Early on while writing, I found the easiest way of breaking a character was to have him/her/and occasionally yes do something so monstrous for that person/culture that there was no recovering from it.

The experience actually came in planning a story arc.  The transgressive action the character engaged in is not considered very bad in our culture, but in that culture it was utterly and completely disgraceful, it was done publically, and it was particularly damaging to a person in a position of power which my character was, since power in that society is held mostly through general consensus.  (Think a council of the tribes, though that’s not what it was, but the mechanics are the same.  While not a democratic or representative society, leadership depends on the honor of the character.)

Having written the story arc, I realized that I couldn’t actually write it as a novel without breaking the character in my own eyes forever.  It was simply not recoverable from.

Mind you these novels were not yet and probably will never be published (if the boys are completely crazy after I’m cold and dead, and find the copies which are paper and which were lent out years ago, who knows?) but in my own head, as far as my character existed there, to write this out long form would make him something I could never touch again in the same way.

It’s  a good thing I learned that lesson early on, because the temptation to break a character and put him back together is of course huge and because it can work in limited circumstances, even a lot of experienced writers fall into it.

What do I mean it can work in certain circumstances? – well, for those of you who don’t read my Shifter series, or who read it but haven’t noticed this, I’ve been breaking Tom slowly (in a way) in a way that hopefully can be put back together.  At the same time that he’s growing in power and responsibility, he’s had to do things that would have shattered his younger self, like kill an enemy in cold blood, or torture two opponents publically.  These aren’t breaks in the character, because he doesn’t do it and never again think about it, and it changes him, internally and – yes – at some point he’ll have to deal with it.  But because it’s very slow and coupled with other growing in responsibility and maturity, it’s believable.  It doesn’t break who the character IS.  (At least I hope it doesn’t.)  Tom is still an over-sensitive, protective (mother hen) type character, who sometimes will make mistakes through being insufficiently ruthless.  It’s just that he’s finding the need to be ruthless and following through on it in specific situations.  And he’ll have to reconcile it to himself, as we all have to, as we grow.

The other circumstances in which it’s acceptable to take a character and make him do something that utterly breaks him, something so alien and repulsive that the character himself doesn’t want to live with it is to force his hand.  Yes, this is coming at some point but not in the Shifter series – and probably not in the current SF series, either – but it is coming because I want to play with it.

However, let’s imagine it in the shifter series.  Let’s imagine Tom had to eat a live baby or his entire family and all his associates would be killed.

While the act would break him forever (he angsts over killing bugs and spends half his life rescuing strays) it would be forced on him, so it wouldn’t break the fundamental premise of the character: that he’s a decent, well-meaning person with perhaps an excess of compassion.

Also, returning from the break (not the same way, it would break him forever.  However, gluing together is possible) would take several books and be an interesting psychological exercise.

BUT it would not be a “break” of the character in the reader’s mind, because in himself Tom would remain fundamentally what he always was.  He was just forced to do something completely against his principles, in order to save his other principles (the looking after friends and family thing.)

How he would come to terms with it I don’t know, and I promise not to do that to Tom (who is yelling rather loudly in my head just now) but if I did, it would be survivable.

However, if I had Tom, out of the blue decide his dragon form likes to eat newborns because they’re a delicacy, that’s not survivable as a character.  He would be broken in my own mind as well as, I think, the readers. (And no, “he suddenly went insane and evil” is not a good plot twist.  For one, it’s not really believable.  Yes, it happens sometimes, but not very often.  Most mentally ill people don’t go evil “because mentally ill” and there are several warning signs before a serious issue.  Yes, it does sometimes happen that a nice boy with no problems goes nuts, cuts up the neighbors and puts them in trash bags – but reality doesn’t have to be believable at an instinctive level.  Reality does.)

OTOH it would be perfectly permissible to start with a character who has for whatever reason including “I was really mad” done something as heinous that is a break with his narrated previous character and then spend a series recovering him.

Wait a minute, say you, why is that permissible, but not breaking him first on camera, and then building him again?

Because people accept the character when they meet him as “he is what he is.”  There is no questioning his report that it was abhorrent to him, or that he went insane for a while.  That is just what it is.  What the character is at the beginning is a character in search of redemption.  That’s his contract with the reader, and that’s what he can’t violate without “breaking character” and making book go against the wall.

And that’s what it comes down to: A contract with the reader.

In the case of my unpublished series, the contract is that this character is “the good king” (even though he’s not a king and … it’s complicated) the one who comes and sets everything right after a truly horrible century.  He’s not very wise at the beginning (because the first two novels are coming of age) but he’s good (which is not the same as a patsy.)

The incident I plotted but never wrote broke his essential goodness which means (this was supposed to be book four) it broke the contract with the reader, and what they’d been assured this character was.

Now, could I have my character slowly corrupted?  Sure.  That was part of the plan.  Not utterly corrupted, mind, but slightly tarnished in the peccadillo sense.  No Arthur remains fully unsoiled after taking the sword from the stone.  Power has its own temptations and its own seductions, and if not for internal strife, what point would there be to the story?

But he was never supposed to go over “to the dark side” because people don’t, and they don’t usually do it in a fell swoop when they do.  He was just supposed to learn that living and exerting power often requires compromises and some less clear areas (over which he angsts, of course.)

Should I ever publish (or finish) that series, I’ll keep in mind that at the end he needs to still be good – bruised and battered, but still trying to be heroically good and fulfill his duty.

An example of breaking contract with reader – a contract I don’t think she was aware of, and perhaps only with THIS reader, though some of my friends had the same problem – was Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series.

Though it’s set up as a love triangle, between herself and Morelli and Ranger, it was – at least in my mind – always set up from the beginning that she was for all her dirty talk and implied sluttiness a GOOD girl.  She was in love with Morelli and the end of it, whether it happened in the series or not, was that she would marry him and settle down to a very conventional life in the neighborhood they grew up in.  (Whether it would be fun to have them married and have her keep being a bounty hunter while having kids, etc is a matter for the author to decide.  If it were my characters they would, because I find the comedy of family life great fun.  But her audience might be all single, etc., so… her decision.)

In book 11? 10? However, she has Stephanie sleep with Ranger, the bad-boy who might actually be married.

Now, because I’d bought the implied “I do all sorts of stuff with Morelli, but I’m going to marry him eventually” her sleeping with Ranger broke the character for me, and the books thereafter slid off the to-read list.

Now, of course I have friends who had relationships with two guys at the same time, and this is not a moral judgment (well, not quite.  Though I’ve noticed characters in books have to be more moral than real people.  The feelings they induce are starker and the grey line between good and evil much sharper. But that and the reason for that is a post for another day.)

However my contract with that character was that she was a “good girl.”  Was it intended by the author?  I don’t know.  I know that a lot of her college-age readers were egging her on to do just that in her discussion boards just before she did.  I think she wasn’t aware there was just as large a contingent of housewives reading her, most of whom (at least most of the ones I know) felt the character was broken by the action.

From the fact that since then the incident was never repeated and is never alluded to I’m led to believe either there was some minute fall of in her numbers (she’s still a mega bestseller) or the writer herself realized she’d broken the character FOR HERSELF and is therefore trying to erase it from the history.

For the record – learn what contracts you might have with the reader, and try to stick to them.  Most importantly, learn what makes the character work FOR YOU because even if you can sell the break to a reader, if you can’t sell it to yourself, that character is dead.

Learn it before you are published.  Even in the age of ebooks, erasing a misstep is much harder than never having made it.