Sometimes characters are going to make bad decisions, but how to do that without annoying your readers? Nobody in real life makes perfect choices all the time, and we shouldn’t hold our fictional characters to that standard either! Today, let’s take a look at three things you might want to bear in mind when you’re having characters make bad choices to reduce the risk of reader frustration.
It should fit with what we know about them
When characters make bad choices, it shouldn’t fly in the face of the characterisation you’ve worked so hard to build up. It should be consistent with the flaws you’ve already had them demonstrate. If a character who has typically been a good and supportive friend decides to sabotage somebody out of the blue, readers are going to notice. It feels contrived.
Similarly, the way they behave after making the decision needs to fit with their established character. It’s possible for even perfectly pleasant characters to make mistakes that hurt others, or get themselves into sticky situations. But they should probably be appropriately bothered by those consequences! We’ll come back to the consequences part later.
The key here is that, when you want to have a character make a bad decision, you look back at how readers have seen them behave previously. Does this decision track with other choices they’ve made? Does it make sense in terms of that character’s motivations? If no, either the character or the decision probably needs adjusting.
It should make sense within the plot
There are situations in life, and in fiction, where there is no right answer. Where every choice is a bad one. And there are also situations where there are plenty of reasonable options to resolve a problem, and a normally sensible character picks the most needlessly stupid and damaging one available.
To be clear, a character doesn’t always have to choose the “best” course of action available to them. They might make a bad call as a result of limited information, or their own natures getting in the way. External manipulation, temporary impairment, or any number of complicating factors. But there should be a solid reason why they’re making this choice.
I’m going to hark back to Frankly in Love as an example of this done well. Frank makes the decision to pretend to date a friend that his parents would approve of, so they don’t know he’s actually dating a girl they wouldn’t approve of at all. A decision that has never, in the history of the world, been known to be a good move in the long run. But it makes perfect sense in the context of the story, even as you can see the complications beginning to arise.
There should be logical consequences
If a character does something awful, the consequences should be correspondingly massive. Similarly, if a character makes a relatively minor mistake, the consequences should be of a similar magnitude. That’s not to say that other characters might not under- or over-react to a bad call made by someone else in your story! But in order to keep readers on board it’s probably a good idea to provide some context for why a character is being ostracised over what seems like a small issue. Or, indeed, forgiven at once for something really nasty.
The over-reaction is something that seems to come up reasonably frequently in romance. Something has to happen to break up the main characters, but it has to be forgivable enough that they can get back together by the end of the book. Some romance stories find really interesting ways of striking this balance, while some just let the consequences of a small mistake spiral out of control for a while before reining them back in.
The consequences of a bad decision should also make sense within the framework of your story, and be consistent with whatever rules you’ve established. Allowing a character to make stupid decisions, but not allowing them to experience the consequences of those, can lead to the phenomenon of ‘plot armour’. Where a main character can never be fired/expelled/killed or seriously injured, no matter how many mistakes they make.
How do you feel about characters making bad decisions?
A necessary evil for exciting plots, or something that authors should avoid wherever possible? Let me know in the comments if you have any favourite – or least favourite – examples of characters making obvious mistakes!
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