Posted: September 18, 2025

The Arc of Time

How do you make your characters fit into their culture when their culture seems either crazy or cruel to modern readers? If your characters live in times or places where racism or misogyny are routine and assumed, say, having them just accept these attitudes will turn off modern readers. But having your characters champion modern conventions in the middle of less enlightened characters makes it hard for your readers to accept your characters as real people.

This doesn't just apply to historical novels. I've edited a number of stories set in other more recent cultures -- Islamic Revolutionary Iran, say, or China at the time of Tiananmen Square -- that harbor beliefs most western readers would find . . . problematic. And, I've got to face it, the sixties and seventies, when I grew up, are now foreign territory for most readers. I realized this more than a decade ago when I met an 18-year-old who had never seen a vinyl record.

In past articles, I've suggested several ways to deal with the problem. You could have your characters reject the more outrageous parts of their culture but feel like the problem is with them rather than the culture -- a sixteenth-century character who feels his repulsion at bear baiting means he is too sensitive, for instance. You can have your characters find a niche within their cultures they can thrive in -- an early eighteenth-century "housewife" who runs a manor house with a staff and budget the size of a small corporation, for instance.

You can also create your troubled background in enough detail that readers might sympathize with your characters even when they don't agree with them. After all, people who lived in these cultures weren't stupid, and they probably had reasons for thinking the way they did that made sense at the time. And if you make those reasons clear enough, then readers will be willing to forgive and accept quite a bit.

A recent client pointed me toward another way to make a character fit into their unsympathetic culture without becoming either unsympathetic or implausible. One of her main characters is a young woman trying to break into television in the mid-fifties. At the time, the new medium was opening up opportunities for women. Both Lucille Ball and (a little later) Donna Reed had considerable creative and financial control over their eponymous shows. On the other hand, the characters they played reinforced the shallowest stereotypes of housewives. ('"Lucy, you got some 'splanin' to do.")

My client's character, an assistant to the producer of a game show, gets a chance to exercise a little creativity between answering correspondence and flipping cue cards. And her boss recognizes her contributions. But at a certain point, she sees one of her better ideas stolen by a male colleague, who uses it to be promoted over her. Her reaction is to not fight for the recognition she deserves but to just keep doing her job, looking for another chance to shine.

Part of it is that she recognizes there isn't much she can do. If she had complained, she would have been labeled a troublemaking woman. But what makes her decision more acceptable to a modern audience is the way she lets go of her anger at the unfairness of it. She recognizes that what happened was unfair, but she doesn't dwell on herself as a victim. Her decision to let it go becomes a sign of maturity rather than helplessness. And that maturity makes it easier for modern readers to like her.

This is a tricky balancing act. But all of us have faced situations where we've had to accept circumstances we don't like but can't change. Unfairness crops up from time to time within businesses, communities, organizations, marriages -- pretty much any time you run up against other people. Clinging to resentment when it happens can feel really satisfying, but it can also poison both yourself and eventually the relationships around you. Letting it go -- even while you recognize that what happened is unfair -- is one of those hard decisions that make sense in the long run.

Not that this is easy to do in real life. In fact, it might be easier to do in fiction. But it does build character, in both senses of the word.