The Softening Problem

Writers soften young characters for understandable reasons. YA readership skews young, and there’s a protective instinct in the writing: don’t make the protagonist too dark, too selfish, too hard to root for. Give them a redemption arc. Make their bad choices explicable. Make sure the reader knows they’re basically good.

Teenagers know when they’re being handled. A protagonist whose moral complexity is always resolved before the end of the chapter—whose bad choices are always explained away by circumstance—doesn’t feel like a teenager. They feel like an adult’s idea of what a teenager should be.

  • Why it worksYoung readers recognize authentic moral complexity because they live inside it. In The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Starr makes choices throughout the book that are uncomfortable and sometimes selfish and always human. Thomas doesn’t clean them up. She lets them sit. In Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, the protagonist makes choices the reader can see are destructive, and the book doesn’t soften that or rush to explain it away. The discomfort is the point. Young readers feel seen by that discomfort rather than protected from it.
  • How to do itLet your young protagonist be wrong in ways that aren’t immediately contextualized. Don’t follow every bad choice with an internal monologue that explains it or a scene that redeems it. Let it sit. The reader is doing important work inside that discomfort.

Do

Trust young readers to sit with a protagonist who is sometimes hard to like. The protagonist doesn’t have to be likeable every chapter. They have to be true.

Avoid

The instant redemption beat. The bad choice followed immediately by the character feeling terrible and vowing to do better. Real moral growth is slower and messier and less satisfying in the moment than fiction usually allows.

From My Work

Katie Bunny lies to Sherry on purpose, repeatedly, throughout The Death of Me. She knows she’s doing it. She knows Sherry deserves better. She does it anyway because the truth would cost her the one relationship she’s most desperate to protect, and that reason is understandable and also selfish and she knows that too. There’s no chapter where she resolves this cleanly. The lying continues. The guilt accumulates. That’s what makes it real.

Selfishness as a Character Truth

Young people are sometimes selfish. Not because they’re bad people but because they’re still developing the capacity to consistently prioritize others over themselves, and that development is nonlinear and situational. A teenager can be deeply generous in one scene and nakedly self-interested in the next, and both are true at the same time.

Fiction that only shows the generous moments is lying about what being young is like.

  • Why it worksSelfishness written honestly produces characters readers recognize from the inside. In We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier, the protagonist does something terrible in the opening pages and the book doesn’t let him off the hook for it. Cormier understood that young characters could be genuinely culpable and that readers could hold that complexity without needing it resolved. In Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson, Mary’s choices and their consequences are morally uncomfortable in ways the book refuses to clean up. The reader has to sit with the discomfort of not knowing exactly how to feel about her.
  • How to do itGive your young protagonist a moment of clear selfishness that has real consequences for someone else. Don’t explain it away with backstory. Don’t have them immediately regret it. Let the selfish choice exist as a selfish choice and let the reader sit with what that means for who this person is.

Do

Let selfishness coexist with genuine goodness. The protagonist can be selfish about one thing and deeply caring about another at the same time. That coexistence is what makes people feel three-dimensional.

Avoid

Punishing the protagonist immediately and visibly for every selfish choice. Real consequences are often delayed or invisible or never come at all, and fiction that instantly punishes bad behavior is teaching a lesson rather than telling a story.

From My Work

Katie’s Life List is partly selfish. She wants to fall in love, she wants the solo, she wants to experience things she missed. That exists alongside her assignment, alongside the people around her who need things from her, and the tension between what she wants and what she owes is never fully resolved. She doesn’t always choose right. Sometimes she chooses herself. The book doesn’t punish her for it immediately and it doesn’t excuse it either.

The Bad Choice Without the Lesson

The most softened moment in YA fiction is the bad choice that comes with a lesson attached. The character does the wrong thing and by the end of the chapter they understand why it was wrong and they’ve grown from it and the reader closes the book feeling that something has been learned.

Real life doesn’t work that way. People make the same bad choices repeatedly. They understand why something is wrong and do it anyway. They grow in some ways and stay stubbornly the same in others.

Writing a morally complicated young character means letting some bad choices be just bad choices. No lesson. No redemption. Just a person who did a thing they probably shouldn’t have and kept going.

  • Why it worksBad choices without attached lessons feel true in a way that redeemed bad choices don’t. In The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Charlie makes choices that aren’t always wise and the book doesn’t always explain them or redeem them, and that ambiguity is what makes him feel real. In Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, the moral complexity of what Melinda carries and how she carries it is never resolved into a clean lesson. She survives. She doesn’t arrive at wisdom. She just survives.
  • How to do itWrite a bad choice scene and then delete the paragraph after it where the character reflects on what they’ve done. See what the scene does without that reflection. Often it does more. The reader fills in the space that the reflection was occupying, and what they fill it with is more personal and more powerful than anything the narrator could have said.

Do

Let some bad choices be structural. The protagonist is participating in something wrong not because they’re a bad person but because they’re inside a situation and can’t see clearly from there. That kind of moral complication is harder to resolve cleanly because it doesn’t have a simple cause.

Avoid

Resolving moral complexity in the final chapter. A protagonist who has been genuinely complicated throughout the book and then arrives at a clear moral position in the last twenty pages feels like a different character. Let the complexity persist into the ending.

From My Work

Katie doesn’t fully resolve her relationship with the truth by the end of The Death of Me. She’s better in some ways. She’s still herself in others. The lying to Sherry doesn’t get wrapped up cleanly. The selfish parts of the Life List don’t get apologized for. She’s a fifteen year old who went through something extraordinary and came out the other side still recognizably the person she was going in, which is the most honest thing the book could say about her.

Voice as the Carrier of Complexity

The easiest way to soften a morally complicated young character is through their internal narration. The character does something wrong and their internal voice immediately contextualizes it, explains it, apologizes for it. The reader gets the bad choice and the exculpatory commentary in the same paragraph.

A narrator whose internal monologue is itself part of the moral complexity—who is rationalizing, who is lying to themselves, who is aware they’re lying to themselves and doing it anyway—is deeply human.

  • Why it worksSelf-serving internal narration is one of the most recognizable things about being alive. In The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden’s narration is constantly self-serving and occasionally self-aware about being self-serving, and that double layer is what makes him feel real. When a narrator’s explanation of their own behavior feels almost right but not quite, the reader can feel the gap between what the character says they’re doing and what they’re actually doing, and that gap is where the complexity lives.
  • How to do itLet your young protagonist’s internal narration be unreliable in small ways. The ordinary human tendency to frame things in our own favor. When Katie explains why she’s lying to Sherry, she gives herself the most charitable possible reading of her own motives. The reader can see through it. She can almost see through it. That gap is the character.

Do

Let the internal narration be slightly off. The character’s explanation of their own behavior should feel almost right but not quite. The reader should be able to feel the self-serving quality of it without the narrator acknowledging it directly.

Avoid

Narrators who are fully self-aware about their own complexity. A protagonist who thinks “I know this is selfish but I’m doing it anyway” has already done the reader’s work for them. Let the selfishness show through the behavior and the rationalization rather than through the narrator’s direct acknowledgment of it.

Final Thoughts

YA readers are not fragile. They don’t need their protagonists to be basically good people who make one redeemable mistake. They need their protagonists to be recognizably human, which means sometimes selfish, sometimes wrong, sometimes capable of choices that don’t get resolved or redeemed or explained away.

Write the complexity. Don’t soften it. Trust the reader to hold it.

Extras

Table Of Contents
  1. The Softening Problem
  2. Selfishness as a Character Truth
  3. The Bad Choice Without the Lesson
  4. Voice as the Carrier of Complexity
  5. Final Thoughts
  6. Extras