Thou Shalt Afflict Thy Protagonist

George Cruikshank engraving

It happened again yesterday. A friend in my writers group kept taking her protagonist into situations that made everyone squirm … but then backed off. For instance … The character is an immigrant maid, and the house in which she works gets sold. She meets the new owner, including his flirtatious twenty-something son. The maid is staying in the house alone just before the new owners move in, and the son shows up in the middle of the night. She throws a shawl over her nightgown and lets him in. He pours himself a glass of brandy and offers one to her. Why not? she thinks. Uh-oh, we know what’s coming. But it doesn’t! She drinks her brandy, returns to her room, locks the door, and spends a peaceful night, her virtue unassailed.

Granted, the young aristo putting a mash on the maid is a cliché, and that, my friend said, was why she didn’t want to go there. But just about everything and everyone in the protagonist’s life is nice. That’s a problem, and not just because “niceness” is antithetical to drama. A character grows through facing adversity. That means you have to put your beloved protagonist through the wringer.

As screenwriting guru Robert McKee says in Story, “True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential nature.”

The characters we love must be unfairly accused, cheated in love and in business, press-ganged, betrayed, tricked, thrown into excruciating social situations, saddled with unbearable family members, threatened, laughed at, imperiled, spurned, one-upped, opposed, dragged through the mud, humiliated, misunderstood, pummeled, starved. (Depending on the kind of book you’re writing, this suffering may be literal, or it may be purely psychological). We need to subject our protagonists to experience loneliness, anxiety, misery, loss.

If your gentle writerly self balks at being so cruel, consider: what if, when Oliver Twist asked, “Please, sir, I want some more,” a kindly soul had smiled and filled his bowl? A happier life for young Oliver. For the rest of us, deprivation.

 

Tags: characters, fiction, novel writing, plotting, protagonist, writing

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