Last Sunday’s Bible class
topic was Paul’s letter to Philemon, which deals with slavery. It reminded me
of the struggle I had with that issue when writing Learning to Surrender,
which has since been published and is available on Amazon. The story takes
place during the Civil War siege of Vicksburg, and my dilemma over slavery was
how to make the book historically accurate without offending my readers. This
week’s blog post is a slightly revised reprint from February 19, 2024, just
before the book was published. Next week I’ll tell you how I resolved the dilemma
mentioned in the reprinted post.
Creating Sympathy for
Characters with Unsympathetic Beliefs
During
a trip down the Mississippi River to research a different book, I came across
information on the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg, where the residents dug and lived
in caves that served as bomb shelters. The idea intrigued me, but it had one
big negative.
There were few, if any,
abolitionists in Vicksburg at the time. Early in the writing process, I came up
with several ideas of how I might make my character and her family secret opponents
to slavery, but Roland wasn’t sure that even closet abolitionists existed in
the deep South then. Besides, that choice didn’t feel right. Historical realism
dictates that my main character believe in slavery, so how could I make her
sympathetic in spite of her unsympathetic beliefs?
This isn’t an unusual
situation for a writer to be in. Many stories begin with an unsympathetic
protagonist whose change in character or beliefs is at the crux of the story.
Think of Ebenezer Scrooge, who starts out as a people-hating miser and ends up
as an open-hearted and generous person. Or Mary Lennox from The Secret
Garden, who is one of the most spoiled, selfish heroines in children’s
literature until she starts having compassion for someone else.
Readers don’t usually
identify with unsympathetic characters, and they don’t like to read about
people they don’t identify with. Unless we catch their interest at the
beginning of the book, they won’t read on. That means that one of our tasks as
writers is to generate sympathy for unsympathetic characters or for otherwise
likeable characters with unsympathetic beliefs. Charles Dickens did it with
humor. Frances Hodgson Burnett did it by showing the circumstances that formed
Mary’s obnoxious character.
Generating sympathy for a
main character with unsympathetic beliefs is just part of the job.
__________
The drawing at the head
of this post comes from Harper’s
Encyclopedia of United States History (vol. 10), John Lossing Benson, ed.
(New York, NY, Harper and Brothers, 1912). It is in the public domain because
of its age.
No comments:
Post a Comment