Into the Fire

If you’ve visited several blogs of late, there has been some discussion as to what readers, be they readers or writers as readers, want in a novel. The consensus seems to be that as a reader you have to care about the protagonist, to somehow believe in his cause or mission and have empathy or compassion or identify with his struggle, to feel his pain so to speak. And right in tune with that the plot has to entice, intrigue, engage, and involve us. While some will suffer a lesser “quality” protagonist as long as the plot grips, few will endure the failure of the protagonist to capture our imagination and loyalty.

While I admire those authors who take unlikable characters and make them the focus of the narrative, it pains me to read about them because they garner exactly zero respect or affection from me. I will say I am almost—but not quite—to the place where I will put down the novel and walk away from it if I pick up one more story that starts with and features characters with few if any redeemable attributes. I’m fairly easy to please really. I give authors and their characters a lot of latitude to establish the story and convince me I should care about these “people” they’re writing about. I expect to find all kinds of characters in a novel, good, bad, and ugly, so to speak, to keep it interesting. But if the bad and ugly are the main characters, my patience wears thin if the author chooses to leave their “redemption” until the end. The average size of today’s Christian novels leaves me feeling I just wasted my time not liking a character or the story because usually no time is left to show the marked difference redemption has made. And that not only feels incomplete, it feels inadequate and unsatisfying.

One other thing that has become apparent is more and more readers are stipulating they want “quality” writing which re-opens that can of worms known as opinion. Quality and “real-ness” in the characters and situations remains subjective and ill-defined no matter how many people try to do it without prejudice. What can be said for almost all readers is they know it when they read it.

Readers want to believe the characters and/or situations and circumstances in the novels they choose to invest their time, money, and imagination in are as close to “real” as fiction can get. Believability, being pulled into either empathizing or championing the hero’s cause(s), and ultimately caring what happens to him and around him qualify a book as being worthwhile to the reader. These factors seem to comprise the consensus.

So, as a writer: write what you like to read.

Father, guide our words and let us please you first. Help us to be discerning in creating stories, to tell those stories you have for us to tell. To listen to your voice in the midst of all the instruction and remain true to you. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.

**BLOG TOUR TUESDAY: TRICIA GOYER’S MY LIFE UNSCRIPTED**