The Importance of Complex Characters By Jacqueline Friedland
Photo by Rebecca Weiss A couple of years ago, there was a debate in the literary world about “likeable” characters. The question, essentially, boiled down to this: must a character be unpleasant, whether angry or aggressive, selfish, or all gloom-and-doom in order to be taken seriously as a literary character? When the debate arose, the focus was primarily on female characters— if a female protagonist has too many redeemable qualities as a person, does this detract from her substance as a character in a story? This query nagged at me and took on a new shape during my writing Trouble the Water , as I watched my two main protagonists undergo journeys of personal growth that left them both decidedly more pleasant than the people they were when the story began. The question I needed to answer was whether depth and meaning are negated by personal recoveries? My own take, as a reader, is that if I am going to spend hours reading a novel, hanging out with characters, I would mu
