Interesting review of Amy Bloom's latest book, "Where the God of Love Hangs Out," exploring how to make unappealing characters appealing -- one of the most difficult challenges a fiction writer faces. Favorite sentence from the review: "It's a mysterious thing, the fact that a reader can fall in love with a nonexistent person."On this topic, I recently had an extensive email debate with a friend who read an advance copy of my novel. She wanted to pick a bone about a sentence of dialogue involving the least likable character in the book. We went back and forth on this for quite awhile. And it dawned on me: She was fighting for a non-existent, unappealing character. That's when I knew there was no way I was going to rewrite that sentence.
What do you think? How do you make unappealing characters appealing?
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