The Trouble With Writing Kind People

Here is a thing they don’t warn you about when you set out to write, and that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand: cruelty is easy to write, and kindness is nearly impossible. A villain arrives on the page fully formed, vivid, magnetic, doing half your work for you. A menacing character menaces in a single line and you can feel the room change. But sit down to write a genuinely good person — someone kind, patient, decent, the sort of person who in life you would be grateful to know — and watch what comes out: a flat thing, a saccharine thing, a character who reads as boring, or naive, or fake, a greeting card in human shape. Every writer discovers this, usually with dismay, and a lot of them draw the wrong conclusion from it, which is that goodness is simply less interesting than badness, and they give up on it and fill their books with charming monsters instead.

I drew that wrong conclusion myself for years, and I want to argue against it, because I think the difficulty is real but the conclusion is a mistake, and untangling the two turned out to teach me more about people than almost anything else the work has taught me.

Why the menace comes easy

Start with why cruelty is so easy to render, because the reason is instructive. Menace is loud. It announces itself. It is all surface — a threat, a sneer, a sudden violence — and surface is exactly what writing captures most readily, because writing is a medium of visible signs, and cruelty throws off visible signs constantly, hungrily, wanting to be seen. A cruel character is performing their cruelty; that is half of what cruelty is, a display of power, and display is made of the very stuff prose is good at. So the villain hands you your material. He does the vivid thing on cue and you simply write it down.

Kindness does the opposite of all that. Kindness is quiet. Its whole nature is to not draw attention to itself — the best of it is nearly invisible, done without display, often done specifically so as not to embarrass the person receiving it. Real kindness is restraint: the thing not said, the pride left intact, the help offered so lightly it doesn’t register as help. It is a man noticing what someone needs and providing it without ever letting on that he noticed. It throws off almost no visible signs, because concealing its own signs is part of how it operates. And so the writer reaching to capture it comes up with nothing to grab — no sneer, no speech, no display — and, panicking, overcompensates: has the kind character say kind things, announce their goodness, weep openly at others’ pain, and the result is a monster of a different sort, a sentimental fraud, because a person who performs their kindness that loudly is not actually being kind, they are being seen being kind, which is a form of vanity, and readers smell it instantly.

The discipline of noticing

So how do you write a good person who reads as real? The same way you recognize one in life: by looking at what they do, in small concrete specifics, and never at what they announce. You write the action and cut the halo. You show the man giving up the good chair without a word and moving on to the next thing, and you do not have anyone remark on it, and you do not have him feel noble about it, because the moment you gild it you kill it. Kindness on the page has to be inferred by the reader, the way it is inferred in life — caught out of the corner of the eye, assembled from a dozen tiny unremarked acts, felt rather than stated. It has to be underwritten, always, because kindness underwrites itself, and any character who is as loud about their goodness as a villain is about their cruelty is not good, they are just differently theatrical.

And this is the part that turned a craft problem into something larger for me, so I will say it plainly. The reason kindness is so hard to write is the same reason it is so easy to miss in life. We overlook the quiet decent people constantly, precisely because their decency does not perform, does not demand, does not announce — they are the least dramatic figures in any room, and drama is what our attention snaps to, on the page and off it. The cruel and the loud and the charming get written about, get remembered, get centered, in fiction and in gossip and in history, because they throw off signals our attention is built to catch. The kind ones do the actual work of holding the world together and go largely unrecorded, because the work is quiet and takes no credit and generates no vivid signs. To learn to write a good person convincingly, you have to first learn to see one — to slow down and notice the small undramatic specifics of how goodness actually operates, the restraint, the noticing, the help disguised as nothing — and that noticing is a discipline you can carry back off the page, into the actual rooms of your actual life, where the quiet decent people are standing exactly where they always were, doing the real work, waiting to be seen.

That, in the end, is why I keep trying to write them, even though they are the hardest thing, and even though I fail at it more often than I succeed. Not because a story needs a good person for balance, the way a meal needs salt. But because the effort of writing kindness well is an education in attention — it forces you to look hard at the least showy people, to take their quiet goodness seriously enough to render it, to treat as central the ones the world treats as background. And a writer who learns to do that on the page, I have come to think, becomes a slightly better noticer off it, which may be the only real moral use the craft has ever had: not to teach anyone a lesson, but to train the writer, and maybe the reader, to see the kindness that was always there and never announced itself, and was therefore, until someone bothered to write it down, almost invisible.