Different People, Different Reactions

Quick. If you see someone dumping their cigarette butts in the grocery store parking lot, what do you think? How do you feel? Do you wonder how they can still be smoking, with all the evidence of its damage? Or hate that they’re mucking up the environment? Or are you sad for them, that their parents didn’t teach them to take responsibility for their own trash? Perhaps you feel sorry for the store employee who gets to clean up the mess.

What irks you may only amuse me. What enrages me may make you weep.

Same with our characters. When you write a scene, consider the character’s personality, values and biases. And write the scene that way. Would your protagonist stride up to that car, grab the window frame and say, “Get out here and clean up your mess”? Or would he scrabble in his trunk for a plastic bag and clean it up?

I’m annoyed when characters in a book do something “out of character.” Donald Maass asks “what would your protagonist never ever do? Have them do it.” He suggests that it takes away the sense of the predictable, and creates tension. My feeling is that if you choose to have your character do something out of character, then it had better make a good point and you’d better recognize within your plot that he or she is leaping out of the comfort zone.

What do you think?