill was pointing, what's it all about?
Ah yes, empathy. The thing is, whoever your main character is (or two, or three, but probably not more), the reader's going to spend a lot of the book in their company. One way or another, you have to get us wanting to care about what happens next, to keep turning the pages. All editors would agree that this main character must be compelling. Not that compelling need mean cute and cosy, and certainly not perfect (what could be more off-putting to us flawed, unconfident humans?). Feisty and adventurous will do just fine, so will accident-prone, or thoughtful in limited doses, or thoughtless if it's charming, and so will psychotic and murderous if we're talking Crime, or taciturn and adventurous if we're talking thrillers.
Exasperated writer often feel that there's too much pressure to make their characters likeable in a narrower sense: blandly agreeable, smoothly textured. I think this could be partly because when you've worked your way up to Stage 13 of slushkiller's stages, 'I just didn't care about the character enough,' is the kind of rejection which induces the very worst kind of despair, because you, the writer do care, so it's very, very hard to know what to do about it: easier (and maybe correct, but maybe not) to feel that 'likeability' is being imposed on them, when it may simply be that you haven't written them fully and clearly enough for an editor who hasn't lived with them for the last five years to get it.
Faced with 'I just didn't care enough,' there are two solutions, I'd suggest, because it's an example of the symptom being universal when the cause is particular. Did you mean your character to be basically loveable/likeable, if flawed? Most commercial fiction needs this, just as it needs some approximate conformity to the form and content of whichever genre you're writing: most buyers of most books want them to do pretty much what they say on the tin. The main character is the reader's entry to the book's world, and their companion and representative in it and, I don't know about you, but I pick my travelling companions very, very carefully in real life, so why do otherwise in fiction? That character may be a wise friend, or a feisty fighter, or a life-enhancing larger-than-life character, or the shrewd operator we'd like to be, or ourselves writ large, an ordinary, friendly soul heading for a life just a bit more delicious than ours. But they must be someone we want to spend time with.
Maybe you didn't mean your character to be loveable in that way, though. American Psycho didn't do too badly, and nor did Money, so it's not a prerequisite for success to have a central character who's a cross between Mrs Tiggywinkle and George Clooney. Go towards the literary end of the spectrum and there's perhaps more scope for the weirdo, the misfit, the odd character with a strange outlook on life which opens your eyes to things and ideas you'd never seen before. Again, the travelling companion analogy fits: I have friends who are like a cosy conversation in a tea shop, but I have others who make me see things slightly differently, who recolour the world I'm looking at or show me places - dark or brilliant - I'd never have found on my own. I even know people I dislike, but who make me rearrange my mental furniture, or at least shine a brilliant light on its splits and stains. I might not go round the world with them, I might not like what I see, but if the light's bright enough to promise revelations, I'll read the book.
So if warm-and-wonderfulness isn't the only thing which makes a character compelling (though in chilly economic times, warmth is always going to sell better, not least the kind which does no harm to your carbon footprint), what is? Back to Aristotle, as always. As I recall (my copy of the Poetics has taken a walk) his basic definition of drama (those Greeks' only failing, apart from slavery and misogyny, being a failure to invent the novel) is "character in action". Character gives rise to action, action expresses character. The two are interdependent, and one without the other is never enough. Action without reason or basis in character makes it a computer game, not a novel. And character which doesn't act is not only boring to watch, but isn't, actually, a character, because we can have almost no sense of who they really are. Think of someone you met recently. If you only saw a photo, you could make a few, stereotyped judgements from their clothes, their expression, their surroundings. But you won't know who they are until you've talked to them, walked with them, seen them deal with the supermarket checkout and the road accident and the baby. You may have written a friendly, appealing woman who'll find her purpose in life by the end of the book, but if all the action is done to her, not by her, why should we care? It takes a brilliant writer indeed - I'm thinking of Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight, if you want to know - to make a helpless, passive character compelling. Even then its appeal is that the book magnifies one kind of being female that most of us know a flicker of in ourselves, and because of the extraordinary eye-and-sense opening writing, and I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't find the central character supportable. It's one reason why villains are often more compelling than good people in fiction: villains, by definition, do things, whereas virtue is too often passive. As someone said of Emma Thompson in Howards End: her capacity to make goodness sexy is very, very rare. One of LeCarré's gifts is to make the essentially decent as compelling as the villainous, because he has such a subtle grasp of character and motive that we believe utterly in their actions. We lesser mortals can only do our best; and of course the important thing in that aspiration isn't just the best, it's the doing.
