The Craft of Writing Resentment
First.
What does it mean to forget and move beyond the so-called problem of “unlikable girls?” That’s the first thing I want you to let go of. This is not an exercise in being likable or unlikable. We writers, we women writers, have spoken a lot about the unlikable female protagonist and that’s not what I’m doing here. Because we all already know she’s marginalized and not liked simply because she has emotions, or she has needs or wants like any (other) man in literature.
(How to Be Creative While Living With Imposter Syndrome.)
Once we can step away from the problem of reducing characters, especially marginalized characters, in a binary process of likable/unlikable, as if this is all that matters, once we can put this aside, we can move forward with writing resentment.
Second.
What is resentment? What does this emotion look like, feel like, taste like, smell like, sound like? How does a person experience resentment in their body?
This is where I like to start: by thinking through emotion and how it works in the body especially.
So many writers, we are really good at what happens in heads and hearts. Our characters have excellent heads and hearts. But they aren’t embodied.
The key here in writing resentment is to remember that heads and hearts are part of the body—not separate entities. If we are to write resentment, we need to align the experience of emotion in the body, head, and heart. Or play with and between and amongst the three places where emotion is experienced. After all, conflict occurs in the rifts. In the places where alignment is off, missing, busted up, and broken.
Third.
To resent is to hold something in the past, to carry that thing with you into the present.
To write resentment is to work with a character’s backstory and how that backstory is immediately relevant to the forward moving plot.
Some of the best writing advice that I was given as a young writer had to do with backstory and when to use it. I know it’s hard, but a writer has to trust their readers to be smart, savvy, capable of waiting for the good stuff.
After all, this is what it means to pace a story.
To wait for what you need.
Until the moment you need it.
Or even, the precise moment after you need it.
Consider when writing resentment to hold as much back as you can for as long as you can. It’s a balancing act. But the more you withhold, the more you tease and hint and suggest without giving it all away, the more you will build the tension of resentment.
You will create the experience for your reader in their bodies, minds, and hearts by using backstory effectively.
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Fourth.
Like all other emotions, resentment needs to be fueled as the story progresses. It cannot only be the past carrying on into the present, but the present must somehow add fire to the past.
A resentful character is not able to let go.
A resentful character’s resentment is a living, breathing thing.
Maybe this is me saying make sure the relationship between backstory and forward moving story is dynamic. Maybe I’ve said this already or maybe adding this step will help some of you see another facet of the thing I’m describing.
Fifth.
Characters need to be much more than their resentments. They need to contain multitudes. Always.
Maybe we don’t think of this when a character is male, white, cis, het, and able-bodied. We might assume they have multitudes—because they have all things due to their privilege.
This is a particular note for those writers who do not have lived experience of resentment as it applies to a systematic experience of oppression, for those that do not experience how the world is not built for their body, for example, or, as another example, who live as a Native person under the constant violence of colonialism.
If you write resentment, you must write beyond stereotype.
If you do not have lived experience, you must be able to imaginatively empathize with your characters. It’s a must. It’s where everything stops if you can’t manage to do this and do this well. Alongside imaginative empathy, you will have to do research, research that does no harm, research that isn’t exploitative. But you also, sorry not sorry, this is the minimum requirement to write any emotion. You must always write beyond stereotype.
Sixth.
Resentment requires resolution, but resentment can last beyond a story’s resolution too.
Consider what you can reasonably resolve? What provides enough relief for a reader and what cannot resolve, what must remain.
Find a balance between resolution and enduring resentment. Allow your characters to continue to exist beyond the boundaries of the page.
Emotions do not end.
They transform, they continue in new shapes.
There is a reason we go to therapy and a reason why therapy is an enduring experience.
Complete resolution is a lie. I always like a story best when it knows this is a lie, gives me just enough but refuses to pretend stories, characters’ lives, worlds, entire universes end in tight little bows.
A Last Note.
I practiced the art of writing resentment while drafting and revising A Constellation of Minor Bears—a book about Molly Norris-Norquay, a 17-year-old girl whose anger at the world, at herself, and at her family and best friend, turns into resentment that she does not know how to escape from.
Writing this book meant letting Molly be angry. And knowing that some might find her unlikable, mean. I reminded myself I wasn’t writing for people who would fault a girl for this. Molly is facing things that hurt in an enduring way: her parent’s ambitions for her future, her brother’s devastating climbing accident, her own worry that she is not enough, that she picked science long ago and that means she cannot make another choice.
Resentment builds from all of these things. It builds against the other characters in the book. It builds against the novel’s setting, the wilds of the Pacific Crest Trail in Southern California, as Molly tries to walk away from her problems.
Resentment is a part of the world-building.
But ought any of the emotional landscape in your story be excluded from how you build the world?
Maybe I’m throwing a wrench at this, here at the end.
Writing, as best as I understand it, is always all things at the very same time. Writing is like the body: There is no way to split body from heart or mind. We can try, and humans we will try, but I know this too: We will inevitably fail.
I offer these six steps. But you’ll have to take them all together in the end. Sorry not sorry.
Check out Jen Ferguson’s A Constellation of Minor Bears here:
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A Writing Exercise.
Come up with a character who experiences something petty, something small in the grand scheme of the universe, and tell the story of that small, petty thing turning into real, enduring resentment.
Consider the above notes on resentment as you write.
Take a risk or two.
Have fun.