Young Writers Society

So as some of you might know I have recently completed Part 2 of my Norse Saga/Fantasy/Mythology. I have a couple of questions I would appreciate some input on.

Firstly: I have crafted a tale wherein there are virtually no 'good' characters. Essentially its bad guys, bad guys and more bad guys. Is there any interest for the reader in this kind of story? I feel like everyone wants dark/gritty/realistic but everyone also wants the 'hero's journey' and this will never be that.

Secondly: I have written only the original rough draft for books one and two. I am looking at probably two more books. Should I go back into editing now? Or should I push through and finish writing the series before I start any revising?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Two books done, even if they're first drafts, is an achievement. Congrats, great job there

When it comes to characters, IMO, separating them to good and bad isn't important in the least. I want stories I read to have characters who do things, characters who grow and change (for the better or worse, or back and forth), and mostly, characters whom I can believe see themselves as the MCs of their own lives/stories. If they're well fleshed-out, if they speak to me and are well made characters, if there's an outcome they're working towards that I can embark on the journey to with them, it doesn't matter to me whether someone would objectively label them as "good" or not.

Hero's Journey is about character development. It refers to how characters change throughout the story, and different characters have different journeys. A character doesn't have to be a hero to embark on a hero's journey.

As for finishing series vs editing... that's really something you have to decide for yourself in the end. It depends a bit on your speed of writing, on the story itself, on your writing habits and on what just feels right.
Writing it all now might mean that, by the time you finish the remaining books and return to the first one to edit it, your style will have developed/changed and you find yourself wanting to rewrite the whole thing, and then end up caught in the circle of it for too long. But sometimes, you need to finish the entire story, with all its parts (books), in order to be able to let it rest for a bit and then look at it with a critical eye. Can each book stand alone, or do they have to be read as a series if one wants a complete story?

There is a market out there for unlikeable characters and dark, gritty stuff. Personally, I'm not a fan of it, but a lot of readers enjoy extremely morally grey or black stories.

I like to think of it as sort of sliding scales of character types - things like likability, competence, and proactivity tend to be the main ones that determine whether or not your readers will stick with your main character(s). If you make the protagonist less likable, making them more competent and proactive will keep them interesting and keep readers engaged. Fascination works too, if your characters have a particularly interesting or chilling view on the world. Morbid fascination is what tends to make books about serial killers work.

Personally, I'd recommend finishing the series before going back and revising them. Having the end in mind and knowing what you need to set up to make it work will help you weave in the foreshadowing, etc, as you revise the first books, and will give you less work to do overall. It's hard to make something feel like a cohesive whole if the end of it is trailing off into uncertainty, to use a somewhat mixed metaphor. However, if the books are more stand-alone, it might not be a problem.

I agree with the others. The "Hero's Journey" doesn't necessarily require a hero. But also, I don't like categorizing characters as good and bad. In fact I usually prefer not having obvious villains--it's fun having characters on both sides of an issue, and both are right and wrong, and they all have their moral failings so it's hard to pick a "side." The antagonists are just as much characters (maybe even povcs) with motives and positive and negative traits, they just happen to be working against the protagonist's goals.

If by no "good" characters, you mean they all trend toward unlikable, immoral, selfish, etc etc, those kind of traits, like the others have said, the important thing is to balance it out so the reader still has reasons to root for them. There ARE books out there with thoroughly unlikable leads, who DON'T go through character arcs to improve themselves. The most common redeeming quality is skill--they're really, really good at what they do. Sherlock Holmes is a good example of someone who's not very nice, but we love him because of his talent. There are a whole slew of factors that make characters more sympathetic--skill and intelligence, being the underdog, proactivity and goals, and more. A good example from a book I read fairly recently is John Cleaver from I Am Not A Serial Killer, which is also very similar to Dexter. Those characters are sociopaths and serial killers, with poor empathy and violent tendencies. But they're FUNNY! The humor really makes them much more likeable. Also when things go wrong, we want them to succeed. Or if they have good intentions, even if we disagree with the methods.

As far as whether or not to edit or keep writing, that's up to how you feel about it. I prefer to do one book at a time, but it almost sounds like you'd be better off writing the whole thing and then editing the whole thing. It might depend on how inter-connected the books are. If it's essentially one long story, it makes sense to get it all written down, so you know what to foreshadow and what to build towards.

I also am curious if any of you have any experience or thoughts on how readers will react when faced with the blatant duality of main characters? I know its very easy to say 'Yeah, characters should be layered and complex.' However the reality is that my characters on both sides of the saga are capable of empathy and kindness as well as selfishness and wrath.

I know damn well as soon as I finally let someone read it I am going to get 'You need to be more consistent with your characters. At this point Agnarr was open and receptive to bringing strangers into his home as guests and at this point he threatened to kill a stranger for being on his property' or 'First he loved this girl more than anything in life and then he had to be restrained from murdering her after he discovered her pregnant by rape. That makes no sense.'

In reality we all have good and evil in us and I can expect nothing more from my characters yet I know more will be expected of them by readers. Or, at least I think so.

So, if you know that you have issues with consistent characterization, you know what to work on in the next draft. You have two ways of fixing this:

1- Get rid of OOC elements. If he loves the girl, don't have him kill her. Or never make him love her and always make him a little mistrusting. Something that basically removes one of the ends of the spectrum.

2- Make the OOC elements IC via rationalization. He loves the girl, but he doesn't want a child at all and hates the fact she "didn't protect" herself (via birth control or self defence, whatever), so he blames her for making his life more difficult. This would require other situations to change, too, where if people "fail" in his eyes, or complicate his life, then he retaliates disproportionately. You can also have him develop negatively as a character, so he starts off loving and ends up resorting to murder for an unknown motive, but either way, this option changes how he interacts with others.

And I wouldn't focus so much on morality, or grey-black, or likability.

Focus on interesting and compelling.

The characters I want to read about are those who have some sort of compelling situation, some sort of unexpected trait, that I want to find out how it plays out. One viewpoint character in The Raven Boys (which I need to finish reading) is absolutely vile, but you find out he's a jealous and spiteful person with skeletons in his closet and okay, I'm invested in his story maybe more than the protagonists because I want to know how he's going to fall, or how he's going to muck things up, and the lengths he's going to go.

He's dangerous, his arc is tense, and he's got a drive to act. Combine with his his villain origin story background, and I'm curious. He's not a good character— he makes my skin crawl, I want him to get just deserts for the things he's done— but I'm still invested.

He's in a very human situation, having lost a lot of what he valued, which is what makes it compelling. He's not reacting in socially acceptable ways (jealousy, considering extreme measures to get what he values back), which is what makes it interesting.

First things first is to see how you want to handle the variations within character. This can involve basically building a monster— which means breaking down motive, internal morality code that informs how they treat others, and any actions that push them one way or another. Maybe your guy goes from open to others on his property to threatening strangers because somebody broke into his home and he tells himself "never again will I be taken."

Then it's just a case of rewriting with everything in mind, with an end point of where you want to go and keeping in mind who these people are. They can either show signs of their future behaviour all the time, or they can be starting as decent people but sliding down, or they can hold beliefs that makes switches flip (like believing their comfort is more important than others' lives).

I would also like to make a note of fascination.

For me, personally, I like villainous characters to receive justice. I'll read them, and be interested in them, but part of that is morbid fascination of how spectacularly they'll fall. I want to see them receive horrific punishment like they dished out.

But, there are genres and subgenres that let the bad guys win. They're a little more niche, and tend to be more on the "horror"/dystopian side of things (I am unfamiliar with the official wording of genre divisions), but they have some pretty popular books.

Either way, you want to tap into fascination with your plot. Asking and answering the questions of how can humans do this? It's not easy, but it's possible.