101 Things

1. move away from ‘bad’ and ‘good’ as contrasting descriptors because, ultimately, they are so wide and imprecise that they don’t actually...help make an analytical claim. does good mean ethical? does it mean good at moving the plot forward? does it mean that they are kind? clever? all these things have super different resonances.

2. characters do not do ANYTHING that doesn’t happen on the page. they do not THINK anything that does not happen on the page. there are reasonable assumptions you can make based on what happens in the text, of course. but students (this is where my experience is) and hobby analysts tend to overgeneralize from ‘real life’ what ‘likely’ would have happened to a character. they only exist on the page; they are more linear than people. people often do random, senseless crap. we have robust inner lives. (well-written) characters don'. they have a purpose and people, no matter how singularly focused, do not have that same kind of singular focus, bc life is weird.

anyway i read a book recently where every time the main character did something ‘bad’ the book bent over backwards to cause-and-effect it to be like ‘[clearly bad thing] was good, actually!’ and the result was a novel with no stakes! because if you can retrofit the effect of an action at any point, then a character lacks a clear purpose or direction, and neither develops nor carries the plot, which are really the two main things that characters do. 

which brings us back to the good/bad dilemma. because a character does not ‘fail’ because they are ‘bad’--a character fails when they are boring and ineffectual. a villain moves the plot forward as much as does a hero, and when the hero does something cruel, immoral, or otherwise contrary to their character, it creates stakes: what is worth it enough for a character who values their moral code to give it up, even temporarily? does this bad action change our overall opinion of the character? does the text support this shift in perception (do the actions of the remainder of the text suggest that what the character perceived as ‘worth it’ to give up their moral code was, in fact, worth it? we can look at how other characters, and how their own morality has been portrayed, as well as broader narrative clues to suggest how the text pushes us to interpret this)?