What’s the Craziest Thing You’ve had a Character do?

John Guillen41 Comments

I’m sure some of y’all are going to give me that crap about only doing things that move the story forward blah blah blah. I don’t care. This is a very simple question. If you haven’t had your character do anything crazy, then it is very easy to not comment.

With that being said, I really don’t think I’ve ever had any of my characters do anything too out of the ordinary. There was a pretty crazy shootout at his house during the middle of the night and another main character killed a couple guys who likely would have done the same to her if she hadn’t killed them first. But that stuff happens in crime novels all the time. Which is why I don’t really think either of those is particularly crazy.

And I don’t think I’d make Andrew or Sydney do anything crazy just for the sake of doing so. Who knows. I don’t.

So what’s the craziest thing you’ve had a character do?

PS: I decided to write about this topic not because of something I’m writing, but because of some personal experience. I was watching my skydiving videos when I thought of it. And decided I’d share those videos with y’all just in case you’ve never been fortunate enough to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. The first video is from July 15, 2011.

The second is from August 15, 2011.

And oh by the way, I don’t actually think skydiving is crazy. Only people who’ve never done it think that.

41 thoughts on “What’s the Craziest Thing You’ve had a Character do?”

  1. I have a self-published novella through KDP where my main character literally kills himself every other day. He doesn’t commit suicide, mind you, he kills himself from the past (portals, dimensions and time travel are involved).

    At one point, the PAST version of the guy and the FUTURE version of the guy decide to have fun with their lot in life.
    They end up having the PAST hanging in the air ten floors over a glass art piece shaped like a massive DNA strand. Their plan is to have the FUTURE shoot the PAST out of the air then see how many rungs of the glass DNA strand the PAST will crash through as he plummets dead to the earth. The FUTURE will count each rung as a point.
    The entire time, the FUTURE (the shooter) is remembering himself as the PAST dangling up over the art piece waiting to be shot.

    So, as of now, the craziest thing a main character of mine has done was commit murder/suicide while surviving his successful suicide and remembering being murdered all while playing a game which destroys a piece of government-funded art.

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      • Haha, yeah… it is pretty confusing out of context.

        One day, Todd Davies is shot in the head outside of a grocery store. Rather than die, Davies wakes up in bed confused and convinced it was only a dream. Through a bizarre set of events, he ends up stepping through a portal and becoming the gunman who shot Todd Davies outside the grocery store.
        The novella becomes a loop of Todd Davies being killed. Every time he dies, he wakes up only to be tasked with stepping through a portal and becoming the person who just killed him. The story’s a constant loop of this happening while Todd Davies tries finding a way to break the cycle.
        Later in the story, the “killer” Todd Davies from “the future”, and the “victim” Todd Davies of “the past” start having fun with their predicament… which leads to the scenario I described above.

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  3. This is a fun one. In BLOOD TOY, my protagonist knocks herself out by headbutting a hope chest. My antagonist turns into a dog and takes out his frustration by knocking down a few pine trees before finally taking out a car.

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  4. Without getting too deep about my story’s circumstances….basically, one of my characters lets Lucifer out of imprisonment because Lucifer is the only one who can help him save the world. There’s actually a lot of equally crazy stuff that happens in the story – so much that I’m having a really difficult time keeping my protagonist an “everyman.”

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  5. Great question! Mine went looking for a famous and powerful ghost on a lonely road in the middle of the night to ask advice, then goes and rescues a goat from an active lava flow.

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  6. • Um, I have actually made one of my character’s live in a barn alone for about nine years (this idea was later scratched).
    • And another one of my character’s breaks into a bathroom while his suicidal cousin in there (it was first in a fanfic and now I think I’m going to use it for real in a new story I’m working on).
    • And then is a completely different story, a main pro character falls in love with the man who killed her father (not going to lie, this is an Avengers/Loki fanfic I’m working on for kicks with my friend.. Don’t judge).

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  8. Great post and fun comments. In the Melding of Aeris, a surgeon is forced to remove a woman’s eyes and hair. He replaces them with eyes and hair from a cat. Another character gives up his human skin to his friends so that he can ultimately destroy the process, which leaves him in animal skin for the rest of his life. I could go on…

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  9. Yeah… I don’t think skydiving is crazy, just scary. So there… you’re a far braver person than I.
    As for my characters… I don’t know how crazy you’d call it, and I think I’ve mentioned it before, but two of my characters have to muck the stalls of magical animals as punishment, and the poop is multicolored. Yep. Multicolored animal poop. Think rainbow colors and beyond.
    They also have to fight/defeat/outwit minotaurs, which I think are pretty angry dudes. I know I have more examples, but that’s what first came to mind.

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