Don’t underestimate the importance of a promise in fiction. The pledge, kept or broken, is one of the strongest motifs running through all of the world’s storytelling. It’s one of the deadliest accusations you can level against an enemy: He doesn’t keep his word. And if your main character casually breaks a promise, it will leave such a sour taste in your reader’s mouth that you’ll never fully win back the reader’s sympathy.

  Cleverness

  Notice that I don’t use the word intelligence. That’s because in our society with its egalitarian ideals, any obvious display of intelligence or erudition suggests elitism, snobbery, arrogance.

  Yet we love a character who is clever enough to think of solutions to knotty problems. Does this seem contradictory? It is contradictory. You have to walk a fine line, making Nora very clever without ever letting her be clever enough to notice how clever she is. Nora can have enormous self-confidence — but she can never think of herself as superior to someone else because she is smart and the other person is dumb. If she thinks of a brilliant plan and it works, it surprises her more than anybody.

  A perfect example of this is Harrison Ford’s character in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indiana Jones is a professor of archaeology — but we never watch him being intellectually incisive. The one time we see him in the classroom, lecturing, he is rather bumbling and confused — distracted by a coed who has written a come-on message on her eyelids.

  Yet whenever things go wrong, Indiana Jones comes up with a brilliant — or dumb-lucky — solution. He’s smart, but he isn’t intelligent. The audience loves a character who solves problems and knows exactly the right facts when he needs them — but they don’t like a character who flaunts his superior knowledge or acts as if he knows how clever he is.

  Endearing Imperfections: The Lovable Rogue

  Now that we have a list of traits, actions, and attitudes that will persuade your audience to love a character, here’s the rub: If Pete is too perfect, your audience will stop believing in him. We’re back to that balancing act between caring and belief.

  The answer to this problem is to give Pete some endearing imperfections. While using most of the sympathy tool kit to make the audience like him, deliberately give Pete some small, understandable foibles to make us believe in him.

  Again, a Harrison Ford character is a perfect example. In the Star Wars movies, Han Solo keeps his word, comes to the rescue, is physically attractive, brave, and clever, and has a great sense of humor — but he is also boastful (Han Solo: “I think you just can’t bear to let a gorgeous guy like me out of your sight.” Princess Leia: “I don’t know where you get your delusions, laser-brain.” And later — Princess Leia: “I love you!” Han Solo: “I know.”) and all his plans seem to be motivated by greed and self-interest. He also doesn’t pay his bills.

  The result? He’s the best-liked character in one of the best-loved movies of all time.

  Hercule Poirot’s little vanities; Nero Wolfe’s obsessive-compulsive behavior and his weight — a mere seventh of a ton; Sherlock Holmes’s rudeness and his cocaine habit; Scarlett O’Hara’s romantic delusions and brutally pragmatic actions; Rhett Butler’s shady past and mocking attitude: All of these traits normally don’t make us like people, but combined with all the traits that do arouse sympathy, the flaws only make us love the characters more.

  CHARACTERS WE HATE

  Getting your audience to hate a character is much easier than trying to win their sympathy. Have a character do something wonderful, and it’ll fade in our memory if he fails to measure up. Have a character do something loathesome, and we’ll never forget.

  Sadist or Bully

  To make us dislike somebody, simply show her deliberately causing someone else to suffer in body or mind. If she enjoys causing the pain, we’ll hate her all the more. Remember the sadistic villain in William Goldman’s Marathon Man, using a dentist’s drill, without anesthetic, to torture the hero into telling information that he didn’t have. Remember Elizabeth Barrett’s father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, whose whimsical and arbitrary commands made him impossible to please, so that everyone around him was constantly tortured by guilt or terrified of punishment. Remember the queen alien in Aliens, who did not kill her human victims, but instead kept them alive, cocooned and in hideous agony, so that her young could feed on them when they hatched. Remember Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, who kept up a cheerful, perky demeanor while deliberately subjecting her patients to degradation, making them less and less human. We hardly knew anything about these characters beyond their hunger for other people’s suffering — yet it made each of them the most memorable character in the story. They became the embodiment of pure evil.

  Predictably enough, the very power of this tool guarantees that it will be overused. How many times have you seen this scene: Good guy Pete is completely in villain Nora’s power — only instead of taking a .357 Magnum and blowing him away, Nora spends ten minutes smearing him with flammable jelly, pouring gasoline over his head, and strapping butane lighters to his body — talking all the time about how she’ll love watching him go off like a roman candle. At the end of those ten minutes, when the audience is so on edge they’re starting to say, “So light the match already!” the police arrive in the nick of time and save Pete. If Nora hadn’t been such a sadist, Pete would have been toast.

  The James Bond movies made this cliche into an art form. Bond is forever getting captured, but instead of killing him, the bad guys always put him in a situation that will lead to certain death — and then walk away. Where-upon Bond cleverly escapes and lives to fight another day. Never mind that the sadistic villain has been overused and misused. You just have to be careful to make your villain’s sadism believable.

  It helps to keep in mind that the root of sadism is not the love of pain — it is the love of power, the sense of control over someone else’s body, someone else’s life. Thus it doesn’t have to be physical torture. The effect is the same whenever one character forces his victim to recognize that the victim has no control over her own life. Nurse Ratched in Cuckoo’s Nest and Mr. Barrett in Wimpole Street never resorted to physical torture; it made their sadism all the more horrible — and believable. They were bullies; they used their power to torment the little guy. That’s the worst thing a character can do in fiction — the unpardonable sin.

  Assassin or Avenger?

  By comparison, mere murder is nowhere near as powerful in making the audience dislike a character. Where bullying can never be justified enough to make the sadist sympathetic, murder and other crimes can. They are not surefire devices for creating antipathy. For instance, a character who is trying to assassinate Hitler or Stalin or Idi Amin is likely to have our sympathy right from the start — if the intended victim is made evil enough, the would-be assassin becomes a hero. The audience is never fully comfortable with the idea of cold, calculated murder — but the assassin can still be a hero.

  When The Godfather first played in American theaters, the scenes of murder at the end of the movie brought cheers and applause from the audience. Why? Because every victim of Michael Corleone’s hit men had earned our hatred by betraying a trust or by making a cynical, cowardly attack on a character we liked. But The Godfather: Part II carefully did just the opposite — it showed that the Corleones used murder, not for the sake of justice, but to increase their own power. When Michael orders the murder of his own brother, a weak, pathetic figure, we understand why, but it’s still a monstrous act.

  A rule of thumb: Murder and other crimes will only make a character into a villain if he commits the crime for selfish reasons, and if the crime harms people who don’t deserve to be hurt. But if your character is committing a crime in order to save others from suffering, or if the victim of the crime richly deserves to suffer or die, then the crime will actually make your character sympathetic. In the classic caper movie The Sting, the characters played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford perpetrate an elaborate hoax in order to bilk the villain, played by Robert Shaw, out of a large amount of money. The motive for the con, however, was not the money — it was vengeance for the villain’s casual murder of a friend of theirs. Shaw, on the other hand, was drawn into the con by his greed and by his desire to bring other people under his control.

  The villain’s crimes made us hate him. The heroes’ crimes made us love them. Redford and Newman played crooks — but in this con their motives were unselfish, and compared to Shaw’s character, they were saints. Motive makes all the difference in assigning a character’s relative place within the moral spectrum a given work of fiction shows to be possible. A con man is an honest man, compared to a cold-blooded killer.

  Self-Serving, Self-Appointed

  One of the nastiest things you can say about another person is that she is self-appointed. “I don’t know why we need to pay any attention to self-appointed experts like Nora,” says Pete — and unless Nora can show that she was in fact appointed by someone else, she has lost much of her credibility.

  It’s a strange thing about human nature, but we simultaneously disdain people who are dull and unambitious — and resent people who try to push their way up to a higher level. The younger brother trying to tag along when his older brother is out with his friends; the lower level co-worker trying to tell you how to do your job; the buttinsky neighbor trying to give you advice on saving your marriage — don’t these people know when they’re not wanted?

  So strong is our aversion to people trying to put themselves in a position where they weren’t invited that it can overcome a great deal of sympathy. In The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers spends the bulk of the novel building up our sympathy for her main character, a lonely young girl who doesn’t know where she belongs. This girl, Frankie, has come to believe in the delusion that she will be part of her older brother’s wedding — that he and his new bride will welcome her along in their new life. “They are the ‘we’ of me,” she says. Yet despite all our affection for Frankie, when she climbs into the back of the honeymoon car, we don’t for a moment expect or even want the newlyweds to take her along. We grieve for Frankie, we ache for her disappointment, but we have no sympathy for her effort to include herself where she wasn’t invited.

  This is especially true with characters who try to take a high position they don’t belong in. Usurpers get no sympathy in fiction. Shakespeare knew this: The audience would never have sympathized with the character Macbeth if he had simply appointed himself king and killed the present king out of pure ambition. Instead, Shakespeare went to elaborate lengths to show that Macbeth did not appoint himself. It was the three witches who first prophesied that he would be king; Macbeth did not take them seriously until the first part of their prophecy came true. Even then, he would have taken no action had his wife not urged him on to murder. Macbeth was a usurper, yes, but he did not appoint himself. That he was appointed by evil forces — the witches and his soon-to-be-mad wife — makes the audience agree that he must be deposed, but the fact that he was not self-appointed allows us to have some sympathy for him after all.

  But by and large, a person who claims a position that he was not appointed to by an authority outside himself has utterly lost our sympathy. Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig was never able to live down that moment when, with President Reagan in surgery to remove a would-be assassin’s bullet, Haig announced, “I am in control here.” He explained a thousand times that he meant only to inspire public confidence that the central government was not in disarray — but he could never overcome people’s perception that he had tried to exercise power that simply did not belong to him.

  A fictional example comes at the conclusion of the play Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Matthew Harrison Brady is completely discredited by the fact that he has appointed himself as attorney for the prosecution and as an expert on the Bible. His final collapse begins with his admission of the ultimate hubris. “God tells me to oppose the evil teachings of that man,” he says, thereby confessing that he imagines that his words are God’s words. It leads to his opponent, Henry Drummond, ridiculing him unmercifully. “The gospel according to Brady!” cries Drummond, and he bows down before his opponent in mockery, crying, “Brady, Brady, Brady almighty!” Ordinarily, Drummond’s bullying of Brady would have lost Drummond all audience sympathy — but Brady’s usurpation of authority is so audacious that Drummond’s ridicule is not seen as bullying at all. It is the restoration of the just order of things — exposing Brady and bringing him down from the high position to which he appointed himself.

  How long does our resentment of or annoyance with a self-appointed interloper last? Until he wins an invitation. Even after Pete has made us dislike him by forcing himself into a place where he wasn’t wanted, our antipathy isn’t permanent. If he later proves that he deserves his new place, if he earns the respect of others, then he ceases to be an interloper. He belongs. This is, in fact, the subject of countless stories — probably because at some time in our lives practically all of us have felt like interlopers, and we long for reassurance that we will eventually win acceptance in that new situation. The only thing that can save an interloper is vindication — but then he isn’t an interloper at all.

  Oath Breaker

  Nora grimly agrees to Pete’s harsh terms. “All right,” she says. “If you promise not to tell anyone about my involvement with Hiram Doakes, I’ll tell you where he gets his funding. But my name can’t come into it — it’ll ruin my father’s business and destroy my marriage.”

  “You have my word,” says Pete. “I won’t let this touch you at all.”

  Nora tells all, and leaves. Pete immediately picks up the phone and has his secretary place a call to the editor of the Tribune. “I’ve got the goods on Hiram Doakes,” he says. “If you want the story, you’ve got it. My source? His lover for the past three years. Nora Simms. N-O-R-A S-I-M-M-S. Her father owns Simms Construction. Of course you can use her name — just don’t tell anybody you got it from me.”

  From that moment on, the audience knows that Pete is slime. When a character breaks a promise or betrays a trust, the audience takes that betrayal personally — Pete has achieved villain status, and readers will be longing for his downfall.

  Intellect

  It’s no accident that so many bad guys speak in very formal, precise language.

  “Look, buddy, you can’t get away with this,” says the hero.

  “Do you think not?” says the villain, raising an eyebrow. “Do you fancy you can terrify me with your absurd threats?”

  “There’s too many people already on to you,” says the hero.

  “Do you mean the police? Those epathetic bumblers?”

  It isn’t just the villain’s vanity that makes us dislike him. It’s the fact that he talks in an educated manner, using big words. You can almost hear him dropping r ’s as he speaks. No doubt he attended Harvard — if not Oxford.

  This isn’t true in every culture, but certainly the American audience resents any character who is smarter and better educated than other people. Robert Parker can only get away with having his detective, Spenser, quote poetry because he works so hard to establish Spenser as a tough guy. For every line of poetry, Spenser has to work out half an hour in the gym to win our forgiveness for his erudition. We’re afraid of and resentful of people who know more than we do, and when they act as if they think it makes them superior to us, we hate them.

  Insanity

  We are terrified of people who don’ t live in the same reality we do, who don’t have the same definition of rational behavior. You can’t talk to them, you can’t reason with them; there is no common ground. However much mental health professionals might deplore it, the fact is that when the public is convinced someone is dangerously insane, all considerations go out the window except one: stopping this crazy person. Unless the storyteller works very hard to win sympathy for the insane character, the audience has no qualms about seeing him brutally subdued or killed. The world isn’t safe as long as the madman has any chance of escaping. And if, like Charles Manson and his “family” or Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, the madman has succeeded in convincing others that his version of reality is the truth, the audience’s fear and loathing is all the greater.

  In film and on stage, insanity is easy to depict — a wide-eyed stare or darting eyes, nervous tics. But the best actors don’ t resort to such easy tricks, and neither do the best writers. It is far more effective to convince the audience that a character is insane by letting us see her strange perceptions of reality — her paranoia or delusions.

  “Do you think I don’t know what you’re doing?” asked Nora softly. “I know why you brought me here.”

  “Yeah,” said Pete, a little confused. “I brought you here for dinner.”

  “You just want to impress all your friends,” she said. “You just want them to see me with you. But it won’t work. I’m in disguise. That’s why I wore this red scarf. Nobody ever recognizes me when I wear this red scarf.” She leaned forward and whispered a secret. “I took it from my mother’s coffin before they buried her.”

  Oh good, thought Pete. Not only is this the most expensive blind date I’ve ever gone on, not only did Steve and Gracie back out at the last minute so I had to go alone, but also this Nora turns out to be crazy. If she isn’t at least okay in bed, Steve will not live to see another day.

  “Don’t eat any of the shrimp sauce,” Nora said. “It’s poisoned.”

  There is no chance that the audience will be hoping for Pete and Nora to end up with a long-term relationship. They will have no sympathy for Nora’s character — unless the author goes to extraordinary lengths to make her sympathetic, either by showing the cause of her insanity or by convincing us, somehow, that she isn’t insane at all.

  This is what was done in the brilliant film A Woman Under the Influence. The main character has just returned from a mental hospital, and her family treats her very gingerly; neither she nor they are fully convinced that she is cured. But as the film goes on, we gradually realize that while it was the main character who attempted suicide, she isn’t crazy — it’s her husband who’s truly evil and insane, even though nobody else realizes it, and he makes her life so unbearable that suicide seems like the only possible escape. She is saved from her husband’s pathological rage only by the heroic efforts of her little children. By the end of the film our sympathy with the woman is complete — but by then we also don’t think of her as an insane person. It’s her husband who’s insane, and true to the rule, our only feeling for him then is loathing and fear.