Activity

This being Monday, it’s time for our annual theme discussion on character development.

I thought I’d touch on one of the best character development tools I’ve discovered: bondage.

Every character has faults, right? Their faults build our sympathy. Bondage goes farther. Bondage is something your character can’t get out of, can’t escape from, is drowning in.

You can think of Gollum and the ring as a classic example. Bondage can be a besetting sin like lust, a fatal weakness like letting other people’s opinions drive how you live, an addiction like drugs, etc, etc. People in bondage, despite how they may look on the outside, are the lowest of the low.

How is this useful for character development? Bondage can evoke powerful emotions in a reader. The initial emotion is a strong pity for the character in bondage. Readers quickly bond with these characters. The next emotion from the reader is fear. Bondage is the strongest of antagonists. The ring, really, is more fearsome than Sauron. This is the ultimate thriller scenario — the villain from which you can’t escape. (That’s the next emotion — fear leads to a breathless tension.) The final emotion you leave with your reader comes from your character’s fate. Does he finally succumb to the total hopelessness of his bondage? Readers will be terrified. Does he get liberated from bondage? Readers will feel stunned, ecstatic, and highly satisfied.

Here are some questions to consider:
. What’s the best example of bondage you’ve seen in literature?
. How do we write about bondage without letting it pull our readers down either with the temptation of the bondage or the despair of its power?
. Are there techniques that make bondage more effective?
. How are you using/how do you plan to use bondage in your story?

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