In a post on CrimeReads, Kate Williams talks about her latest novel, a murder mystery packed with unlikeable characters, and how you can create characters you readers will root against.
Inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, Williams set out to write a story filled with people readers wouldn’t like. “From the very beginning, it seemed obvious to me that my characters would all be social media influencers,” she says.
We’re with her.
“My cast would be diverse but have the shared traits of selfishness and hunger for fame, their unlikability easily identifiable to everyone but themselves,” Williams adds. “My initial idea was to make these characters viscerally unappealing so that the reader would keep turning the page, waiting, hoping, for them to get what was coming to them.”
Eventually, though, some of her characters evolved. “They got backstories, and then those backstories became more complicated,” Williams writes. “As the story wove on, they confessed their wrongs and took accountability. They committed unselfish acts, and tried to save each other’s lives, coming to terms with their pasts and reckoning with their (lack of) futures. They were all flawed and complex and while many never truly became likable, they became something even better: real.”
Lesson: it’s possible for your unlikeable characters to have complex histories and to grow into slightly better people, while still remaining essentially unlikeable. And that can be a powerful takeaway for readers, especially a younger audience. “When readers fall for an imperfect person on the page, ideas are planted, very deep and unnoticed at first, but those ideas grow and spread and permeate and soon turn into beliefs that transcend fiction and take root in the real world: Flaws are not fatal, life is complicated, and being likable is not a requirement for love,” Williams says.
