In a chapter of his book 'Elements of Fiction Writing' Orson Scott Card takes on the difficult subject of how to get the reader more emotionally involved in a story. He discusses several ways this can be done including: suffering, sacrifice, jeopardy (the anticipation of pain or loss) and sexual tension.

'The intensity of the character's feeling, as long as it remains believable and bearable, will greatly intensify the reader's feelings - whatever they are.' Orson Scott Card

This ties-in with why it's so important to give your main character a concrete goal. (Something external that there is no doubt when it has been achieved or lost forever.) As long as your MC desperately wants something, even if this changes as they are changed by their experiences, they are bound to feel intensely when they come up against obstacles to reaching this goal.

Jeopardy, sexual tension, sacrifice (heroic altruistic acts) are all great points and it's worth reading what Scott Card has to say about them if you can get your hands on his book, but here I want to take the time to talk about 'suffering'.

Scott Card's point about making your character suffer led me to consider some of my favourite fictional characters. I noticed a couple of interesting things. Firstly, the vast majority of my favourite characters had already suffered greatly before the start of the novel. They have traumatic back-stories that are a vital part of who they are. In All Our Yesterday's by Cristin Terrill the main character Em has been through hell and back. She's been in a cell for months, tortured by the Doctor. In Poison Study by Maria. V. Snyder Yelena has been held prisoner for months and is facing execution for for killing a man who tortured her with extreme cruelties. In the Hunger Games Katniss and her sister almost starved to death when she was twelve and her father was blown up in a mine explosion.

Each of these characters has been through the kind of extreme physical and mental suffering that most of us (fortunately) will never experience. And they've each survived it and somehow remained strong and ready to fight. This is part of the reason, I think, why we are willing to invest in them straight away. We know we're siding with a survivor. They've been through hell already and made it out (mostly intact). We're ready to get onboard because they've already proved they're not the kind of person that will give up.

A character's suffering prior to us even meeting them can also be an intriguing way of developing your MCs flaw. Someone who has learnt through life's hard knocks that survival means never trusting, or avoiding too much compassion, or never depending on anyone else (for e.g.) will find it far harder to overcome this 'survival' reflex than someone who's defensive or aloof or guarded for no particular reason. Besides, who would you empathise with more, someone who was distrustful because that was their nature, or someone who was distrustful because their mother abandoned them into the hands of an abusive aunt when they were seven, promised to return and was never heard from again?

Scott includes two important warnings about using suffering to enhance your reader involvement:

If you 'keep harping on the character's suffering, the reader begins to feel that the character is whining, and the reader's emotional involvement decreases.'

'When pain or grief become unbearable in fiction, readers simply disengage from the story and either abandon the tale or laugh at it.'

I have often seen readers object to an MC that is too whiny, complaining or spends any time feeling sorry for themselves. There's a reason why we don't want a character to do this, even if they have suffered atrocities we can barely imagine. When someone talks a lot about how hard their life has been and how much they've been through, they are inadvertently asking you for sympathy. They want you to feel sorry for them. The problem is, when someone does this, they are putting themselves in the victim's shoes. As a reader we are identifying with a character and emotionally investing in them so we don't want them to be a victim. Why? A victim is someone who can't change their destiny, who is saying 'look what they've done to me' instead of 'this is what I'm going to do.' As readers enjoy being transported through other worlds by characters who have a good chance of succeeding, allowing your character to complain or feel sorry for themselves loses the reader's confidence.

While I'm not advocating that every story written should have a main character who has already suffered greatly before the start of the novel, this might be a device worth thinking about if you've had any difficulty getting readers to feel empathy towards your characters.

The kind of suffering you choose is also relative to the kind of book you're writing. A murdered girlfriend might suit an MC for a Contemporary Thriller, but not a Historical Romance.

I'd be very interested to hear whether your favourite characters from novels of any genre had already 'suffered' before the start of the novel.

Please note: When Orson Scott Card talks about a character suffering he seems to be referring to events during the novel and not necessarily preceding it.