No they did not

[ritaxis]

Dorothy Heydt used to say that the moment for her when she dropped a book was when she found herself saying "I don't care about these people."

For me, it's when I find myself saying, "no, they did not," meaning that I do not believe they did or said what the author just told me they did or said.

Sometimes it's because the story is set in a real world milieu and there are particular ways that the people behave in that milieu, sometimes it's a matter of physics or biology, sometimes it's the human emotion or thoguht process that's wrong.

I'm struggling with an old Vonda MacIntyre right now, because of this. I don't think I'm going to finish it, thoguh it has many elements that I love, and it's Vonda MacUIntyre, and I've enjoyed other books of hers. And this is part of a series I started a long time ago.  But the characters are doing things I don't believe they would do and they are saying things I don't believe they would say. And so are the institutions  behind them. And it's getting too annoying to proceed, so I think I'll read myself to sleep with cookbooks again.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's complete turn off for me too. People do do things that are "out of character", but only under unusual circumstances. If the author hasn't convinced me that there are extraordinarily good reasons for someone's behaviour, then the story just stops working for me.

[ellarien]

If I was guilty of that in my own writing, it would be because it seemed to make sense in the outline, but by the time I got to writing it the characters or background had developed enough for it not to work. I derailed the plot of my November novel by deciding not to blindly follow the outline when I hit one of those, and I'm still struggling with the fallout. I think this may (sometimes) be what people mean when they say their characters refused to co-operate; at some -- possibly subconscious -- level they're recognizing a mismatch between planned plot actions and what the characters would actually do.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

My response to that is 'it's aliiiive' - when characters refuse to do what I thought might happen, it means that I have a good enough grasp of their personalities and wishes to actually write. (If *I* try to make character do something, I get a chunk of flat prose and then a complete standstill. Usually up to 10K after the problem, so it's not productive at all.)

I never feel that I know world and characters enough before I've started writing them, so any outline will be based on my assumptions of what *I* think might happen and what *I* might do. If I get the characters right - if I listen to them - then of course they react differently.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

That's my materialist explanantion of that phenomenon too. The way I describe the process is "I know everything that happens before I start. I am wrong."

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

And from that impulse - 'no, that's not what they would have done, they would have done X' seems to spring a lot of fanfiction. Sometimes you can detect the author's iron hand - it would fit the plot for the character to (miss a clue, do something stupid, trust a person they have no reason to trust etc etc) and so they do.

As a reader, that stops me every time.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Is this the Starfarers tetralogy?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Yes, anmd I want to love it so much, but I am having trouble just reading it.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I have much the same problem, though it occurs in visual media more often. I was watching a DCI Banks episode last night, and I kept fast forwarding through huge chunks of it because I just did not believe anyone's behavior. For example, they had just found a paralyzed woman in a wheelchair with huge old burn scars on her face on the moor, and were checking the nearest nursing home. The policewoman asks if anyone is out for the day, the administrator says one person hasn't been signed back in, and then instead of the investigator asking the obvious question of 'did she have a badly scarred face? Was she in a neck halo?' they had this dramatic scenes of them running up the stairs and searching through the room. It was just dumb writing that ignored basic human behavior so they could have a Dramatic Reveal.

[carbonel]

Dorothy refers to it as the Eight Deadly Words: "I don't care about any of these people."

I try to remember it when I'm not enjoying a book, because I have a strong completist streak. I did finally slog my way through Wuthering Heights, but I'm still not sure why it's considered such a classic.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

For me it's less what these particularly characters would do or not do, but that human beings don't work like that. And it's pretty visceral, mostly I can go back and figure out why but when it happens I'm just thrown completely out of the story. I can keep reading an I don't care about the characters book if there's something else there to enjoy, like the scenery or the ideas or the mystery, but a humans don't work like that I have to either start skimming or stop completely.