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What little protagonists are made of


Student of Trinity

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After writing quite a lot more of this story than I had at the point of my November 2012 post "Cordite and steel and everything nice", it seems that Anastasia works quite well as a character. The people who have read my drafts so far are all family members, so they're an easy crowd, but everyone seems to really like Anastasia.

 

Liking the protagonist is really important, especially when she's also the narrator. An unlikable narrator-protagonist makes the whole book painful, but with a likable one even a broken shoelace can raise a bit of suspense. My second protagonist-narrator, Thomas, was less appealing. I abruptly switched narration to him, half-way through the story, and everybody found this disappointing. They wanted Anastasia back.

 

Anastasia has issues and limitations and deep mysteries to solve, but my book is an action adventure, and for my female protagonist, all that stuff is really chrome. The engine is being an escapist super-heroine with uncanny presence of mind in a crisis. Anastasia is sympathetic and nice and all, for a stone cold killer, but being nice isn't enough. The most important thing is, she makes things happen. I'm thinking this may be the simple active ingredient in a good protagonist — the special sauce, as it were.

 

It's not so easy to pull off. You can have your heroine solve a problem, for instance; but does she really do it? Or does it just solve itself automatically, while the heroine poses for the camera? I don't think that has the same oomph. You've got to show the protagonist making things happen, not just tell it. You've got to write a credible sequence of causes and effects that resolves the problem, and the protagonist's actions have to be crucial links in the chain. Every little problem is a story in miniature, and you make your big story's protagonist work by making sure she's the protagonist of a lot of little stories. In my story, Anastasia herself is the main plot device. She keeps making things happen. I think this goes a long way to making her appealing.

 

I think that "making things happen" can also apply at different levels in a story. The least effective level has the protagonist jumping through a series of hoops that are presented by others. The jumping may be ingenious, but the hoops aren't the heroine's doing. I think the protagonist makes things happen in a bigger way, that makes her more appealing, if she is also doing things to select the hoops. Anastasia works well in this way, I think. She is pro-active to the point of recklessness. She tends to choose her own targets, and very seldom is it up to anyone else to judge whether she succeeds or fails. She's not trying to make anyone like her. Her success or failure is usually as objective as surviving or dying.

 

Anastasia is an active protagonist and not just an observer. She is anything but a victim, even though bad things happen to her; she does a lot of dangerous things, knowing the risks. Her decisions drive the plot. This does more to make her an appealing character than anything else, I think. It has nothing to do with her being female, but I think this itself may be an important point about female characters. Stupid habits and preconceptions tend to turn them into bystanders. Avoid this, and you have a more interesting character right away.

 

Anyway, for what it's worth, both my wife and my mother seem to like Anastasia. Both complained when the narration switched away from her.

 

That's my main problem now, as I try to hack and hammer out a second draft. I have a second narrator, who is supposed to be a second protagonist, and who should be an adequate foil for Anastasia. She's a hard act to follow, but I have a monstrous mutant with superhuman strength and speed, driven by a fanatical cause; and I have a ruthless manipulator who reads people like comic books by instinctive recognition of micro-expressions, and can play any part but himself. These are both Thomas MacLayne. He's a throwback descendant of a line of bio-engineered special forces who were designed to foment revolutions. People are puppets to him, but he has been conditioned from birth to hate abuse of power, so he's sort of a good-guy psychopath, like Batman.

 

As an action-adventure protagonist, Thomas seems promising. Yet in my first draft he came across as all dressed up with no place to go, in comparison with Anastasia's abrupt action.

 

The problem is all in the third of my book's four sections, in which Thomas has entirely taken over narration, but has not yet shown his Hulk side. My draft squandered all his preternatural insightfulness on narratorial observations and gloomy commentary. He watched things go by. He dumped a lot of data. He didn't make things happen. The third section was trickily plotted, and in tying it all up to get Anastasia apparently burned as a witch, I let my second protagonist-narrator retire from protagonism. In effect I finally got the whole thing put together, and discovered I had a lot of parts left over — all the things that Thomas should have done.

 

I have spent months trying to fix this. I think I'm on the right track. Thomas does make things happen, now. When I first started trying to revise this section, I had the idea of making him a persecuted victim who was just managing to survive; but I've reversed direction completely on this, now. Now he is an expert conspirator setting up a bloodbath of revenge. His schemes derail, because the mysterious bad guys are finally showing their hand, and because Thomas himself will change his mind about who his real enemies are. So he will inevitably look less unstoppable than Anastasia, when the dust has all settled. He'll have made more mistakes and had more things go wrong; he'll have failed to solve some of his problems. Okay. I guess that's just how it is. Maybe it can be enough for a good and likable protagonist to try to make things happen, if he tries well enough, and fails in a good cause.

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