by Donald Maass
Write on a breakout level and you will not feel dependent on capricious-looking promotional bucks, either. You will be secure in your fan base and in your confidence that you can keep your readers spellbound book after book.
Enjoy the journey. I have enjoyed bringing these exercises and observations to you. I hope you will enjoy using them as you create your breakout novel and all the wonderful novels that will follow it.
—Donald Maass
From Protagonist to Hero
Why would we wish to read about characters whom we do not like? The fact is, we don't. We stick with characters we like, admire, and cheer tor; we abandon characters we dislike, disapprove of, and don't care about. It's that simple. That is not to say that protagonists can't be flawed, troubled, torn, haunted, unhappy, hapless, or in any other condition that makes their situation ripe for drama and action.
But that is not the same as a protagonist who is downbeat, depressed, hopeless, bitter, stuck, or in other ways in a condition that makes us feel fed up. Have you ever known someone who couldn't shake off self-pity? How much tolerance did you have for that negativity? Not much, I bet. It is the same in novels. That is why lifting your hero above his circumstances—indeed, above himself—is so necessary.
How do you do that? It starts in your opening pages, when your protagonist gives us some reason to care; that is to say, identify with him or her. Why should we? Well, why do we feel sympathy for anyone? I believe it is because we see ourselves in them. Indeed, when we see in others ourselves as we would like to be, higher admiration sets in and with it deep concern and abiding hope. We want our heroes to win.
Quickly evoking that kind of identification with a protagonist is one of the secrets of breakout fiction. Most manuscripts do not manage it. It is as if authors are afraid to push too far too fast; they fear, perhaps, that if their protagonists immediately are strong they will not be credible.
Nonsense. Heroic qualities are highly desired. No one disbelieves in them. Everyone seeks them, and in their absence feels disappointed. Furthermore, it doesn't take much to endow a protagonist with qualities that we like and admire. A small show of gumption, a glimmer of humor, a dab of ironic self-regard can be enough for us to hang onto.
In Tess Gerritsen's thriller The Surgeon, ER surgeon Catherine Cordell has
every reason to be fragile. Two years earlier she was the only victim to successfully fight off a brutal serial killer whose method involved tying women to a bed and performing surgery on them without anesthetic. But Catherine Cordell is strong. We first meet her in the emergency room:
Dr. Catherine Cordell sprinted down the hospital corridor, the soles of her running shoes squeaking on the linoleum, and pushed through the double doors into the emergency room.
A nurse called out: "They're in Trauma Two, Dr. Cordell!"
"I'm there," said Catherine, moving like a guided missile straight for Trauma Two.
So far we know little of Catherine, yet we are drawn to her. Why? I think it is the strength inherent in the phrase "moving like a guided missile." This woman is focused. She knows what she is doing. That becomes even more evident a page later as she prepares to operate on a hit-and-run victim right in the ER rather than the more usual OR:
"All rooms are in use. We can't wait." Someone tossed her a paper cap. Swiftly she tucked in her shoulder-length red hair and tied on a mask. A scrub nurse was already holding out a sterile surgical gown. Catherine slipped her arms into the sleeves and thrust her hands into gloves. She had no time to scrub, no time to hesitate. She was in charge, and John Doe was crashing on her . . .
"Where's the blood?" she called out.
"I'm checking with the lab now," said a nurse.
"Ron, you're the first assist," Catherine said to Littman. She glanced around the room and focused on a pasty-faced young man standing by the door. His nametag read: Jeremy Barrows, Medical Student. "You," she said. "You're second assist!"
Panic flushed in the young man's eyes. "But—I'm only in my second year. I'm just here to—"
"Can we get another surgical resident in here?"
Littman shook his head. "Everyone's spread thin. They've got a head injury in Trauma One and a code down the hall."
"Okay." She looked back at the student. "Barrows, you're it. Nurse, get him a gown and gloves."
"What do I have to do? Because I really don't know—"
"Look, you want to be a doctor? Then glove up!"
Catherine's command of the situation is hard to resist. In a short time, Gerritsen has us cheering for this gutsy doctor. Catherine's bravura is a facade, though. We soon learn that the trauma of her brush with the serial killer known as The Surgeon has left her brittle and afraid. Indeed, when a new killer begins to imitate modus operandi of The Surgeon, so tightly controlled
and anxious is her mental state that the police suspect Catherine herself. However, thanks to the strength with which Gerritsen already has invested her, we never doubt her sanity.
What about a protagonist who is not demonstrating heroism as we first meet her, but instead necessarily displays unattractive qualities? That is the challenge faced by Ann Packer at the beginning of her delicately observed literary novel The Dive From Clausen's Pier. The beginning of this story finds Packer's heroine, Carrie Bell, a year out of college and discontent with her familiar life and friends in Madison, Wisconsin. She is weary of her boyfriend of eight-and-a-half years, Mike, and quickly alerts the reader that an "unraveling" is looming between them.
All of this is perfectly human, yet Carrie's sullen mood in the opening scene, a Memorial Day picnic at Clausen's Reservoir, easily could make her difficult to like. This is an especially dangerous opening moment for Packer because in the novel's inciting event, Mike soon will dive from a pier into water unexpectedly shallow, break his neck, and wind up in the hospital in a coma. This circumstance guiltily ties Carrie to Madison when she would rather leave, a powerful inner conflict that infuses the novel with its driving tension. And yet in the novel's opening scene Carrie plainly is in a sour mood about her boyfriend:
The parking lot was only half full, and we found a spot in the shade. From behind my seat I unloaded a grocery bag of chips and hamburger buns while he opened the hatch. He wore long madras shorts and a green polo shirt, and as I watched his movements, the quick, effortless way he lifted the beer-laden cooler, I thought about how that easy strength of his had thrilled me once, and how it didn't anymore.
Ouch! How are we to feel sympathy for this hard young woman? Especially later, after a tragedy incapacitates her, to all appearances, perfectly likeable and loving boyfriend? Packer is aware of this difficulty. She addresses it first by giving Carrie nothing bad to say about Mike. Theirs is just a relationship that has run its course. Carrie is a young woman yearning to spread her wings and fly away from her hometown. Who cannot understand that?
Next, Packer makes Carrie aware of her disaffection and its essential unfairness:
I could feel everyone looking at me: Rooster, Stu, Bill, Christine—even Jamie. Looking and thinking, Come on, Carrie, give the guy a break.
Here is Packer's secret: It is Carrie's keen awareness that she is in an ill mood that rescues our opinion of her. She knows that her friends can see it. She has the honesty and grace to observe their looks of reproach and not to defend herself.
In the hands of a less careful novelist, Carrie would be bitter about Mike, sarcastic toward him, ignore her friends, and indulge her dark feelings. We would find it impossible to sympathize with her. Packer takes a more balanced approach and leaves us with the feeling that Carrie is not mean-spirited, just a young woman who is trapped by her circumstances. That is a situation with which anyone can sympathize.
A still more subtle demonstration of opening strength can be found in one of Alan Furst's gripping World War II espionage novels, The Polish Officer. Furst's handling point of view in this novel borders on objective. At first his hero, Captain Alexander de Milja, is seen as if through t
he lens of a camera: from the outside only. It is September, 1939. As Germans invade Warsaw, de Milja supervises the burning of documents at the headquarters of Military Intelligence. One by one, de Milja watches the immolation of maps, plans, surveys, etc:
Drawer 4088: Istanbul by street. Istanbul harbor with wharf warehouse numbers. Surveyor's elevations of Uskudar with shore batteries in scale. Bosphorus with depths indicated. Black Sea coast: coves, inlets, bridges, roads. Sea of Marmara coast: cloves, inlets, bridges, roads.
In the fire.
Drawer 4098: Timber company surveys, 1935-1938, streams, logging paths, old and new growth trees, drainage, road access, river access. For forests in Poland, Byelorussia, and the Ukraine.
"That series aside please," de Milja said.
The clerk, startled, whirled and stared, then did as he was ordered. The timber surveys were stacked neatly atop maps, drawn in fine detail, of the Polish railway system.
De Milja's sparing a set of forest surveys from the flames may not seem particularly notable, but there is something calm, deliberate, and purposeful in de Milja's order to set them aside. We suspect that something is at work under the surface—something strong. As the action unfolds in the following pages we realize what it is. De Milja has grasped his country's essential situation: The Germans will conquer Poland. Maps, surveys, and plans will be needed for the resistance into which he is later recruited.
De Milja's intelligence, deliberate care, and ability to face a dawning reality set him apart. He has unusual strength. Even though Furst has not yet taken us inside his hero's head and heart, we already admire him for his actions.
How do you hint at the heroism of your protagonist in the opening pages of your current manuscript? How do you make us care? What about this character will we find admirable and attractive? More to the point, what is it that you find likable about this character at this precise moment? Figure that out, and you will be most of the way toward making us, your readers, care as much about your protagonist as you do.
__EXERCISE
Adding Heroic Qualities
Step 1: Who are your personal heroes? Write down the name of one.
Step 2: What makes this person a hero or heroine to you? What is his or her greatest heroic quality? Write that down.
Step 3: What was the moment in time in which you first became aware of this quality in your hero/heroine? Write that down.
Step 4: Assign that quality to your protagonist. Find a way for he or she actively to demonstrate that quality, even in a small way, in his or her first scene. Make notes, starting now.
Follow-up work: Prior to the climactic sequence of your novel, find six more points at which your protagonist can demonstrate, even in a small way, some heroic quality.
Conclusion: So many protagonists who I meet in manuscripts start out as ordinary Joe's or Jane's. Most stories build toward enormous heroic actions at the end, which is fine, but what about the beginning? What is there to make me care? Often, not enough. Demonstrate special qualities right away, and you will immediately turn your protagonist into a hero or heroine, a character whose outcome matters.
Multidimensional Characters
One-dimensional characters hold limited interest for us because they are limited as human beings. They lack the complexity that makes real-life people so fascinating. In well-constructed fiction, a multidimensional character will keep us guessing: What is this person going to do, say, or think next? Furthermore, we are more likely to identify with them—that is, to see ourselves in them. Why? Because there is more of them to see.
Eoin Colfer's young adult novel Artremis Fowl was billed as a "dark Harry Potter," a description that intrigued me. I grew even more interested when Artemis Fowl hit The New York Times best-seller list. The novel's twelve-year-old protagonist, I had read, was a criminal mastermind. How could a novel with such a dark protagonist be so popular?
Fatherless Artemis Fowl, the scion of a famous Irish criminal family, is indeed diabolically clever and bent on a wicked scheme: restoring the family fortunes by obtaining the gold that is set aside to ransom any fairy, should one ever fall into the hands of the Mud People; that is to say, humans.
If that was all there was to Artemis, he would indeed be difficult to like. But Colfer does not expect us to sympathize with a one-dimensional, amoral adolescent. Early in the novel Colfer begins dropping hints that there is more to Artemis than that; indeed, that he is a boy with a range of feelings like any other, as we are shown when Artemis visits his mentally frail and bedridden mother:
He knocked gently on the arched double doors.
"Mother? Are you awake?"
Something smashed against the other side of the door. It sounded expensive.
"Of course I'm awake! How can I sleep in this blinding glare?"
Artemis ventured inside. An antique four-poster bed threw shadowy spires in the darkness, and a pale sliver of light poked through a gap in the velvet curtains. Angeline Fowl sat hunched on the bed, her pale limbs glowing white in the gloom.
"Artemis, darling. Where have you been?"
Artemis sighed. She recognized him. That was a good sign.
"School trip, Mother. Skiing in Austria."
"Ah, skiing," crooned Angeline. "How I miss it. Maybe when your father returns."
Artemis felt a lump in his throat. Most uncharacteristic.
Artemis is trying to deny his longing for his father and his grief over his mother's condition, but Colfer makes sure that his readers do not miss them. Later on, Artemis succeeds in capturing a fairy, Holly Short, a high tech-equipped officer in LEPrecon, the elite branch of the Lower Elements Police. Artemis lays a deadly trap for Holly's superior officer, Commander Root, aboard a whaling boat, which blows up. Root is nearly killed; meanwhile, Holly suffers (or appears to) in captivity. Artemis gloats over his success, but mixed with his glee are other emotions:
Artemis leaned back in the study's leather swivel chair, smiling over steepled fingers. Perfect. That little explosion should cure those fairies of their cavalier attitude. Plus there was one less whaler in the world. Artemis Fowl did not like whalers. There were less objectionable ways to produce oil by-products. . . .
Artemis consulted the basement surveillance monitor. His captive was sitting on her cot now, head in hands. Artemis frowned. He hadn't expected the fairy to appear so . . . human. Until now, they had merely been quarry. Animals to be hunted. But now, seeing one like this, in obvious discomfort—it changed things.
Artemis Fowl believes himself to be single-mindedly focused on his goal of extorting fairy gold, but again and again his author shows us that Artemis has other, more human sides. These added dimensions make Colfer's hero a complex criminal mastermind—and one for whom we can feel sympathy.
Plot events themselves can provoke the emergence of a new side of a character. Ann B. Ross's fourth novel, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, scores a hit with its portrait of Julia Springer, a wealthy, sixty-ish lady in a small North Carolina town. Miss Julia is a proud, frugal, orderly banker's widow. She is well acquainted with the ways of a small town. When her dead husband's nine-year-old bastard son is dumped on her doorstep one day, Miss Julia is mortified— and knows that gossip about this development will ruin her life. She is terrified. What to do? After considering her options, Miss Julia makes a surprising choice:
"Here's what I'm going to do," I went on, feeling my way as I talked. "The first thing I'm not going to do is call any of those child welfare agencies. Keeping this child is my cross the bear, even thought I don't deserve it, and it's the only way to get back at Wesley Lloyd. He hid this child for a decade, but I'm not hiding him. And I'm not going to hide my face, either. None of this is my fault, so why should I act like it is? There's not a reason in the world. They're going to talk no matter what I do, so I'm going to give them something to talk about. I'm going to hold my head up if it kills me, and I'm not going to protect Wesley Lloyd Springer from the consequences. This is his son, and everybody's going t
o know it, without any guessing. I'm going to flaunt this child before the whole town, so let the cookies crumble!"
Miss Julia's suddenly stiff backbone becomes not only a reason for reader sympathy, but a plot spine as well. With a sharp eye, and sharper tongue, Miss Julia sets about transcending the town gossips and inheritance grabbers—mostly.
This new character dimension is not the first that Ross reveals. Although Miss Julia claims to be tenderhearted when it comes to children, there is little maternal warmth in evidence as she regards her husband's illegitimate son:
Not hearing any movement behind me, I turned to see Lillian's arms around the little bastard, his head against her white nylon uniform. He turned loose the grocery sack long enough to wipe the sleeve of one arm across his running nose, smearing his glasses even more. It was enough to turn your stomach.
Later in the novel, after little Lloyd Jr., has been taken away by this tele-vangelist uncle, Rev. Vernon Pucket, to be reunited, Miss Julia is told, with his mother, who is going to a hairdressing school in Raleigh, Ross reveals another side of Miss Julia:
Oh, there were a lot of things I could've done and should've done, and now I had to live with it all. I got up sometime in the middle of the night and walked across the hall to little Lloyd's room. The empty bed made me realize how empty my house was, and maybe my life, as well.
I was just a selfish old woman with nothing but a few million dollars to her name. No husband, no children, nothing to look forward to but more of the same. Even the thought of writing checks and buying things couldn't lift my spirits.