Reading Response to Moody, Eidus, and Bender

I love what Rick Moody talks about in To Hell With Likeability. There have been to many times have I gone through a book or short story or poem and been utterly disappointed because the character with predictable and so small in regards to their personality and their depth. In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest; we connect so well to Mac and Chief and all the other characters because a) they aren't all that likeable and in some cases bad people and b) the head nurse, whose name eludes me at the moment, is a terrible person and down right evil. Good books have bad endings because life is bad sometimes. Happy endings are boring and people get tired of them. Just look at your average rom-com movie. They're so bland and dry and the only good ones are those where the guy doesn't get the girl or some other crazy thing.

            In Janice Eidus' We Are Not Your Mother, it really is a good eye opener to how we write characters, at least for me. Looking at the story I am writing now, I realize that I have fallen into that mindset of the reader already knows this person and should care about them. It’s a good idea to have to make your character earn the readers love. My teacher in my fiction writing class told me when I asked her to look over my short story to make sure my character isn't whiny or all woe-is-me and it makes sense to see it like that. Readers don’t have to read your book about your character. They are choosing too.

            In Aimee Bender’s story Off, we see a connection to what I was saying in the previous paragraphs. We are given our main character, which is to put it plainly, a bad person. She is rude, unlovable, and a little slutty. We watch her try to fulfill her goal of making out with a blonde, red, and black hair guy. This seems like a pointless story but you stay interested because you want to see want ridiculous thing she does next and as the story continues, we learn about her past and how she is very lonely and start to feel bad for her. So when the end comes she has been broken and there is a sense that when Adam takes her hand, it is well deserved.