WARNING: Spoiler alert for all books by Thomas Harris involving Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, including the movies Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. Also spoiler alert for Hitchcock’s and Robert Bloch’s movie/story, Psycho.

This week’s blog is either a continuation of the themes discussed last week, or at least a very close parallel tangent. I want to speak about getting your readers to emotionally invest in both your story and, most importantly, your characters. Before I can elaborate on that we need to realize that no matter what we do as writers there will be some readers who will not engage, not like, and not enjoy either some or all of our stories. I think one of the most common fatal flaws in writing and, honestly, life, is to try to be all things to all people. At the risk of falling into generalizations, the majority of readers and movie goers don’t have an enormous palate of tastes. There is very little demographic crossover between The Fast and the Furious and the Life of Pi.

This reality evokes a corollary to the theory about “writing what you know.” While in the beginning, you may be doing writing exercises that you believe are about random subjects that you might never have chosen, in the end what you write about is what you do actually care about. For example, let’s say I got a writing exercise where a jogger is trying to beat her best time but is distracted by a fellow jogger that is running alongside her because the jogger is both attractive and won’t stop chatting with her. Now, frankly, I have absolutely no interest in jogging, or joggers. If you ever see me running, either follow me if you want to live or kill whatever is chasing me. However, if I were to take on this exercise, the fact that the two people were joggers would becomc irrelevant. What is the story about to me? It is about goals. The jogger is trying to better herself. It is about self-advocacy—the jogger needs to assert herself and decide what her priority is or she is going to be filled with disappointment and regret if she doesn’t tell the other person she needs to focus, or chat them back up and go for coffee after. I would write the story so that you could substitute jogging for studying in the library for the SATs or baking 5000 cupcakes for the biggest catering order she has ever had, or perfecting Flight of the Bumblebee on piano for her Julliard interview. For me, all stories are about people and relationships; either between people, or their environments or themselves.

This creates what seems like a paradoxical maxim that goes something like, “the devil is in the details but don’t sweat the small stuff.” What I mean by that is don’t waste too much time on inconsequential elements, but when you have decided on those elements make them real by adding details. So, in the above example, though it doesn’t matter whether she is jogging, baking or playing piano, once you have decided which one it is, give us something that makes us hear her sneakers on the pavement, smell the cupcakes, or hear Rimsky-Korsakov.

Once you realize what you want to write about in the universal sense, you then need to picture what Stephen King calls “Constant Reader.” Picture the typical person you want to read your work. The person that will love your witty repartee, your relatable characters and  your plutonian humor. Once you visualize your audience, the choices on how to manipulate them should become clearer.

That being said, how do you get readers to engage with a character and treat the character’s triumphs and failures as their own? The easiest answer is to write characters that have a lot in common with your constant reader. If you are writing for the literary fiction fan then you want to write about both well-educated, erudite characters, and “exotic,” “earthy” outsider characters who are “real” and “down-to-earth,” because literary readers like the intelligent, the minority and the underdog. Fans of literary fiction also tend to like to experience cultures that are unlike their own. However, if you are writing for an action audience, your characters’ educational background, and their ethnicity are less important unless they are vital to either obtaining or impeding the characters’ goals. For example, if a guy from the hood who did well and worked himself into the middle class has a financial emergency and gets back in touch with some shady friends so he can do one big drug mule run to pay for his daughter’s operation, then the fact that he DID go to college and IS now an outsider becomes relevant to him achieving his goal. If that same story was just about a hood rat that wants to make the run so he can retire to San Salvador, then whether or not he graduated high school is probably irrelevant.

One of the keys to writing relatable characters is to give them depth. If all your protagonist does is do good, and never doubts themselves, they can seem wooden. This can cause audiences and readers to yawn and wonder if there is any fried chicken left in the fridge or how long the popcorn line is at the moment. You should give your characters flaws, and insecurities and inner obstacles as well as outer ones. The diametric opposite applies to your villains and antagonists. Don’t write an antagonist like Snidely Whiplash who snickers and twists his moustache while tying poor Nell to the train tracks. The best villains have traits that the reader/viewer can’t help but admire. Perhaps the best example from both a literary and cinematic perspective is Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal, also known as “Hannibal the Cannibal” is such a dangerous serial killer that there are intricate protocols for interacting with him. He can’t appear in public without being sedated, restrained and wearing a muzzle. Thomas Harris, the author of the four books where Hannibal appears lets the reader know that Hannibal has no compunction about killing—and eating when possible—anyone who stands in the way of his goals. Harris also tells us that a deviance from the protocols once resulted in a nurse having to have reconstructive surgery on her face after Hannibal bit her. He is truly a terrifying character because he is extremely smart, extremely vicious, and seems to be three steps ahead of everyone at all times. However, he is charming. He is well read. He can reproduce exquisite charcoal drawings of places he has seen from memory, and converse on a wide variety of subjects. Over the course of the three books that FBI Agent Starling appears he literally seduces her with his wit and charm. They actually marry at the end of the book, Hannibal.

Thomas Harris here is a genius at work. We like Hannibal. We hate his warden/doctor and want him to get what is coming to him at the end of Silence of the Lambs. Harris extends this wonderful characterization to Starling, who is earnest, ambitious and smart, if, as Hannibal states she is a bit of a “rube.” A notable thing to observe in the books is the relationship between Hannibal and Starling. Starling is the protagonist and the obvious person the audience is rooting for. Normally, that would logically mean that the reader/viewer can’t like Hannibal because he is a serial killer. However, when Hannibal escapes, the audience has no fear for Starling because, as she says in both the book and the movie, he would consider attacking Starling, “rude.”

Of course, not every character is going to be a Hannibal. There is a lot to learn from him, though. I think it is worth giving one more example, and I will use the movie rather than the story by Robert Bloch that it was based on. That is Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho.

In Psycho we are initially introduced to Marian Crane, who it seems is going to be our protagonist and main character. Marian works at a bank, has a lover, and want to escape her life. She seizes the opportunity to do this by absconding with a five-figure deposit she was supposed to bring to the bank. This evokes conflicting emotions in the viewer. Theft is obviously wrong, but she is stealing from an obnoxious, lecherous rich man, so the sympathy level for the victim is low. Marian is in love and wants to escape and this resonates with a lot of viewers so we are emotionally invested in Marian, though we know that things will probably not work out.

However, we are not prepared for Norman Bates. Norman is nerdy, and sort of creepy, but seems harmless and inspires—before he begins to murder people—sympathy in some viewers simply because he is friendly and thoughtful and tries to engage Marian in conversation. He is the underdog.

Our opinions of Norman change quickly when he spies on Marian undressing and the shower scene happens where we do not know for certain it is Norman that kills Marian, but we suspect it.

Here is the genius of the writing. Having spent twenty minutes of screen time following and maybe rooting for Marian, she is now gone, and all we have left is Norman. Norman is our new protagonist, and the only things we know about him is he is a taxidermist, a peeper, and possibly a killer. We are sort of in limbo with how we feel about Norman until we are introduced to the off-stage Mother character. Now we feel more sympathy for Norman because we believe his problems stem from his overbearing mother, another relatable trope.

In terms of audience manipulation, a writer could do worse than study the interactions and characters in Bloch and Hitchcock’s Psycho.

I will leave you with one other thing. I may have stated I am a puzzle nut. One recurring folk myth about vampires is that they cannot help but count things, so if you are being chased by a vampire you need only throw salt or sand on the floor and the vampire cannot pursue you until he has counted the exact number of grains. I think if I were a monster you would only have to leave a logic puzzle, or a dozen word scrambles, and you could escape at your leisure.

I mention this because when I was thinking of the dynamics a writer must consider when thinking about making complex or unlikeable characters relatable to the reader so that they invest in the character and story, I thought of an exercise. I will warn you now that I don’t have an “answer” for this puzzle. I believe there are multiple ways to solve it. I am more interested in the thought experiment than the actual puzzle but here it is.

Think about a story that picks up with the following scene. This scene is probably somewhere in the middle of the story, meaning it is probably best not to think of it as the first scene in the story and having it be the last scene limits your options to solve the problem. So an undetermined amount of scenes have happened before this one.

The scene begins with a man walking out of his office. He sees a homeless man and gives him money.  He gets in his car and he lets someone merge in front of him although the man has the right of way. Perhaps he sees someone on the side of the road and stops and helps them change a tire or something like that. He comes home and kisses his wife, who greets him with a big smile and a hug. He then retires to his bedroom and closes the door. A sweet puppy runs up to greet him and he immediately scowls and stomps the puppy to death.

Now, I am going to preface this with the fact that there is probably no way to get readers to actually forgive this act. Just as the mutilation of the nurse by Hannibal is not forgiven or justified. However, the reader rationalizes the nurse’s attack by the fact that she failed to follow protocols so she sort of got what she deserved. We rationalize bad actions from friends, lovers and family members because we think that “deep down, they are good people. They love us,” or whatever rationalization we choose instead of the raw truth.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it is to write or think about the above example and get the audience to so like the character that when he commits that atrocious, unforgivable act, the audience can rationalize that somehow, “the puppy had it coming.”

Now, while you are contemplating both the puzzle and whether, after reading this you stil like me (if you ever did), I want to point out something else that goes toward manipulation and the makeup of your constant reader.

There is, I believe, an animal that I call “the Sophisticated Reader.” Feel free to change “reader” to “viewer” if you are more cinematically oriented.  The Sophisticated Reader has read dozens, hundreds, thousands of books, or has seen thousands of movies. She knows the vocabulary of story, and she has heard all the pickup lines designed to getting her in bed. Being a player with smooth lines isn’t going to cut it. You have to be real. You have to surprise her. You need to do something unexpected to catch her off guard and make her fall for you. I say this because the set up for the above story is way too obvious. Though stomping a puppy is a horrific, sensationalist, over-the-top act, because we wrote this character so altruistic, so good, so patient, the Sophisticated Reader knows that he is going to do something very bad to counter that. Ironically, these days, the surprise would be if he actually were a truly good guy.

My last analogy for how to manipulate your readers comes from cat trapping. I worked with a cat shelter that used to do catch-and-release of feral cat colonies. They would basically catch the cats, neuter them, notch their ears so we knew the ones we have gotten, and then release them back int the wild. Some cats, let’s call them the Sophisticated Reader cats were cage wary. These were hard to catch. The typical method was to put some food out near the cage, and something really yummy and smelly inside the cage. The food is located on a pressure plate that closes the cage when the cat steps on it. However, predators like cats learn quickly. When they see their fellow colony members get trapped, they become suspicious of the cage and no amount of salmon, stinky tuna, or liver pate will entice them. One of the answers was to put out unset traps with food, and let the less wary cats go in and get a meal, then freely walk out. Eventually the Sophisticated Reader cats realize they are missing out of safe, free meals and start to go into the traps again. This is when you re-set the traps. A parallel in writing might be the red herring, or, going back to our puppy exercise, perhaps actually having the man be neutral good while surrounded by less ethical and moral characters. The reader will wait for him to be seduced to the dark side, and he just never does.

Good luck, my friends.

Keep writing.