July 1, 2020

Lucy Foley on Writing Characters You Love to Hate

Author of “The Guest List” on the characters she loves bringing to life in her thrillers.

Story By: Lucy Foley

Lucy Foley on Writing Characters You Love to Hate

Author of “The Guest List” on the characters she loves bringing to life in her thrillers. Story By: Lucy Foley

When I think about my favourite characters in thrillers I realise they’re often the ‘baddies’. If I made a list it would have to include Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr Ripley, Villanelle in the books of the same name (Killing Eve in the TV version), the unrepentant boyfriend-murdering Ayoola in My Sister the Serial Killer. None of these are cardboard-cut-out bad guys: they’re witty, or sympathetic or just downright charismatic. They even have elements we might recognise in ourselves. These are the kind of characters I’m drawn to create as a writer.

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy writing ‘good’ characters: the ones the reader empathises with and roots for and could even imagine themselves being friends with. But I also love writing the ones you ‘love to hate’. Those with guilty secrets, dark pasts, evil intentions: characters that you objectively dislike as a reader, but also find yourself more than a little fascinated by. Or you could flip it and say that some of these characters are those you ‘hate to love’: the ones you know you shouldn’t like, because they’re deeply flawed in some way — and yet find yourself drawn to in spite of those flaws.

As a writer I enjoy the challenge of creating characters that are perhaps objectively bad, but also compellingly so. I don’t want the reader to be so appalled with them that they don’t want to read on, or fail to find anything to empathise with. It’s an important balancing act. My test for myself when I’m writing is: do I want to spend a little more time in this person’s company? Am I having fun creating this character? If the answers are yes, then I’m hopefully on the right track. Conversely, if I find myself increasingly turned off by them, then it’s unlikely the reader’s going to want to hang around long enough to find out what they have to say for themselves!

Of course, you’re likely to find more examples of this sort of love-to-hate figure in a murder mystery, in which everyone may have a motive to kill. A cast of badly behaved characters is pretty much a hallmark of the traditional murder mystery novel. And in The Guest List, even those characters that I want the reader to actively like, that are on balance ‘good’, aren’t without their own secrets. I hope it makes them feel more rounded as characters to have that complexity.

Likewise my characters that are on balance ‘bad’ aren’t without their redeeming features, or without personal struggles and disappointments that we can empathise with. This, I think, humanises them. I want the reader to have some level of understanding for their motivations, perhaps even to feel some degree of compassion for them. I never want to write moustache twirling ‘evil’ villains: they’re boring and not particularly believable. After all, no-one thinks of themselves as the bad guy in their own narrative. Everyone can justify their own actions to themselves. This is why I enjoy using the first person point of view in my murder mysteries, so that my characters can tell their story to you, the reader, directly. It’s confessional, intimate. This way you can really get inside their heads. Perhaps you might even begin — uncomfortably — to understand their motivations.

None of us are perfect and without our own flaws, petty jealousies, uncharitable thoughts: so why should a character in a book be? That just wouldn’t feel believable. Because, after all, aren’t we all a little bit bad?