Advice on portraying my protagonist's anger without making her insufferable
Background Info: My main character starts out the story with kind of a sad back story, it's not in a tragic way, just the normal kind of misfortune; losing family members, having to drop out of college (with a lot of debt) to take responsibility for her family's small business, and also losing all of her friends after she naturally breaks down from the stress and goes on a drug bender, they also felt uncomfortable that she wasn't in school anymore and stopped supporting her. I'd like to think that this is a common thing to have happen to someone, the story takes place several years later. She's fine, mostly happy, and engaged but still has a lot of anger and regret about how she handled things in the past.
My problem: I'm not really sure how to express that without having her have some kind of an annoying internal monologue or just seem pathetic. Her circumstances change a lot in the story and she has to come to grips with and let go of all of that negativity in the end.
Question: What is a good approach (or approaches) to depict her underlying anger enough to show that it's a problem, but also have her still be likable?
Hopefully I made this clear enough, let me know if you need more info!
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Dialogue and monologue.
Dialogue with her friends, one by one, until they leave. With a bartender or barista. On a chat room or a BBS.
Monologue could be writing in a diary or a blog. Or potentially she monologues at her cat, who will look interested only until she's fed.
Whoever the audience is, have the character say out loud the things she's thinking and feeling, with occasional asides of things she's thinking and feeling that she doesn't want to admit out loud.
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I suggest a popular literary technique called 'indirect characterisation'
If your writing in first person; write about her thoughts and reasons and actions. If she is approached by someone who speaks and she reveals how that person has affected her ,good or bad.
If in second person you may start a chapter revealing that she had suffered a breakdown and is recovering in a bar, then you hint what's going on in the bar and what affect this has on her senses. Smell of beer, taste of free water, feeling of splinters under the bar table...and so on
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/23610. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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