10 Signs of a Great Protagonist

By Janice Hardy

At the heart of every story is a person with a problem, and the more compelling that person is, the better the story will be.

Imagine you’re having lunch one day when you overhear an animated group at a table, gossiping about a bunch of people with crazy lives. Some of them debate which hottie Jess should end up with, while others discuss the terrible behavior of Selene, and not one of them can agree on what Alastair is really up to.

You lean closer, curious about this wild group, and soon realize they’re not talking about life on the cul-de-sac, but their favorite novel—or more specifically—their favorite characters.

If you’re a writer (or a reader), discussing fictional people as if they really existed is normal. For writers, it’s even encouraged.

How to Make Readers Care About Your Protagonist—and Your Plot

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

If you’re struggling with a lagging story, a lack of character agency might be the reason why.

A helpful-yet-brutal piece of critique feedback is “Why should I care?” Why should readers care about the character, the conflict, or the story in general? Why should they read this novel you’ve worked so hard to create?

“Because it’s my novel and I love it” might be true, but sadly, no one outside our friends and family accept that as a reason. And sometimes, not even then if we have honest critique partners. Potential readers are lost every day to novels that might be good in every other aspect, but they just “didn’t care” what happened to the characters.

Often, this is due to a lack of agency.

Why Rescuing Your Protagonist Might Be a Terrible Idea

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

It’s fun to get your protagonist into trouble, but before you do, consider how they might get out of it.

I enjoy putting my protagonists in terrible danger, and throwing them into situations they can’t easily get out of. Which is both a lot of fun, and a whole pile of frustration, because sometimes I don’t know how to get them out of that trouble. I’m one of those writers who likes to write into a corner and force myself to come up with more unpredictable solutions, which make for better scenes.

Except when it makes for a worse scene.

Back when I was working on my Healing Wars trilogy, I faced this situation multiple times. My protagonist, Nya, gets captures a lot. So I had to get her out of that jam a lot.

The first idea that always popped into my head was to have another character come to her rescue, but I discarded it almost immediately every time.

Two Reasons Why Your Protagonist Isn't Driving Your Plot

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The protagonist is the driving force behind the plot, but sometimes he or she feels just along for the ride. Here's an updated look at why your protagonist might not be driving your plot. 

First drafts are often full of holes and weak characters, which is fine since we don’t always know where a first draft will lead. It’s okay for it to be a mess. But once we know how the story unfolds, it’s time to go back and make everything is serving that story.

A good place to start is with the protagonist. Is (s)he driving the story or is (s)he just along for the ride?

First draft protagonists can go several ways, but two common miss-directions are too much time spent in their head and too little. Too much is a draft filled with lots of internalization and thinking out every detail, but not a whole lot of actual doing going on. Too little is all plot and not enough thought to know why any of it matters. For a well-rounded story, you want both.

What to Do if You Think You Have the Wrong Protagonist

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The wrong protagonist is a serious issue for a first draft, but one that does happen from time to time. We get an idea, we write it, and it turns out that the person we thought was at the center of everything really isn’t.

This can be disheartening, but it's not the end of the world or the end of the novel. Go ahead and vent to your writer buddies about your frustration, then roll up your sleeves and get to work fixing the problem.

To find the right protagonist for your novel, ask yourself:

The Main Event: Main Characters Vs. Protagonists

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Visit any writer's forum and you'll see tons of posts that talk about the MC (main character). You'll even see posts that talk about the main characters (plural), because there are several. This has always struck me as a little odd, because by definition, "main" is the most important, so that suggests singular. All those posts got me thinking about a couple of things.

1. Can you have more than one "main" character? 
2. How is the main character different from the protagonist?

What Makes Your Protagonist Heroic?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

The protagonist is the hero of his or her story. That “hero” could be a shinning knight out to save the world from evil or an assassin who sets out to avenge the death of his wife. Hero and anti-hero, good and bad, noble and justified. Being the hero doesn’t necessarily mean being the good guy.

Yet we love our heroes no matter where they fall on the good to bad scale. We cheer for the assassin just as loudly as we do for the hunky guy in colorful tights. It’s not their profession we find heroic, it’s what they’re doing with those skills.

You killed the puppy his dead wife sent him? Oh dude, you gotta die. (John Wick)

Whose Story is It?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Some story ideas come to us through a character, so we know exactly who the story belongs to. It’s that person with a problem and we start our novels with that in mind. Other ideas are more conceptual or based on a situation, and we have the entire problem figured out before we know the best person to dump that problem on.

In these novels, it’s not uncommon for us to lose sight of whose story is it—or not decide that at all before we start writing it. We’re more interested in the premise than the people that premise affects.

The Trouble With Reactive Protagonists

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A reactive protagonist is a common reason for rejected manuscripts, and a common problem in premise novels—the novel explores a concept and shows “things happening,” yet there’s no real person with a problem. When a protagonist is reactive, they’re just someone who has “things happen” to them. The protagonist isn’t driving the plot, but only reacting to things that almost randomly happen.

Reactive protagonists are troublesome because they’re often a red flag that the story problem or core conflict isn’t personal enough to the character. If the problem mattered, then the protagonist would have reasons to act to resolve that problem. They can also indicate that a story that lacks narrative drive and feels aimless, or worse—pointless.

Set Up or Start Up? Making Critical Character Traits Part of Your Plot

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Every protagonist has something unique about them, otherwise we wouldn’t have picked them as our protagonist. This "thing" is often what gets them into trouble and makes the story happen. It’s central to who they are, which means there’s a pretty good chance it’ll be on the cover copy or in the query. Readers will know what it is before they open the book. Which leads to a bit of a quandary.

How do you show that important trait in the opening without it sounding like setup or infodump?

Readers of The Shifter know my protagonist can heal by shifting pain--it says so right there on the cover. Had I started the novel with an example of Nya just using her ability, it probably would have bored folks and they’d have wanted to know when the story was going to start. Instead, I put Nya in a situation where readers could see the trait in action, but the goal of the scene was something that had nothing to do with that ability. And that’s the key to showing important character traits.

5 Essential Questions to Ask When Writing Your Protagonist

By Bridget McNulty, @bridgetmcnulty

Part of the How They Do It Series

No matter what your writing process, at some point you're going to have to develop your protagonist. Please help me welcome Bridget McNulty to the lecture hall today, to share five questions that will help you figure out who this all-important character really is.

Bridget published her first novel, Strange Nervous Laughter, in South Africa in 2007 (with Struik) and in the USA in 2009 (with Macmillan). She has just completed her second novel, Life in six courses. She's also the founder of Now Novel, an easy to use motivational online writing course.

Website | Facebook | Twitter | Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indie Bound

Take it away Bridget...

You Need More Scoundrels in Your Life: How to Write a Han Solo Hero in Six Easy Steps!

By Tiffany Reisz, @tiffanyreisz

Hey Readers!

Last month on Janice Hardy’s blog, we had a nice long talk comparing Luke Skywalker to Han Solo. We learned that Han Solo is the real hero of the Star Wars world because, unlike Luke, he has a compelling character arc. We learned to look at our own heroes and decides if we’d written dynamic Han Solos or flat Luke Skywalkers. But what if you’re just starting your book? How does one write a Han Solo-esque hero, a real alpha scoundrel for the ages? Well, I’ve got six easy tips to give your hero a Han!

Han Versus Luke – Who’s the Better Hero?

By Tiffany Reizs, @tiffanyreisz

JH: I'm delighted to announce a new column for the blog: Contributing Authors. This column will continue to develop over the next few months, but the goal is to bring a regular guest author to the blog every Thursday. Four authors, four Thursdays (for those rare fifth Thursdays I'll have to find a wildcard post or maybe do a critique contest or something fun). I have two contributors lined up so far. One for fiction and one for poetry, and my plan is to fill the last two spots with an agent, editor, and/or marketing person to get some inside tips on the business side of fiction.

Kicking off the column is the always informative and fun Tiffany Reisz, and you'll see posts from her every third Thursday (don't worry, I'll have a schedule if you forget).

Take it away Tiffany...