In any event, all these strategies depend on the author's knowing how to get the audience to feel sympathy or antipathy toward a character.

There's another practical reason for knowing how to get your audience to like or dislike a character. Most readers of most types of fiction want to read about characters they like. And why shouldn't they? If you were going to take a three-day bus ride, wouldn't you hope to have a seat-mate whose company you enjoyed? Your readers are investing considerable time in your story; if they dislike your main character, it's going to be a lot harder to persuade them to stay along for the whole ride.

At times, of course, you'll want to violate that general principle and tell a story whose main character is pretty repulsive. Even then, however, with almost no exceptions, the writer who brings off such a story successfully is really not making the main character completely unlikable. Instead, the character is given several major negative traits early in the story, and the traits remain prominent throughout, so that readers don't notice that the writer is using three dozen other techniques to create sympathy for the "unsympathetic" hero. The true "anti-hero" is rare in fiction. Most seeming anti-heroes are really heroes who need, metaphorically speaking, a bath.

One way or another, then, you're going to need to know how to arouse audience sympathy or antipathy toward a character. I've found in teaching writing classes that when beginning writers create an obnoxious main character, often it isn't because they had some notion of creating an anti-hero. Instead, these writers simply didn't realize that their hero was becoming obnoxious. They weren't in control.

What Should We Feel About the Character?

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Characters, like people, make good or bad first impressions. When characters first show up in a story, we start to like them-or dislike them- right away.

We Like What's Like Us

The word like has a lovely double meaning: The most important ingredient in how much we like a stranger when we first encounter him is how much he seems to be like us. With important exceptions, we tend to feel most comfortable with and personally attracted to people who belong to the communities that are important to us, and people who are like us in ways that we are proud of. All else being equal, we feel more at ease in approaching a stranger who is our age than one who is older or younger; the same applies to economic class, style of dress, and so on. Likewise, when we find out that someone belongs to the same church or plans to vote for the same candidate or has the same attitude toward the President or served in the same branch of the military or loves our favorite book or movie, our tension relaxes and we get some of that comfortable feeling of kinship-we "hit it off from the start. It's as if we recognize them, even though we've never seen them before.

We tend to feel somewhat tense around people who don't seem very similar to us-people speaking a foreign language or wearing nonstan-dard costumes, or people who form a closed group to which we clearly don't belong. We know that we're not part of their community. And we get a definite bad impression of people who don't behave in ways that we have come to think of as "normal": people wearing the wrong clothes for the occasion, or talking too loudly, or using inappropriate language (too elevated or too low); people with bad personal hygiene; people who accost strangers on the street; people, in other words, who are not behaving in ways that we would behave. We tend to look past them, sidestep them, avoid them, shun them openly. They are not like us, and therefore we distrust or dislike them.

The things that make us instantly like or dislike people we meet in real life are pretty much the same things that make us instantly like or dislike the people we meet in fiction. We will immediately feel comfortable with a fictional character who reminds us of things we like about ourselves. We "recognize" the character. On the other hand, if we first see a character doing something physically gross or socially inept, or if we are shown a character who is foreign, alien, strange, then we tend to feel repelled, or at least not attracted.

Still, there's a kernel of truth in the adage "opposites attract." There are other, much stronger forces than mere similarity working to draw people together. We've all had the experience of learning to detest someone who seemed comfortably attractive at first; likewise, getting to know somebody better can help us overcome the immediate distance and suspi-