*Copied from an email to a friend, that word the problem it well.*
Can I ask for advice?
Artemis's(MMC) is meant to be manipulative, but at the same time kind of struggling.
The struggling makes him too cute.
I don't want him to be cute. But at the same time I don't want him to be unlikable. He's not a bad person but he's very self serving.
That's hard for me to pull.
Angeline(MFC) is also self serving, but it's in a different way, she wants to be able to control how people see her.
Everything from how she dresses to how she acts is based on this, and she's not above advancing her situation.
For instance, she staying with her dad right now because it gets her into Gallery showings.
But she'll return to her mom halfway through the story.
It's in disliking the ways that Angeline is self serving that Artemis starts to correct these behaviors in both of them, but at the same time, he's literally teaching her how to control people.
(How to read and use body language to affect people is a big thing between them. By the end of of the story they can communicate from across a room.)
But making this type of imperfect charters not seem evil or jerky is amazingly hard.
Any advice would be loved.
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19,306 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 20 45
I would suggest focusing a lot on how they see themselves and how they justify their behavior, so the reader can understand why they do the things they do.
--8P
6,191 / 50,000
Dec 1, 2008 - 21 06
I like to thank people that help me individually when I can.
Thanks.
*Great irony in the fact I wrote: "that words the problem well" wrong.