With short-short fiction, I usually will read the whole thing if I have time, particularly if I'm going through a friend's prompt-call batch. If a story leaves me with a positive or negative impression, I tend to say something; ones that don't make much impression I might skip. This one was kind of intriguing to read, to see what was unfolding in a tangled impression, but what stuck in my mind was still, "Wow, what a bunch of jerks."
The thing with unlikeable characters is that they tend to leave the reader wondering, "Why am I spending time with these people?" Usually there's someone in a story that we want to see succeed, someone to root for. Without that, it can be tempting to start watching the sky to see if rocks will fall and mash all the jerks to interesting goo. So if the characters aren't likeable enough to hook readers into the story, something else has to do the job instead, and that's harder to write.
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branchandroot
Re: 0_o
Date: 2011-09-26 06:26 pm (UTC)The thing with unlikeable characters is that they tend to leave the reader wondering, "Why am I spending time with these people?" Usually there's someone in a story that we want to see succeed, someone to root for. Without that, it can be tempting to start watching the sky to see if rocks will fall and mash all the jerks to interesting goo. So if the characters aren't likeable enough to hook readers into the story, something else has to do the job instead, and that's harder to write.