On the Perils of Fancying Your Main Character

or Their Wardrobe

I think we’ve all experienced it.

That moment when we meet a character on the page and we go, Mmm, I’m glad they’re in this book. Perhaps later on, they’ll fall in love with another character, and that’ll be fun to watch. All the private stuff.

And if, twelve pages later, that other character arrives, we’re partly relieved, but we’re also slightly jealous.

Damn, I thought I had them to myself.

Why can’t they just carry on being charismatically lonely in the big city/beautiful countryside?

This, I would say — this transference — is a sign that the writer themselves fancied that character.

Which brings its dangers.

Perhaps I should take this fancying more seriously, and put it more sombrely psychoanalytic terms.

Writers often include objects of desire (perhaps even versions of Lacan’s unattainable objet petit a) within their texts.

Maybe this is why stories exist. To play out the yearnings of lack or dramatise the tragedy of fulfilment.

Be careful what you wish for or Dream Baby Dream.

I don’t do this as often as I used to do. There was a point where I was very keen on introducing into any story, whenever possible, a young woman who looked like Louise Brooks or Snow White.

To me, pearl pale skin, blood red lips and raven hair meant very much the same as they have come to mean through Fairy Tales and Vampire stories.

The fun starts here and Boy, are you in trouble.

Perhaps some would argue that writers include nothing in their stories that isn’t, in some way, desirable to them — it’s only there because they wanted to possess it by including it, and its continued absence would be felt as a lack.

This goes for material objects as well as people.

Texts can be assembled from things the writer lusts after but can’t have.

Some novels, from James Bond to Billionaire Romances, are in large part fantasy shopping lists. Or Supermarket Sweeps through spangly narrative worlds.

That car. That dress. Those shoes. That lakeside villa.

As I’ve speculated, the moment of arrival of an object of obvious desire is one of transferred energy — the reader briefly glows.

And this, well worked in, may suit the narrative.

We may feel, as Charles Ryder does when he meets Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, or when Mole meets the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows, or when Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, that our life also is about to get more interesting.

If we felt nothing during that crucial paragraph of introduction — if we were presented with the new character’s unexciting ordinariness — the story would be in the process of underwhelming, and probably failing.

Yet a desired-by-the-author character does not necessarily become one with charisma on the page.

Quite possibly, the writer’s inability to see their character-crush as anything other than desirable — just because they have the right attributes — means they don’t put any work into making them more generally charismatic.

A Manic Pixie Dream Girl or Boy may be the pash of the first draft, but the writer can’t simply shape them and dress them to fit their own kinks and expect everyone else to swoon.

There are few things worse, in reading, that feeling that the writer clearly intends us to be besotted by A or B, when we simply find them affected or immature.

Perhaps this even goes for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky. Yet Jane Austen thought no-one would much like Emma.

Unless the writer’s desire serves also to seduce the reader, there’s going to be a dead space of annoyance within the book.

What makes a character profoundly desirable are characteristics rather than attributes.

Sensitivity can be way sexy.

Anything that stands out from a narrative, and doesn’t fit the world, be that an anachronistic phrase or an ungeneric action, risks pulling apart the whole story.

In order to enjoy what you’re telling them, the reader will have to put brackets around something or someone.

Yes, they’re really annoying, and shallow, but I know the main character is into them, so I’ll just have to play along.

It’s like being politely friendly to a best friend’s new boyfriend or girlfriend, even though you know it’s never going to last.

Sigh.