On characters you hate.

I'm not talking about someone from a TV show, or a video game, or a movie that you don't like. No, I mean characters you yourself have created, and you hate their fictional guts. Hard.

Do you find them difficult to write for? Why or why not?

For me, it's a challenge. Often the hated character will run counter to my own ideals, and it irritates me to have to get into their mindset. I'll use the main character in a piece I'm currently working on as an example. He's an affluent male living in Victorian England. He's accustomed to all the privileges enjoyed by a white male in such a place and time, and he thinks women are inferior to men. Don't get me wrong, he cares deeply for his mother and sisters, but he knows them to be "good" women. Subdued, obedient "Angel in the House" types. He would find an educated woman highly suspect because everyone knows that women aren't supposed to be able to think. 


I hate him like you wouldn't believe. But I realize that if I wrote him as a feminist who believed strongly in the capabilities and rights of women, he wouldn't fit with the setting. People in his social circles would find him more than a little off in the head, and that would be disastrous for him. Also, it would make him nothing more than the author's mouthpiece, and even people who don't know me well enough to realize that chauvinism makes me furious would be canny enough to realize that.

It'd be forced, and that's no good when you're trying to tell a story. Your audience is going to fixate on that one out-of-place element rather than everything else you're trying to do.

Believe me when I say I'm clenching my teeth trying to write this guy. I have to think like him, and it disgusts me. Yes he's fictional, but the fact remains that people did and often still do think the way he does. My one comfort is that I'm planning to have something terrible slowly and inexorably happen to him, and it will drive him to madness and back. Without saying too much, of course it will be of a supernatural nature. That's my bag.

I won't say the challenge isn't welcome. I want him to be unlikable, but not one-dimensional, so I need to throw in a few sympathetic traits here and there. It's much harder than writing a character you think is awesome in every way. Not everyone can do it well; I've read enough bad fanfiction to see it. Hell, I've seen published authors write a wonderful hero, while the villain is so flat and Snidely Whiplash-like it's ridiculous.  There's no way to empathize with the unlikable character in that case; they're simply unpleasant for the sake of being unpleasant. Of course, some people will always side with a character like that even if they really don't have any redeeming qualities, as they think it makes them somehow "edgy".

I already have the end written out for my little friend. I'm nowhere near that point in the story, but I have it. I know which direction I'm taking him in, all I need to do is do it convincingly. It'll be hard to get him there without just deciding that he explodes in a spontaneous fireball, but I'll do it.

So tell me: how is it for you?