Excellent writers group meeting tonight, and I’ll post more on it tomorrow. But one thing remains floating in my mind that I wanted to put down.
One of the workshopped pieces we felt needed a character buildup, fleshing out. While I said at the time that we need to sympathize with the protagonist, the author rightly said that it is not a likeable character, and that’s exactly the reaction he wanted to him.
This is very true, of course. It’s not sympathy or empathy we’re seeking from the reader for the character, it’s knowing him well enough to love or hate him. Otherwise, we just really don’t give a rat’s ass what happens to him, or his story.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology