Protagonists vs. Heroes
Donald Maass on May 06 2009 | Filed under: CRAFT
Is there a difference between a protagonist and a hero? A protagonist is the subject of a story. A hero is a human being of extraordinary qualities. A protagonist can be a hero, certainly, but isn’t always. Quite often in manuscripts the protagonist is an ordinary person. They may face extraordinary circumstances in the course of the story but when we first meet them they, in effect, could be you or me.
That early, introductory moment is where many authors begin to lose me. Why? Meeting a protagonist who is a proxy for me, with whom I can readily identify, should be ideal, shouldn’t it? Isn’t that how sympathy arises? I see myself in the novel’s focal character and, therefore, their experience becomes mine? Actually, it doesn’t work quite like that. A reader’s heart does not automatically open just because some average schlemiel stumbles across the page.
Whether they are public figures or just ordinary in profile, our heroes and heroines are people whose actions inspire us. We would not mind spending ten straight hours or even ten days with them. That is important because ten hours is about how long it takes to read a novel and ten days a not uncommon period of time that readers commit to a single book. When it is your book, what sort of protagonist do you want your readers to meet? One whom they will regard more-or-less as they do a fellow grocery shopper?
To create an immediate bond between reader and protagonist, it is necessary to show your reader a reason to care. Pushing a shopping cart is not a reason to care. Demonstrating a character quality that is inspiring does cause readers to open their hearts.
This was an excerpt from The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great by Donald Maass. In his new book, New York literary agent Donald Maass illuminates the techniques of master contemporary novelists. Some authors write powerhouse novels every time. What are they doing differently on the page? Maass not only explains, he shows you how you can right away use the techniques of greatness in your current manuscript.
A literary agent in New York, Donald Maass’s agency sells more than 150 novels every year to major publishers in the U.S. and overseas. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004) and The Fire in Fiction (2009). He is a past president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc.
You can order The Fire in Fiction online, and learn more about it from the publisher.
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The importance of point of view cannot be overestimated here. In my writing, the focus is not on how I the author view the scene, but on how the focal character views it. What matters to him about his environment, what does he understand about it? What is he doing and why is he doing it? Then we are reading about the things that matter to him and so they come to matter to us.
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Good point. It reminds me of something my creative writing professors always tried to impart to us: each character can be a stereotype, as long as they’re a “stereotype +”. In other words, a jock + a fondness for baking, or a bank robber + a daughter dying of cancer. There’s got to be something that makes each character unique, more than just what they appear on the surface. Like Maass is saying, a protagonist has to be a Joe Schmoe +.
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My problem with that is that it’s too easy to read that character as Joe Schmoe +. In Tom Clancy’s work, it’s quite clear that he uses this technique to make his characters more 3-D, but it doesn’t work too well. He gives his wife a hobby of photography, but adds none of the touches to support this, no development booth, no photos on the walls, nothing. She is never seen photographing anything, and never mentions it as something she likes to do. This technique works best when the extra touches are things the author knows well and has an interest in, but then we’re getting away from mere characterization into real characters, which are my preference.
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I’m reading this book now and I don’t believe Maass is saying a protagonist is a Joe Schmoe+, I believe the intent is to have a writer bring out in an ordinary character what is already extraordinary and will captivate the reader — using the past, present and future of that character. How it works is different for different genres. An seemingly ordinary man might have incredible super powers against evil in one book and we might care about him because he wants to protect his world, because in some way, at some point in time, we all wish we had super powers. In this book we might learn about his past or his future and what motivates him to fight the bad guy. In another novel the protagonist could be a woman facing death and her extraordinary measures come out in her attempt to organize her life before she dies. Everyone dies, but not everyone handles death the same way. Ordinary can become extraordinary. It just has to be there under the surface. And be well written.
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