A distinct memory: my psych professor saying, if you’re alone with a client and afraid he might hurt you, ask him to pass you a pen.
Ridiculous advice? No. It’s a secret strategy in real life and crime fiction.
Okay, disclaimer – the preferred option is to get away from said potentially violent client. (I was also trained to keep my own chair nearest to the office door.) But if you’re stuck with someone and the mood turns ominous…consider asking them for help. It’s harder to hurt a person you’re in the act of helping. Even passing someone a pen can make them feel more like a teammate than a target.
Helping someone else – even begrudgingly – can move you to care.
What’s the relevance for hooking characters and moving readers? Consider this: have you ever read a book and thought, I’m annoyed/bored/want to stop reading. These characters don’t care about each other. And I don’t care about them either.
At the most basic level, authors know (and writing classes teach) that the protagonist has to want something, so intently it powers the reader’s commitment to the story’s journey, to see if the character makes it to their goal. That may be the root of a reader’s attachment to the story and its characters… but what happens beyond the roots can expand and beautify the story, like branches of a tree, or stunt its growth.
One branch of this tree of story development, to go with the metaphor, is how relationships in a novel are made more compelling. Whether two characters are best friends or annoy the crap out of each other, as readers we want to care about their connection and what happens to it. Creating a helping dynamic (and maybe the more unusual or unexpected, the better!) can fuel that.
I just finished Olivia Blacke’s A New Lease on Death, in which a recently deceased ghost sticks around her old apartment – and its new tenant – while trying to solve the murder of a man who lived across the hall. The novel alternates between perspectives of Cordelia-the-ghost (in life: forty, alcohol-dependent, and isolated except for an unhealthy workplace affair) and Ruby-the-new-girl (twenty, down to her last can of soup, and painfully kind and friendly).
These two have nothing in common except the apartment. In the beginning, Ruby doesn’t even know Cordelia is there. When she realizes it, communication is an immediate an ongoing challenge. With these circumstances, how emotionally hooked and invested is a reader going to get? In my case, fully.
But why? When I reached the end and thought about themes, my mind gravitated to that question. And zoomed in on the glue that pulled the characters – and my heartstrings – together. Cordelia and Ruby started helping each other. At first in small and irregular ways, and then with increasing commitment. Their attachment grew. And the more invested they got in each other, the more invested I got in them.
A metaphorical parade of studies has well-established this fact: helping others has positive emotional and physical effects on the helpers themselves. That client who could destabilize enough to hit me, but hands me a pen instead? That de-escalation is healthier for him, as well as for me.
This doesn’t mean the only way to make readers care about characters and their relationships is by having those characters help each other. But it’s a powerful one, especially in the absence of common history or interests. A New Lease on Death made me feel it, and think about it. And I’m glad I did.
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