No protagonist? No problem! (but don't try this at home)

Red Letter Media has a long, detailed and extremely rude (read Not Safe For Work Or Children, which is why I'm not linking it) review of The Phantom Menace during which the reviewer explains that the movie has no protagonist.

(My husband and I can recite this part, and often do: "Your movie should focus on someone. A prota... pro... protaGONist.") Plinkett continues by saying that the protagonist is the one who faces the main story question and in solving the main story problem, changes in ways that are good for him or her, and that this is called an "arc."

As soon as he said this, it occurred to me that this is why Phantom Menace failed in places where Star Wars so admirably succeeds: because you care about Luke, and unfortunately the viewer in no way cares about the characters of Phantom Menace. At least, I didn't. I should have, and I wanted to, but it all felt so flat. Plinkett even runs down the main characters to show why none are the protagonist.

This weekend, my Patient Husband and I watched The Avengers for the first time. We'd worked up to it by watching all the other movies, and despite the hype, the movie delivered. We loved it and we're going to watch it again, and then we did what geeks do, which is discuss it at length.

And last night, my Patient Husband said to me, "You know what's odd, though? There was no prota... pro..." and I gasped.

Think about it, if you were one of the 50 million people who saw the movie before I did: there isn't one main character in the movie. No one changes. There's a flimsy attempt at a character arc with Iron Man's decision at the end, but really, no one changed. No one person's decision hinged the movie.

Put on your writer hat. What would the QueryShark say to this? I'm not in her league, but I'd guess she'd say that if querying your book with an ensemble cast, you focus on one character so we care.

Now, did I care? Heck yeah. I felt for these characters. I was pulling for them the whole way through. And not just because of the action or the peril. I also don't think it's owing to watching the previous films and getting to know the characters then because others who hadn't seen all six films also cared. Since the film grossed something like one and a half billion (so far), it's a good bet that peopel cared.

What did Joss Wheadon do right?

Let me take a guess here: the team itself is the protagonist. The Avengers team is, in and of itself, your main character.  It starts as something formless, something with officials lined up against it, and in its most nascent moments it knows it's needed but at the same time struggles to exist. It's internally conflicted. It's got both a hidden need and an external need. It sets aside its random individual needs and yet at the same time, tries to meet or resolve them for a greater good. It's got an antagonist who wants nothing more than to sow self-doubt in order to undercut it.

In its darkest hours, it doesn't even exist any longer, and yet it overcomes that. It's got a journey. It faces a decision.

I used to say this about the Battle of the Planets/Gatchaman team, that the team itself was my favorite character in the series, but here it was so much more intensive.

This is a black-belt level writing trick. I would not recommend attempting this unless you're driven to do it and nothing else will make you happy. As I said above, most ensemble casts do focus on one as the primary protagonist. But in this case, I have to say: learn. Watch and learn, because I'd love to be able to do that someday, and I'd wager that most of the rest of us would too.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Wrong Enemy, to be released by MuseItUp on October 5th. She is also author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a dis

Querying your unlikeable character

The common advice for query-writing is to have character, crisis and conflict. All well and good, but what if your main character is a jerk?

Worse, what if your main character is unappealing on gut-level?

Literature is full of unappealing characters, but I'm not talking about main characters some readers personally can't stand. I'm talking about the ones whom human beings in general categorically don't like, such as rapists. Murderers. You get my drift. Sure, once we start reading the book we may like these characters -- may like them a lot -- but in terms of a query, you don't get very much space to introduce these questionable people. Yet with edgy fiction, you may have a character on the fringes of what most people will tolerate.

In about 250 words, you need to convince an agent or editor to read about someone she probably would step out of an elevator to avoid.

So, how to introduce (and make someone root for) a bully, a demon, a kidnapper, a racist...? Or in the case of my first novel, someone who murdered a child? I think you do it by adding more to the package.

The very first thing I would suggest is working out for yourself exactly why you love this character. After all, you must have loved this character a lot in order to spend hundreds of hours writing and editing him (or her). Why do you find him appealing? (If it's just, "Well, assassins are cool!" then you're going to need to skip this step. If it's "Well, I wanted to raise everyone's consciousness that human traffickers are evil," then you might want to rethink the whole book.)

Maybe it's the character's intelligence. Maybe he was abused as a child and wanted to break out of the cycle but couldn't figure out how. Present those characteristics. Let us know the character is multidimensional.

Maybe it's how he justifies himself to himself. Show us the labyrinthine thought that allows this person to think well of himself despite what he's doing. 

Second: is he at rock bottom? Right now? Give it to us, raw and bloody, there in the first paragraph of the query, everything this person has already lost by being this unappealing. He's in jail awaiting the guillotine after assassinating the crown prince. Or maybe his wife went into hiding with their kids when she discovered the horrible thing he'd done last week.

Third: the voice. It might be that this character is as outrageously funny as he is outrageously appealing. If that's the case, pull out all the stops to showcase that character's voice in your query. If the character's just so gripping to listen to, we'll be willing to listen to some unsavory stuff.

Fourth: humor. According to Blake Snyder in Save The Cat, the movie Natural Born Killers works because the two guys are so funny that you want to keep listening to them. It's an extension of voice, but if your main character is funny, try to showcase that in the query. 

Fifth: the character's dreams -- and what stands in his way. If the character aspires to something other than what he is now, let us know. Maybe he wishes he could quit pimping and go to college, but first he needs to learn to read.

What not to include? Why the main character had no choice about what he is. Most of us have been in awful situations without becoming murderers or kidnappers, and therefore no matter what the circumstances, we're not going to find it convincing that this person had no other choice. It will just make the character sound weak and the plot contrived. But if the character chose this way of life, then we can believe that by the end of the book, the character can choose something better.

Obviously it's easier to make someone care about an orphan tween being raised by his cruel aunt and uncle, but querying an unappealing character is as possible as it is to write about one.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the riveting Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.

Strengths and Your Protagonist

One of the reasons I love having a real-life critique group is that I learn even when I'm not the one being critiqued. For our meeting this past Saturday, one of the members had contributed a zombie story, and another member, unsure what to do with it, had gone through the trouble of finding an online guide to analyzing ironic fiction.

It never would have occurred to me to look up something like that, since I grew up bilingual in English and Sarcasm, but since I write a lot of humor, I snatched the article from the good critiquer's hands...only to discover not that much I didn't already know.

Except for one thing.

We all know about character flaws. A villain is arrogant and therefore discounts the one minuscule chance in a million that the heroes might just somehow be able to shoot a plasma bomb into the air vent and blow up the death star. "I think you overestimate their chances," he says, moments before he's floating through space in a million different directions. And we see this in protagonists too, where the protagonist has to overcome his weakness in order to solve the main conflict, and in a tragedy, often he doesn't.

But this article mentioned something I'd never considered: that sometimes your protagonist's strengths are going to get in the way of solving the problem.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the real people in your life for whom this is absolutely true: the organizational genius who could plan a mission to Mars but whose family gatherings are fodder for a letter that should go viral the week before Thanksgiving ("Please do not use the over-size blue serving dish you used last year.")

When a character's strengths are what stand between him and resolving the conflict, you've got an amazing story on your hands, because the reader will sense the tension: we don't want a conscientious worker to become a slacker, for example. We know he won't want that either. But we'll also recognize as readers when this hard worker is burning himself out or needs to rely on someone else's help, only he won't do it.

Every character trait has both positive and negative aspects, of course. To give an example far too close to home, take the writer who can create worlds and people, and makes her deadlines, but who has three loads of unfolded laundry on the couch. The trick would be (and this is not only for "ironic fiction" but for all fiction) to have the positive side of the character trait be what's standing in the protagonist's way.

A karate black-belt is able to use his opponent's strength against him. Your villain should be able to use the protagonist's strengths the same way.

Consider the possibilities: a forgiving protagonist who lets the villain get too close because she believes he's changed. A loyal protagonist who remains faithful to a leader he doesn't realize is taking advantage of him. A logical, intellectual protagonist who needs to follow the lead of his emotions in order to solve the conflict (or an intuitive, intense protagonist who needs to stop following his emotions and trust his analytics).

In all these cases, a character would need to retain those good character traits, not overcome them. And the challenge of the writer would to supplant what is good in the protagonist with an even greater good.
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Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the flawless Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.

A nameless protagonist

I have a simple, very simple, request for everyone who reads this blog. Please, please name your main character.

I recently ran a short story critique group as part of an online writers conference, and fully half the stories had a nameless main character. One of these was even a third-person narrator.

The reason given by the authors was, "I wanted the main character to be an everyman type," or "I wanted to make sure the reader would be able to step into her perspective." In addition to the lack of a name, these characters lacked history, lacked family, lacked motive -- lacked personality.

Before I begin dissuading you from taking this route, let me admit there are perfectly good stories which have nameless and extremely interesting narrators.  A. Lee Martinez does a fantastic job with a nameless first-person narrator in A Nameless Witch and Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca also has a nameless first person protagonist. 

But for the most part, every novel you pick up is going to have a protagonist with a name, and there's a reason for that. Because before your reader can identify with your protagonist, your protagonist has to have an identity. 

Leaving the character nameless is a symptom of this overall lack of identity in the main character, and rather than creating a blank slate on which the reader will write his own name, gives the reader a featureless individual who drifts rather than acts (since our actions come from our identity) and whom we instinctively distrust. In these cases, the namelessness is a symptom rather than a cause.

Do you want to write an "everyman" type of character? Check out the Harry Potter books. Not only is Harry's life detailed, but they're very specific details. They're in many ways over-the-top details, but they're all there, and yet millions of readers identify very strongly with Harry.

Now why would that be, since I can guarantee you all those millions of readers do not have magical powers, are not orphans, were not forced to bunk under the stairwell, and aren't living in boarding schools. Many aren't male and all the ones I know personally are not British. 

What we're identifying with is his core humanity. Break him down and you get:

1. someone who's special, but the world doesn't really know it
2. someone who faces adversity
3. someone who has trouble making friends, although he has a few close ones
4. someone who feels misunderstood by authority -- either people expecting too much of him or, by contrast, people expecting far more than he could possibly deliver
5. someone who feels the rules are smothering him and keeping him from achieving his full potential. 

Everyone can identify with these traits. Either we feel those things about ourselves, or we want to believe those things. Harry evokes in the reader a sense that we can transcend our past, can prove our detractors wrong and maybe live up to the expectations of our cheerleaders. Who wouldn't want to feel that?

So to make your MC more identifiable, give him that human core which we all want. Expanding those characteristics, even if they're not specific to every one of your readers, is going to make your protagonist more accessible. He doesn't have to be "everyman" in order to be identifiable to everyone.

The reader wants to invest in the main character. That's in the author's favor. It's easier for us to do that if your MC is inhabiting a fully-fleshed-out world of his own. That means a job, clothes, flaws, needs (both met and unmet), friends, choices to be made and the process by which the character makes them. It means a personality. It means a name. And once you give us those characteristics, we'll be able to step into his place and see ourselves there too.

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Jane Lebak is the author of The Guardian (Thomas Nelson, 1994), Seven Archangels: Annihilation (Double-Edged Publishing, 2008) and The Boys Upstairs (MuseItUp, 2010). At Seven Angels, Four Kids, One Family, she blogs about what happens when a distracted daydreamer and a gamer geek attempt to raise four children. She is represented by the resolute Roseanne Wells of the Marianne Strong Literary Agency.