Writing a Wrong ‘Un: Creating Empathy for the Antihero

When I begin a new book, I look at relationship dynamics I’ve used previously and try to find a fresh angle. For Fallout, this meant creating a main character who is not the usual middle grade hero. Far from it. 

Marcus is the perceived bad kid; the one from a notorious family, the one who everyone in their tightknit community would easily blame for something he hadn’t done. There’s no trust or respect for the Pritchards. But the key word here is perceived. Marcus is only thirteen, had he been born into a different family, he’d be a different boy. Expectation weighs heavily on him – his family want him to be like them. In their household, all ‘love’ is conditional. 

Often, no one gives children like him a chance so I wanted to explore that…but how to take readers along with me? How to create empathy for the boy with a terrible reputation who is literally being trained to break the law?

Writing Marcus was a balancing act, he had to behave badly enough to be a believable product of his upbringing, but with flashes of the kind boy inside. So he steals, he’s aggressive, he vandalises, he breaks and enters. And his internal monologue swings from defence to reason to guilt, showing the reader he’s no one-dimensional criminal kid. 

Almost everyone in his small town expects Marcus to do the wrong thing so he often makes bad choices to live down to their expectations. For instance, in one scene, he goes into a bakery to buy a pasty but the owner is so mistrustful – and so demonstrably generous with other kids – Marcus steals instead of paying. In his mind, he may as well prove the owner right; he has no reason to behave otherwise. I needed to give him those reasons. And they came in the form of two other outsiders; retired Mick, the neighbour who built a nuclear bunker in his own garden and Emma, the headstrong peace protestor. In their own ways, they each offer Marcus opportunities to change, to prove there’s a good kid in there.

Luckily for Marcus, I loved him from the beginning, so making readers feel the same was easier. You have to feel things for your characters – good or bad – or no one else will. Part of how I did this was to make Marcus very alone; he has an unloving family (his only nice brother is incarcerated in borstal), he’s fallen out with his closest mate and been suspended from school. This made him more open to forming bonds with Mick and Emma. But trusting others and being trusted himself needed to take time, as it would in real life. His transformation had to be gradual and believable. 

Writing in first person provides an opportunity to show who a character can truly be through their thoughts as well as their actions. We are inside Marcus’s head, but the reader also brings their own, more distanced, perspective. We see he’s frustrated, desperate, actually quite sad and often scared, although he’d never admit it. 

Believable characters need layers and, underneath all the swagger and bravado, we see Marcus’s true potential to break away from his expected path in life. At his core, he’s decent and has a sense of right and wrong despite his family’s twisted set of ‘values’. I had to feed in glimpses of his good nature; he’s nice to a cat, he gives Mick a hand with some building materials, he steps in to defend Emma when the peace protest gets out of hand. 

Is Marcus’s story the classic Hero’s Journey? I don’t know; as a non-planner I tend not to get that technical. Maybe it’s the Antihero’s Journey? Either way, in this thirteen-year-old ‘bad kid’, I found my fresh angle.

Lesley Parr grew up in a South Wales steel town. Her debut, The Valley of Lost Secrets, published in 2021 and was a Waterstones Book of the Month, longlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, and shortlisted for both the Branford Boase and UKLA awards. Lesley’s books have won the Tir na n-Og Award (2022, 2024) and Wales Children’s Book of the Year (2023), amongst others. All three of her novels so far have received CILIP Carnegie Medal nominations. A former primary school teacher, she holds an MA with distinction in Writing for Young People. Lesley now lives in England with her husband and rescue cat, Ramsay. She shares her time between writing stories, tutoring adults and shouting at rugby on the TV.