Deborah Woehr

Have You Ever Hated Your Main Character?

I’ve come to love the main characters in Prosperity, but that wasn’t the case with God’s Last Twilight. The latter story is the backstory for Prosperity I’d written for the 2004 NaNoWri contest. It started out on a blog (now defunct), and I received positive feedback from my readers.

I did finish God’s Last Twilight, but the problem was I hated the character so much that I was all too glad to type “THE END.” She was an enraged soul who did horrible things to the townsfolk of Prosperity. God’s Last Twilight was the most brutal story I’ve ever written, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.

The story has been sitting on my hard drive for well over a year and nagging at my mind. But I’m not ready to go back to it yet. I’m determined to finish Prosperity first.

Have you ever written about a character that you couldn’t stand? Were you able to finish the story in spite of this?

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5 Comments Writing

5 Responses to “Have You Ever Hated Your Main Character?”

Lee Pletzers on 27 Jan 2006 at 5:55 am #

My characters evolve as the story moves forward.

pat kirby on 27 Jan 2006 at 7:17 am #

Uh, no. First, because I’m well in touch with my dark side, I am capable of “liking” a bad guy even if I don’t like what they do. If I don’t connect with the character, can’t project myself (yep, even the dark stuff), then I can’t write the story. Without that connection, it’s just a report, not a story and the writing will be dry and flat.

deborah.woehr on 27 Jan 2006 at 8:07 am #

I guess my problem is that I’m writing outside my “box” with GLT. The hero/heroine was good in 99.9% of the stories I’ve read. Another problem was that I’d written this for the NaNoWri contest, which didn’t give me enough time to connect with the characters.

Benjamin Solah on 27 Jan 2006 at 4:38 pm #

My main character for ‘Hadeon’ has made some very strange choices, and he is slowly turning insane, so he is not a ‘good’ character per se, and I don’t like him, but I enjoy writing the stuff that makes me hate him, if that makes sense

deborah.woehr on 27 Jan 2006 at 4:41 pm #

That makes perfect sense. I’ve started drawing up a character bio for Myra (the crazy woman in GLT) in an effort to get to understand her better. Maybe that will help.