It’s High Time Your Hero and Villain See A Therapist
If you are struggling through your current WIP, it may be time for a little therapy session with your main characters.
One of my chief goals as a storyteller is to create heroes, villains, and central characters who stay with you long after you close the book or turn off the show. To do that well, we need to build a real emotional investment between the character and my audience.
No story can be built without strong characters, and there is no strong character without an emotional life that rings true to our own human experiences. My early mentors hammered this home when I was a newbie writer just learning the ropes. Now, more than twenty years into this journey, it’s one of my guiding principles.
Whatever the genre, character is king! Character choices drive the plot. Yeah, yeah. We all know this. But character development is rigorous and takes time to get to know the people you’re putting down on the page.
This month, let’s take our two main characters: our hero investigator and our criminal villain, and put them on the therapist’s sofa.
Get your pen and get cozy. Here are some prompts you can use as you try to get them to open up their internal and private lives.
How much emotional investment should my heroine and villain have?
Every hero and villain brings a backstory to the table when they walk into a crime story. Detachment isn’t an option. However hard they try to stay neutral and objective, pathology trumps intellect, and that’s a good thing.
The human pull toward empathy and mercy is what keeps a great hero grounded. It’s also what lets them see things for what they really are. A detective who feels the grief for the dead person on the floor will look longer and closer than the purely clinical eye does.
A villain criminal commits great evils because of a past wounding. What was it and why didn’t it get healed? How was this wounding dealt with by those who should have been caring for him? If there is any empathy left in that villain, who gets to see and experience it? Why that person?
How much should a hero care?
The bottom line is simple: no reader and no viewer wants to follow a hero investigator who doesn’t care.
One of my favorite craft books, Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, is built on the idea that you have to make us care about the hero right away, by page five or sooner.
The thing that gives your hero and villain a rich humanity is how they respond to hurt, how they show love, and how they feel empathy and pain. That’s what makes them care, and if they don’t care, why should we?
Caring requires the daily choice to stay open when it would be so much easier to shut down. How does your heroine make that choice case after case? How do they visibly show they care for the players around them– especially the ones they don’t particularly want to care for?
Where is my hero’s line between professionalism and personal life?
Both fictional and real investigators have to hold the line to get the job done. They have to set your feelings aside long enough to do thorough, careful, complete work, and on the job, professionalism comes first.
They can still hold empathy and care for everyone around them, the coworkers, the victims, even the suspects, and their feelings simply don’t get to outrank doing the work well.
That said, what an investigator sees in the field day after day takes a toll, and the healthiest ones build real ways to carry it. Some find solace and healing through a faith practice, some through therapy in its many forms, and every one of them needs a life outside the work to come home to.
Investigators need to take care of themselves so they can keep taking care of the world. Deciding where that line falls, and who gets to move it, is some of the richest character work a writer can do. Where is that line? And what do they do to unwind and stay mentally healthy?
How close should my heroine get to her suspects & victims?
You’ll need to decide how close or distant your hero is willing to be to those around him.
Think about your own emotional range with your parents, your spouse, your kids, your best friend, the neighbor, the cashier at the grocery store. All different, right? Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves and would break down in front of a store clerk as readily as their spouse. Others wouldn’t dream of being that open with a stranger. How close does your heroine get to the people in her life? How about your villain? Who are his besties? Who does he go to first? Who’s on his sh–t list?
Your investigator and villain have a range of emotions, and it shifts depending on who’s across the table. For example, some detectives get close enough to earn a confession, then pull back to stay clear-eyed, because they don’t want to get sucked too far into empathy. Some villains are cool and collected. Some are wiry and skittish. Why? What made them that way?
One of the best examples I know is the first season of the British series Broadchurch. It’s a tight, tender community where people look after each other, and when one of their own is murdered, a child no less, the emotion runs high. Detective Ellie moves through that investigation and through the town, as she has to make hard inquiries of the people she’s known and lived around forever.
Notice when and with whom she leans in, and when she pulls away, and notice how the truth, when it finally comes, breaks her open. When she finds out that the killer is someone she’s deeply connected and close to, she has to decide what to do with that relationship. Does she stay close and protect it? Does she abandon it? Does she hold it at a distance and try to make sense of it?
What happens to my heroine when the emotional costs get too high?
The cost is different for every hero, and it depends on what they’ve already carried and how well they can take in evil without letting it seep in. That’s fertile ground for a writer, because each character has to weigh whether the cost is worth it and decide how much they are willing to sacrifice. What is the one thing your hero and your villain would never sacrifice?
Look at the example of the TV show hero, Monk. His wife was murdered, and he came back to the work to solve and avenge her death while closing case after case along the way. He paid a steep price, and he also gave back to his community as he rejoined the police force. He stayed open to his grief and faced it in every episode, he lived with a couple hundred fears, and he still refused to hide at home. He went out into the world and faced all of it to serve something bigger than himself.
That’s juicy fodder for a strong, complex, memorable hero! Monk’s interior vulnerability and sacrifice is exactly what makes for a great fictional and real hero.
What lives at the heart of my heroine and villain?
What’s the most important value in your hero’s life? Your villain’s? What would they do if this was taken from them?
In crime stories, the values of justice and mercy are usually the highest stakes. There is no true justice without mercy, and no true mercy without justice. Mercy is a way of caring for another person’s ultimate good and the good of the people around them. Justice makes sure you have an environment where mercy can thrive. You can’t pull either one loose from the other and still expect a stable society, or a stable human being.
Your investigator lives inside that tension, and the best crime stories let us feel it. What does your hero think about justice and mercy? Where does she land most of the time? How does she show this in her public life versus her private life?
And how does your villain mess with this? Why does he mess with it? What are his views on justice and mercy? How do they differ from your heroine’s?
How can I help you jump start your next project?
Before you outline a single trail of evidence in your murder plot, write half a page on how your investigator feels about murder victims. Why are they in this field to begin with? What’s in it for them?
Next, write down where their professional line lands, and who in the story is going to try to move it, cross it, or try to get them to destroy it.
Do that first, and your plot will hang on a person the reader already cares about.
Character rules. Everything else is scaffolding around that character’s choices.
I go a lot deeper into all of this in my new master course, Writing the Killer Crime Story.
It runs eleven modules, walks through three full case studies where I take a magnifying glass to beautifully built crime stories, and finishes by guiding you through exercises to jump-start your own case file.
We’ll dive into the emotional interior of your hero and villain, key investigative and forensic elements, and the plot structure for building a great crime story.
You’ll also get the workbook, a comprehensive forensic resource guide, three in-depth case studies, and a 25% discount on Forensic Speak. It’s built for storytellers working at every level, from the blank page to the twentieth novel.
The course launches soon! I’ll announce the date the moment it’s polished and ready to walk out the door. If you’d like to be first to know, join my newsletter and keep an eye on the blog. I’d love to have you in the writer’s room.
Stay curious. Jen
