A Continuation of Things I Learned from Reading Dracula
This blog is the rest of the article started at Ideas for Narrating Your Novel.
3) Have enemies who are terrifying and enemies who you feel empathy/sympathy toward.
Dracula was a scary opponent. When Jonathan Harker met the vampire women and realized Dracula was something other than human, it was creepy. Some parts of the story that related to Dracula bordered on scary. He made a really good enemy, although I thought they defeated him too easily. (I guess if he hadn’t been asleep, there was no way they could have won.)
As scary as Dracula was, though, he wasn’t my favorite villain. I guess Renfield might not be considered a villain, but he basically was because he helped Dracula and had a habit of eating living things. All he needed was black clothes and he’d be a pretty standard Batman villain. Even his psychosis fit!
The thing I really like about Renfield, though, was that he wasn’t purely evil. He showed a full range of emotions. While Van Helsing was the epitome of good and Dracula was the epitome of evil, Renfield was the confused guy who gets used by the main villain. I could almost understand where Renfield came from, and I even admired him when he attacked Dracula. How often can you say you admired a villain?!
When you write, most characters should be a mixture of good and evil. While it may make sense for a few characters to be pretty much pure evil or pure good, the majority of characters should be able to be tempted by ease, money, a relationship, power, or something else. I think it makes for a much more interesting character when you come to the end of the novel and realize, “I don’t know if he was a good character or a bad one!”
One of my favorite historical characters is Rommel. He is one of history’s greatest military generals, but he lived when Hitler started WW2. I don’t know how true the following story is, but I remember it from high school. Apparently Rommel said that he didn’t like or agree with Hitler, but he would live and die for his country. Because of this philosophy, he did more damage to the Allied forces than almost anyone else in Germany, but he also defied the leader of his country and died for it. He is a great example of what a character in a novel should be.
4) Don’t be afraid to impair and/or kill some key characters
Early in the novel, Mina’s friend, Lucy becomes a vampire. Later in the novel, Mina becomes the victim of Dracula and begins to suffer from eating his blood. She is scarred by the wafer and eventually has to be trapped by Van Helsing so she won’t escape to join the vampire women. Quincy also falls prey to the fight against Dracula. He dies in a heroic mission to kill Dracula.
I wonder if Bram Stoker ever sat in front of his paper and shook his head because Quincy was about to die, but he knew that it was the only way to kill Dracula. I wonder if he winced when Mina drank the blood from Dracula’s chest, but he knew that it was the next move Dracula would make, so he had to write about it.
When you are writing your novel, it’s important to stay true to the characters you’ve created. Bringing characters back from the dead or saving them from a desperate situation can be awesome, but it can also be extremely cheesy. Be careful when you do something that wouldn’t normally happen!
I read about a comic (which I can’t remember of the name right now….) where the hero was trapped in a steel box, flying through space at the end of one episode. Apparently everyone who read it couldn’t figure out how he was going to get out, and they were really excited to see what happened. In the next episode, he showed up in New York to save the day without any explanation whatsoever.
Don’t do that to your reader! When you write your novel, think about what you are going to do; make sure it can happen within the rules that exist for your universe. Some characters will die heroically; others will die for something stupid. Some characters, who you might not like, will live. It’s okay. Let you characters get hurt if that’s something that should happen.
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