Goodness Is Something That Blazes
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
I prefer villains - I really do. When I write good people, it's so easy to get frozen up before I write anything. It's easy to feel the pressure that a good character can't make a mistake - any little thing they say or do could make readers stop liking them.
I think this is more common for autistic people than we admit. So many of us are natural rule-followers. So many of us learn from an early age, either through therapy or through social pressure and our own attempts at figuring out how the world works, that life is full of rules that don't instinctively make sense to us, and we have to follow them, because people who don't follow them are horrible. Also the rules are always changing. Also neurotypical people won't always tell you what they are...
A lot of us have baggage around the idea of "being good," is what I'm saying. I've tried to write "good," "sympathetic" characters before, and often failed.
Yasira in THE OUTSIDE has some of this baggage, and she projects it onto her girlfriend, Tiv. She calls Tiv a "good girl" in ways that come off to many readers as insulting. It's a way of questioning Tiv's motives when Tiv is kind or nice or wholesome. Does she really mean those things? Or is she just working as hard as she can to follow the rules?
Ironically, Yasira is the one who has this problem, not Tiv. Yasira is the one who sleepwalks through the motions of a religion that doesn't appeal to her. Yasira is the one who doesn't truly agree with how her society is set up, but who goes along with it because she's never really formulated a clear desire for something else. It takes a lot of trauma, and a lot of direct exposure to heresy, before Yasira figures out what her real values are.
This is not to suggest that Yasira isn't the first book's hero. She does have values, including the idea that all human lives are worth saving, and she acts on those values at immense personal cost. But even in her most heroic mode, Yasira makes her choices in a very abstract way - judging what outcome for the planet is least terrible, acting on her own to make that outcome happen, then kind of collapsing into a traumatized pile.
Yasira has her heroic traits, but Tiv, not Yasira, is the one who really wants to be sweet and kind, and to connect meaningfully with the people around her.
Tiv's mode of goodness is harder for me to connect to, and that made it a challenge to write from her point of view. I loved the character, and I was excited to bring her in as a co-protagonist for THE FALLEN, to let her come into her own. But what is it like to be someone who's good the way Tiv is good, and who's struggling with a situation like THE FALLEN's post-apocalypse, where everyone is in ongoing peril and there are few easy answers?
While I worked on this I found myself noticing characters in the media who seemed like convincingly good people - characters who stood for something. We're drowning in superhero media at present and so I thought about characters like Captain America or Wonder Woman - not that they're characters without a certain kind of messiness, but that they seem to represent an ideal of how a certain kind of person should be, in some very exaggerated form, and every part of how they act from the most public to the most personal springs from some part of that ideal.
I wish I could distil this thinking into an organized exercise for you to try at home. The truth is, it's just something I noticed and had a feeling about. The most interesting good characters aren't rule-followers - or at least, if they have some rule-following traits, that's still not where the root of their goodness comes from. Their goodness isn't about sanding themselves down until they fit a safe box someone else defined. It's about believing in something so strongly that it blazes from every facet of their life.
And when I wrote Tiv in THE FALLEN, I thought about that. What would it be like to be Tiv? Someone who can so easily see and sympathize with the needs of the people around her. Someone who wants the best for everyone, even when it's hard - not because she's been told she should, not even out of abstract reasoning like Yasira's, but just because that's what she naturally, deeply wants.
Every Book A Doorway's review of THE FALLEN says:
She’s not the kind of character I’m used to seeing in situations like these, and in some way I can’t define, that made it all more real to me. In many ways, Tiv is the ideal person… It’s just different to see a character with such strong principles and with so much compassion not just in a leadership role, but also facing an immense enemy and an impossible situation. The Gods want them all destroyed, the angels are shooting and kidnapping people…and Tiv grits her teeth and refuses to despair.
When I read that, I knew I had finally gotten it right.