CREATIVE WRITING

Who says you have to write ‘likeable’ characters? Novelist Lisa Harding looks at how to approach creating toxic characters

Photo by Francesca Mantovani

Apparently, I have a knack for writing ‘unlikeable’ characters. I find this amusing, since I spent my whole younger life wearing the ‘nice girl’ mask, the one who didn’t want to offend, or show any disagreeable traits. Prior to writing professionally, I was an actress who was always cast as the sweet victim. Then, at thirty-seven, no longer able to play the ingenue, I started to write and found my roar on the page. I shocked myself with the stuff I seemed to be channelling and expressing: the anger, the complexity, the contrariness of human nature.

As a young person I was often left perplexed by the behaviour of some of the people closest to me, and I guess the drive to write these sorts of difficult characters stems from a desire to understand their behaviour. And also, to give full vent to my own shadow side: the parts of me I’d repressed by wearing the ‘good girl’ mask. Plus of course, writing troubled, complex, badly behaved, out of control characters is undeniably fun.

The characters I am most interested in creating/reading/ watching are those that push the boundaries of ‘acceptable’; those that let rip, who aren’t afraid to not be ‘nice’. Who doesn’t get a kick out of watching the morally dubious, truly obnoxious characters in The White Lotus, Traitors or Succession, for instance? These characters can hold a mirror up to societal ‘norms’ by exposing greed, power imbalances, privilege and inequality, often with a large dollop of humour that lands with pain. They can symbolize how messed-up systems shape human behaviour. We love these shows because they mirror the complexities of real life, where the lines between right and wrong are often blurred, and there’s no easy answer to who is ‘good’. And let’s face it, characters behaving badly creates drama, conflict, and unpredictability – key ingredients for good entertainment.