What Makes Them Hurt? What to Consider when Torturing your Characters

I recently had the pleasure of attending a one hour workshop presented by Donald Maass.  Another fellow writer and I joked that he was considered the Uber Agent, the "Nora Roberts" of agents– when he walks in the room full of writers, you can bet that everyone knows his name.  (Cue Cheers theme….) 

That one hour listening to him, writing down the questions he peppered us with and told us to consider, gave me pages and pages of ways to well, consider how to torture my characters. I learned a lot more in his session so I'll likely talk about this until you wonderful folks tell me to shut up about it, but for today, let's just talk about Torture. Pain. Hurt.  (Such lovely Monday morning conversation, I know.)

Maass: What makes them hurt? 

I think mostly what I learned from this portion was that while the problem might not be unique to my hero/heroine, it has to be unique to my character.  So let's say that my heroine's problem is to protect a secret.  That isn't unique.  Plenty of people have secrets to protect.  However, what makes this so unique for my character? Why is this her journey and no other?  It's another way of looking at how to take a tried and true story and make it "fresh." (A writer's favorite word.) 

We've all heard the "everything stems from childhood" line.  It's nothing new, but have you applied this technique to your characters?  Have you given them a childhood memory or perhaps an adult memory they must deal with that makes this situation harder? More difficult? More complicated?

An excellent example of this is in a book I'm reading right now by Karen Rose: DIE FOR ME.   The heroine Sophie is faced with a task that triggers a painful memory of her own, something she has to deal with as she's completing her task. As you get a hint of what she remembers, you can begin to look at her situation with a different eye, a more emotional, a deeper one.  You understand how this can hurt her.  Instantly, you identify with her need to triumph over the pain and move forward.

Maass: How can it matter more?

Another question I came away with: What would make this matter more than anything else to my character? 

ANYTHING else.

That's quite a degree of importance, but can you imagine how much tension and heightened awareness you add to the situation if you make it matter more than anything?  So taking my heroine with the secret.  Let's say that she has a secret that threatens to ruin her family life.  What is in her life that she is willing to give up, throw away, or betray in order to keep this secret?  Is she willing to hurt someone else to keep it? Is she willing to betray someone?  And what if she's in a situation where her only options are to protect her secret but lose her family, or let the secret be revealed and have a chance to keep her family?  How far would she go?  How far would your character go?

In Brenda Novak's EVERY WAKING MOMENT, the hero Preston has given up everything — his wife, his home, the life he'd built — to seek revenge on the man he believes responsible for his son's death.  We can easily determine his problem: he needs to find the man to gain his revenge, to avenge his son's death.  And in a balance of importance, he was willing to give up everything else in order to meet that need.   

It's easy to hold back, to not push to the limit a world that's balanced by need and desire.  But we all balance out gain and loss every day.  We give up one thing to get something else. That bowl of ice cream that becomes more important than the diet we're on.  Let's say we're running late to work, so  sacrifice a measure of safety and ramp up our speed on the freeway.  80 mph. 85 mph. 90?  It isn't until you end up in a car accident that you question that choice and wonder if it was worth it?

These are human traits — the balance, the bargaining one need for another desire.  And I realized (in the first 10 minutes of Maass's session, mind you) that these traits need to be in my characters.  I needed to know how far my heroine could be pushed.  How far my villain was willing to go.  Where the hero draws the line, if there is one…and what circumstances would send him over that line.  

How far would your characters go?