Earning Sympathy for Someone Who Doesn't Deserve It
Chapter 2: How to give a character a tragic past without letting it excuse him.
One of my characters has a genuinely tragic backstory, the kind of loss that would reshape anyone at fifteen years old.
He's also, by the end of this book, not going to be someone you'd call a good man.
Writing that combination honestly has been one of the harder things I've done so far. It would be easy to use his past as an excuse, a little narrative apology whispered to the reader: “see, he had it rough, so go easy on him.” I didn't want that. I wanted the empathy and the accountability to exist in the same character at the same time, without one canceling out the other.
Real people don't come pre-sorted into good and bad. The most interesting characters, I think, are the ones who make you understand exactly how someone becomes who they become, without ever asking you to forgive it.
