Treating characters terribly

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

It’s an old axiom in fiction that your job as the author is to treat your characters terribly. It makes sense – if all conflict is indeed drama your hero/s need obstacles to overcome. If they have an easy time of it there’s no drama.

But I always feel more than a bit sorry for supporting character Barry Paul. He’s the orthopaedic surgeon who’s treated Dale ever since he had the computerised device put in his back that reconnected his spine and has become his closest (really his only) friend in the years since.

In Falling’s original drafts, I figured that since Barry was running a specialist medical practice he wouldn’t have the time or resources to investigate the strange phenomenon happening on and around the Sydney Harbour Bridge by himself.

He engaged a private investigations firm where Albert Dimitriou, a former cop, worked and became the lead investigator. He was the point man, dealing with metallurgy and engineering professor Donald Chin-Hsei Lambert and reporting back to Barry on what they found.

Despite the stress of what was happening to Dale and what might be wrong with the construction of the New Sydney Harbour Bridge, Barry had it pretty good. He was married to a wonderful woman named Julia, had a successful practice and was building a unique career opportunity for himself.

Albert, while he had a pretty good job, had an awful marriage. He and his wife Emily had long since fallen out of love because of his devotion to his job and her many infidelities and now hated each other. But an even worse fate awaited him in one of Falling‘s pivotal set pieces; the dark and stormy night the entire company converges on the bridge to take readings and do tests.

Along with Donald, Albert died in the firey aftermath when the research van from the university explodes, hoodwinked by a hideous apparition into firing a gun in an enclosed space filled with combustible gas.

At some point when I convinced people to read at least an outline of Falling (nobody in a critique group was ever going to read the whole book), somebody said something insightful in that I had two characters doing the same thing in Barry and Albert. After a friend who’d read an early draft had said she’d occasionally lost track of who everyone was, I realised I had to make some changes.

Albert was demoted to a government liaision Barry dealt with in the Sydney city government and had a much smaller role in the proceedings. And with him mostly out of the picture, Barry was propelled into the position Albert had vacated. His loving marriage with Julia was jettisoned and he got the Emily, the wife he now hated who cheated on him constantly. Even sadder, he was now the one who died in the van explosion with Donald.

It was a terrible thing to do to him but structurally, it worked. After the fateful night on the bridge (I came to think of it as ‘the expedition’), Barry reappeared once or twice, but it was in sequences which themselves had to go for various reasons. Without them, he just kind of drifted around in the background, having little else to do with the plot. Having him die so impactfully after he’d been such an important part of Dale’s life had a sense of synergy and bought his story to a neat – if tragic – close.

It was good fiction but honestly, I grew to like him so much I have to sometimes remind myself he’s only a fictional character.