Don't Shoot the Messenger! (Adventures of a Critic)

Baggage and How to Do It Well

Since the last chapter sort of talked about how some bad boys on here aren't portrayed very well and truly are bad boys (and girls).

This chapter we will be talking about baggage and how it can work really well for your characters, or how it can truly weigh down your story. 

LOTS OF CHARACTERS ON WATTPAD HAVE SUCH STUPID BAGGAGE: and let me tell you why. Because it's either NOT baggage because it's just some tidbit of sadness thrown into the beginning of the story to TRY to give their character depth, OR, it becomes all the character is in NOT A GOOD WAY and slowly takes hold of the story making the entire story NEVER GO FORWARD BUT ONLY BE IN THE PAST. 

Now, some characters who are obsessed with their pasts can be interesting, but you have to do it extremely well. The past has to become their sole drive. Like someone may keep a bunch of pictures on a wall and information to try to figure out how something was off in something that happened in the past; that drives them to keep looking for more and more in the future. 

There are characters who are so desperate to right their bad pasts, or who are still so messed up from their pasts that they themselves in the present are messed up. 

THIS DOES NOT MEAN bring up traumatic event very five seconds. 

THIS CAN MEAN that you can let their past define them. WHICH AGAIN DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOU HAVE TO BRING UP THE PAST COME UP SO MUCH. What I mean by letting their past define them is have their past be their drive to keep moving forward. Maybe they obsess over the murderer who got away, and they have files in their bedroom that they take a glance at every morning. 

TV example: In the show "Castle" Beckett's whole point for becoming a cop was to catch her mom's killer. She still hasn't by the time the show starts--she's not even close (which is incredibly important and I love that she failed--which sounds awful but it's true). But now her life has become SO MUCH MORE than just that, she loves being a cop. BUT, her mother's murder is still a defining part of her. And even still, to me, they make this too much at times, but whatever. 

Examples just by me: Corporation leader is menacing, will not refrain from "playing dirty" to get what he wants. This is because when he was a kid his parents liked to play a game where he was always smaller, he could never win the game, he was always smaller. Got an A in class, why is he not trying for sports? Made the football team? Why's he not quarterback. Now he drives to be bigger, always. Note that I didn't explain how they made him smaller for four hundred sentences, how they made him tiny. You may hear about the point where he finally said "fuck his parents" and became ruthless, but I did not dog you down with every single wrong thing they ever did.

(though the corporation leader was not real, the game of "becoming smaller" is from a fantastic movie called "Life as a House" with Kevin Kline and the guy who plays Annakin Skywalker and the girl who plays Lydia in "Pride and Prejudice" and Johanna "Hunger Games: Catching Fire" and a woman from "Parenthood" and hundreds of other movies and Ian Somerhalder, it's absolutely amazing.)

An example of what not to do: Teenage girl grieves throughout the entire book about her brother who she believes she actually killed--sure enough the love interest will FINALLY convince her that she didn't do it, how it wasn't her fault, but it's the "big secret" that she harbors with her and makes her never trust anybody (somehow). 

You laugh, but I see this ALL THE TIME. This story plot is SO horrible, because honestly, I don't care. I don't want to see her grieving throughout the whole book. I really don't.

Here's what I want to see. I want to see her nearly run off the road because she thought she saw a boy walking on the street and thought she may kill him; turns out, she nearly hit the guy in the other lane. I want that whenever she sees a needle she passes out, and the doctors can't explain why, because she wasn't like that before. I want her to scream when the love interest goes two miles over on an icy road because she's terrified of what might happen, and she's "seeing ghosts". I want her to nearly KILL her love interest in the avoidance of TRYING DESPERATELY NOT TO KILL HIM. Get where I'm going? I want to see the EFFECTS of this traumatic experience, not the traumatic experience twenty THOUSAND times. This is hinting at what happened, but it's not exactly. Eventually can you explain her brother died? Sure, fine, whatever, but PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT MAKE THAT THE WHOLE POINT OF YOUR CHARACTER.

In fact, breadcrumbs should be all we ever hear about the character's past. I don't want to hear all the weight that goes on the tipping balance, I want to hear about the point where the balance had so much weight it snapped and all the baggage splattered on the floor. 

I don't care about your character's life story, and neither does anyone else. They'll tell you they do, but you'll notice that those comments are more just "that's so sad!" instead of "holy crap, that was intense." 

You don't want to hear "that's so sad" unless it's something happening in the present that's sad.

Also, don't start out stories with funerals unless it's actually integral, that plot opener is starting to become as bad as the "alarm clock wake up". Quoting from someone else: "unless that person is waking up by being stabbed to death, I don't want to hear it". Same with the starting out with funerals. It's a way to try to forge in some baggage that we're meant to feel pity for. 

The problem with it is that we don't know that character, and now we never will. We don't know your main character, we don't know how attached they were to dead character, the baggage makes NO sense to us whatsoever. We don't care. I feel no pity. That sounds heartless, but it's true, I could give less of a crap about that funeral or that baggage. Unless someone's going to be killed at that funeral, or a love affair opened up, or maybe the body's missing, I don't give a flying flip. 

Note here: baggage doesn't mean regret. Sometimes people think these go hand in hand, and sometimes it can, but a lot of time it doesn't. Some people can have tons of baggage and not regret a single thing in their lives. 

I'm going to contradict myself here: there are ways to bring up the past a lot well. It's true. If you do it right, the past constantly being brought up can really affect your character in the way you want. Let me provide an example. 

"Whenever Dr. Smith went by the old hospital, all he could think of was his wife. He drove by it every morning, and he could see his wife's face as she screamed for him to help her, and he couldn't. 

It wasn't just her face, either. It was little Marty Remirez with the heart condition, John Gallifan with pancreatic cancer, Jeanine Foster and the failed organ transplant, and so many more.

He became a doctor to save people, but how come it seemed like every day he was told to let things go? That sometimes people die? 

Wasn't he supposed to stop that from happening?

He saw these people in other patients too, at the new Sacred Heart. Such as the incident with Bobby Moore yesterday and how he wasn't able to give Bobby the injection.

He could even see them in people who were perfectly okay. Like Henry Wilkins, Mary Wilkins' son. He looked like Marty, and Marty wasn't even blonde. 

He saw these people everywhere, and he didn't know how to make it stop."

And from that point you could keep having him see the faces and whatnot. Now, that's not even that great, but there are some authors who can do it brilliantly and it works really well. But again you have to really know what you're doing.

Baggage is a tricky concept, and this won't be the last chapter on it I promise you. Baggage has to be done really well if you're going to incoorporate it and you really should because everyone has it. And I mean EVERYONE has baggage, not just the depressed, the anxious or the MC primadonnas with "super secrets". I have baggage, you have baggage, your aunt twice removed has baggage. Again, this doesn't mean regrets, but true baggage. I hope this was somewhat helpful, and I know it's a bit jumpy. 

Thanks for visiting Critic-Land! Hope you learned something!