Activate Your Protagonist

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Now, for today’s topic: the Active Protagonist.

I had many deficits as an amateur writer. Frankly, I still have a lot of those weaknesses and struggle to overcome them to this day. That’s what today’s post is about. You can have writing weaknesses, but you can overcome them.

All writers who share their work will quickly find there are some things they’re naturally good at and some things they struggle with. Perhaps you take classes or share your work with other new writers and you get comments like this: “I really like the way Eartha’s mind works. She’s so interesting, but I don’t understand the ending.” Or “It’s kind of hard to understand Jamal’s thought process, but your metaphors are incredible!”

Generally, my first readers and mentors told me that I was good with voice, dialogue and metaphors, but had issues with pace and plot. Pace refers to how slowly or quickly a story moves. The effective writer skips over boring things and lingers on notable moments. On the other hand, plot refers to how a story moves i.e. what happens. My pacing problem was easy to overcome. I just started cutting out literally every paragraph, sentence, and word that I could. You would have thought I was Gordon Lish editing a Raymond Carver story. (I’m not trying to be pretentious, but for the uninitiated, here’s a peek into the fascinating Carver/Lish dynamic.) My stories became taut and anxious in a good way. Upgrading my plot skills remains a struggle, but I usually get there after several drafts of a story or novel.

But what I really want to get into is a hack for fixing most of these problems all at once. I’m talking about writing the active protagonist versus writing the passive protagonist. The active protagonist does important things. The passive protagonist observes things.

When I sold my first book, We Cast a Shadow, I was proud of the accomplishment. I worked on that book diligently for four years (not including the decades leading up to the writing of the book; this was time spent transforming myself into an author). My agent loved the book. My editor loved the book. But there was still work to be done post sale, but pre-publication. While a part of me was shocked and offended (“how dare they ask to change my absolutely perfect and totally flawless work of art?!”), I fully understood that my team was there to help. That’s why I hired them. I understand this is an unusual mindset. So many of us are so happy just to get an agent to look at our work. We are ecstatic when anyone wants to publish us. Yes, I was ecstatic. But it’s not necessarily a relationship among equals. The artist stands at the center of the creative maelstrom. The team supports. Look, while Beyoncé’s producers play a role in her phenomenal success, it’s Bey’s name that goes on the cover of the album. It’s your name that goes on the cover of the book.

Still, I had (and have) complete faith in my team. So when they said that my protagonist was too docile, too easy going, too much of an observer, I took those critiques to heart. I had worked to make a fast-paced book, with a dynamic and active main character. But I had no idea how big the gap was between an active character at the amateur level versus what worked in the critically praised, commercially successful books I loved to read. There’s the pace of the book you share with your friends. Then there’s the pace of the book you share with the world. In high school, I played football. We worked hard to improve during practice. But come game time we moved with new intensity and twice as fast. A published book must move at game speed not practice speed.

The protagonist is responsible for the speed of narrative. If she sits in a garden and thinks for 300 pages, that’s one kind of lead character. The French love those kinds of books. I love them too…sometimes. If she grabs a hoe and goes off to fight mushroom zombies, that novel is bound to feel much faster. Most American books have protagonists who move with this intensity. Even if there are no mushroom zombies.

Long story short, I wound up going through the whole manuscript looking for Moments of Choice. A Moment of Choice is where your heroine can sit and watch or get up and do something. I searched for where I allowed my narrator to rest, contemplate, consider, or leave action to other characters. In nearly every instance, I stirred him to action. If he didn’t want to get up, I hid a pin in his seat cushion. This generated new plot and more moments of interesting characterization. For example, early in the book, my WCAS narrator loses his job. In an earlier draft, he mopes at home and is eventually called back to work by his boss. In the published version, the narrator decides to go to his former place of employment and try to reclaim his job. This is because he needs the money to help his son. I didn’t understand how important helping his son was in earlier versions. But making the narrator leave his comfort zone clarified this bit of motivation for me. And that clarification changed the entire book in positive ways. I even went back and revised the first chapter to fit this discovery.

In real life, we writers are often introverts. While we can write introverted characters, there’s a lot to be gained from watching an introvert move to action on behalf of what they care about. I suggest you look at this in your own writing. Activate your protagonist.

I guarantee it will help you.