Criminal Intent by Mary Dutta

I’ve been at odds with a pickpocket lately. A fictional one, that is.

In my short crime fiction, I’ve had characters kill people, frame them for crimes, scam them, and commit a host of other misdeeds.

The challenge in writing such characters is to make them relatable enough that readers will go along for the ride rather than reject them outright. We all have flaws, we all feel desperate at times, we all do things we may regret. A story character may take all of that to lengths the reader would not condone in real life, but as long as the motivation behind their deeds is made clear and offers something the audience can connect to, the reader will stick around to find out what happens.

That being said, my current work-in-progress, a story about a career pickpocket, is putting my ability to drum up reader sympathy to the test. I have never written about a professional criminal before, and I’m finding that the thief whose story I am telling lacks the relatability I usually give both my protagonists and antagonists. She feels quite comfortable with the criminal path she has chosen. She is not in desperate circumstances. She could easily earn an honest living rather than steal. And her victims are strangers, who haven’t wronged her in any way.

She is not the first problematic character I’ve struggled with. I ended up abandoning one story recently because I just found it too hard to create sympathy for the protagonist. There was supposed to be a plot twist at the end where it was revealed that he didn’t really hold all the objectionable beliefs he had been spouting, but was rather using them as a smokescreen to distract from his crime. But to get to that big reveal, both I and the reader had to spend the bulk of the story with someone (at least seemingly) remarkably unsympathetic. I didn’t want to spend that much time with him, and I had to accept that most readers likely wouldn’t want to either.

I think there is more hope for my pickpocket making it to the end of her story and into the anthology I’m writing for. As the story stands, I’m not buying her justifications for what she does. But I can give her the backstory, the circumstances, and the relationships to show how she developed those rationales. If she can win me over, however questionable her ethics, then I think she could win over readers as well.

Will she end up abandoning her criminal ways? Well, that’s another story.