Build a strong protagonist

What’s good, family?

Today, I want to talk a little about building a strong protagonist. Honestly, much of this applies to building all your main characters, but let’s focus on the top dog for the moment, since that’s one of the most important figures. 

Your protagonist is the driver of the story, usually, so it needs to be your strongest character in terms of development. 

When we refer to character development, what we’re talking about is how well you develop a character before the story begins. It’s how well you built that character and how well you know it. 

Character arc refers to how a character changes throughout a story, and sometimes writers get the two concepts confused. 

In the simplest way, character development is building a human. It is assigning all the traits and characteristics to a character that make them a full-fledged and fully fleshed out human. 

What I always recommend is building your character by answering just about any question you can think to ask about that person: 

• What is their temperament? 

• What is their affect?

• What are their beliefs?

• What things do they like to do?

• What are their hobbies?

• What are their dreams?

• What things do they dislike?

Every question all the way down to what their favorite food is and what type of shoes they like to wear on most days. I mean, everything you can think of that makes a human and human, you should be able to answer that question about your character. 

There are other things you need to keep in mind as well. You need to make the character relatable. The main character has to be someone your readers can relate to. Now, they can relate to characters in a lot of ways, so this doesn’t mean you have to create a Forrest Gump type of character that everyone loves. Not at all. You can still have an unlikable narrator if you want. What I mean is that character has to have some traits that readers can hang on to that they can relate to. 

And here’s something that I feel is very important: you need to resist the idea of good characters vs. bad characters. You do not want you character to be all good or all bad. 

First, humans don’t work that way anyway. Second, it gets boring if a character has no diversity in his/her personality. 

All characters, whether protagonist or antagonist, need to have good qualities and bad qualities. Everyone has flaws and everyone has redeeming virtues. So, you can’t paint your characters with such a broad brush. 

Characters need nuance. They need to have the same little quirks that all humans have. 

Think about the most famous humans in our history. All of them, whether good or bad, had conflicting traits. Maybe a famous leader help thousands of people, but also was unfaithful to their spouse. Maybe a killer has a soft spot for children. Maybe a great politician still has a habit of stealing a little money here and there. 

I don’t know a ton of history on Mother Theresa, but I have to assume she has at least one flaw. Maybe she was a hard person to work for. I mean, who knows. I’m not here to bash Mother Theresa, but my point is no human is homogenous in their character. 

And that’s what makes them all interesting. 

That’s also what makes your characters interesting. Characters that have flaws that readers are aware of are unpredictable. We have an idea of what they might do, but we still have a feeling they could break off that plan due to their on eccentricities. 

That is what makes characters interesting. 

Let’s look at a couple of examples. 

In the ol’ classic The Great Gatsby, we see Jay Gatsby as a man who is deeply in love with his childhood sweetheart. He’s done all this to be close to the woman he loves. That is obviously an endearing trait. 

However, in one scene we see Tom get Gatsby angry, and Gatsby nearly punches Tom. He shows he has a bad temper that doesn’t fit in the society in which he’s pretending to be a part. He is also a bootlegger, which means he made his money in an illegal trade. And finally, though he is in love with Daisy, he is trying to break up a marriage. 

So, while we have a man who is personable, likable and looking for love, we also have a sinister side that is slowly revealed to us. 

Here’s another example from a comic: Batman. Batman is presented as a hero who saves Gotham from crime. He risks his own life to protect those who cannot protect themselves. That’s a virtue if there ever was one. 

But, he’s a vigilante. He is violent and he operates outside of the law. Essentially, what Batman does is criminal behavior. And if you think of the irony that our hero is also one of the criminals he is believed to protect people from, well, that’s a pretty damned solid conflict inside of one character. 

Finally, how about Jake from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Jake is a war vet who returned from war with PTSD before we had a name for it. He is a shell-shocked vet who now doubts the world view he had before he entered the war. He has also returned home impotent, which, at that time, seriously commented on his manhood. 

Jake is seemingly a good man, but he has lost all hope and is careless toward life. He no longer believes in good and evil as a concept, so he has lost all feeling. 

As you can see from these examples, the more complicated you can make your characters, the more your readers will respond to them. Readers like having to figure out a character rather than having the author simply tell them they are “good” or “bad.” 

What I’m saying here is that you need to fully develop your characters with a full set of traits, both good and bad, that make them a complicated person who doesn’t make decisions in linear fashion. They have pathologies that pull them in different directions and it make them unpredictable. 

The problem with “good characters” and “bad characters” is that I, as a reader, know what to expect from them if you, as the author, have defined them so simply. 

So, make your characters a little messy. Like humans. Like me.