Unlikable Characters Can Sink Your Story

As writers we often struggle with walking the fine line when it comes to characters who aren't likable. Not characters who aren't nice, who aren't kind, or who aren't friendly, but characters who the audience simply will not be able to bring themselves to like. It's why we focus so much on trying to make relatable, complex characters that have something to offer even if they're clearly in the wrong... but we don't always manage that.

And it's bad enough when these characters are in supporting roles, or they're the villains. But sometimes we plug them in as the main protagonist, and that can be a kiss of death to your readers' interest.

If this character isn't dead in 2 chapters, I walk.

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Now then, let's get to it!

What, Precisely, is "Unlikable"?

As I said in the opening, an unlikable character is a very specific type of character. Namely they are someone that we, as the audience, cannot really get any purchase on when it comes to feeling any kind of empathy for their motives, or who we cannot identify with in some way. The Phantom of The Opera is a serial killer, a blackmailer, and a child groomer, but despite these monstrous qualities we can still empathize with him. We can feel for someone who was so outcast from society that he eventually fell to using such methods because he felt they were the only ways he could get what he needed.

You see similar results with nearly any popular anti-hero, villain, or sarcastic support character in our stories. Magneto is a super-powered terrorist who views himself and other mutants as superior to baseline humans, in addition to being a killer and an egomaniac. He's also a Holocaust survivor with a deep and abiding empathy for those he feels have been outcast, used, and abused, and so from a certain perspective his actions aren't unreasonable. The Punisher is, at his core, a serial killer whose victims number in the hundreds (if not thousands). However, as I mention in The Punisher is Evil, he's also a deeply compelling character whose traumas and burdens can leave the audience fascinated and horrified in equal measure.

I could keep naming names from pop culture, but you get the idea. From the Joker to Hannibal Lecter, a character being evil, deranged, or wrong in almost every way doesn't necessarily make them unlikable.

I'm sure you get the idea.

Unlikable characters are characters who don't offer us these intriguing insights. They aren't a mixed bag, combining awful or atrocious actions, beliefs, and histories with redeeming qualities or sympathetic traits. They don't have different facets or secret internal lives. They aren't struggling against something far worse than they are. They're just... unlikable. And characters who are negative experiences all the way around suck out your enjoyment as a reader if there is nothing to balance them out in the narrative.

For example, say you have a character who is absolutely caustic to interact with. They never have a single pleasant thing to say, and they're utterly draining to try to work with. This is a trait of both the modern take on Sherlock Holmes we saw from Benedict Cumberbatch, but also the character of Dr. House portrayed by Hugh Laurie. And if that was all there was to those characters, we could put up with them for a little while... but not that long. Certainly not long enough for them to be the main characters, much less the faces of their respective shows. We need more dimensions to these characters to put that behavior into perspective; we need something likable about them, whatever form that takes.

With Holmes we get glimpses into his life and see what it's like living as the kind of person he is. We see his excitement over new problems, and we occasionally see him realize when he's gone too far before he attempts to make amends. With House we see the physical pain he's in, and we get enough glimpses of the character that we see he does genuinely want to help a lot of the people who come to him. That despite the flippant attitude, unpleasant demeanor, and occasional reprehensible behavior, he does believe in what he's doing.

That's the balance in action, which allows characters to have unlikable or abrasive traits, but which can still make them good characters.

So Everyone Has To Be Likable Now?

The answer is obviously no. Just like how ships carry ballast, so too a story can find a practical use for unlikable characters. The key, however, is that you need to use them properly so they don't sink the ship.

Even tools have their use.

The main use for unlikable characters is as antagonists. If your book has white supremacists, big corporate union busters, crooked cops, and so on, you generally don't need to make those characters feel relatable to your audience. Ditto if you have space tyrants like Darkseid. Unlikable characters make great foils if you need a protagonist to look like they are unquestionably in the right in a given storyline, even if they're using extreme or questionable methods.

However, if a character is going to be unlikable you should consider how much time they're on screen, and how much counter is provided to them.

For example, say you're writing a legal thriller and our protagonist's boss is just unlikable. A slave driver who always offers empty promises of reward for extra work, slacks off, takes credit for other people's work, and is just a condescending prick. He doesn't have a tragic story about early onset dementia, he isn't overcompensating because he's trying to be a good mentor and failing... he's just an abusive boss trying to get more work out of one of his employees. Maybe throw in some sexual harassment for good measure if we want him to be an absolute scum bag.

If your audience only has to see him a couple of times in the book, he can fill his role pretty well. He quickly establishes that he's an obstacle that we're meant to hate, but without taking a toll on the reader's energy. Maybe he's in two scenes briefly, and a phone call or email as the story goes on. So he's a presence that we know about, but we aren't saddled with the burden of actively interacting with him in the story. The more of that you have to do, the more energy it takes from your reader.

Unless, that is, that interaction comes with a counter of some kind.

Say that the boss comes into a scene, and is just scumming it up. We have to deal with that, and it can be draining. However, if you introduce a counter to the scene, it mitigates that unlikable character's impact and mixes things up. Say, for example, there's another manager present. Or an investigator who works for the firm, but not for this guy. Someone who can actively call out, or take actions to counter, the unlikable character's bad behavior. This can balance out the scene, allowing you to keep the unlikable character's contributions to the story, but without your audience sighing and asking, "When is this guy getting hit by a bus? I'm so goddamn sick of him!"

Just don't make your protagonist unlikable. They don't have to be a good person, they don't have to be morally righteous, and they don't have to be kind, friendly, or upbeat... but unlikable protagonists will kill readers' interest faster than almost anything else.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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