Created by Randy Ingermanson - "the Snowflake Guy"
America's Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

How Do You Decide Who Your Protagonist Is?

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in Craft, Fiction Writing Tagged:

What if your protagonist starts acting like a jerk? Should you try to make him or her behave? Or should you change to a different protagonist?

Emily posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

How can you tell who your protagonist is?

I began writing my novel a couple years ago and I am still incredibly new at writing fiction. I have been kind of all over the place with it and haven’t really had a good method until I found the snowflake method and so far it seems to be the method for me. But I have now come to a new problem and that is that I am wondering if my Protagonist may be misplaced. The story is in the time a bit before the Protestant Reformation and the first disaster is that my “protagonists” wife becomes a Protestant and my protagonist feels obligated because of his values to send her away despite the fact that he loves her to death. Eventually some time later she discovers that she is pregnant with his child and to her her husband gets really upset. For some reasons he doesn’t seem to be very likeable and I am wondering if maybe it sounds like his wife should be the protagonist. Or does he have hope of being likeable if I write it right?

Randy sez: Glad to hear you’re finding the Snowflake Method useful, Emily! I don’t know much about your protagonist, but already I don’t like him. And I suspect most readers won’t like him either. Of course I might change my mind after seeing some of your novel, but as it stands, this guy is a jerk. 

So what are you going to do?

As I see it, you’ve got three options:

  • Change your protagonist’s behavior to be more likeable. 
  • Change your story so the wife is the protagonist/lead character.
  • Change the story so that your current protagonist remains the lead character but now becomes the antagonist.

In a minute, we’ll look at those three options, but let’s talk first about what a lead character is.

Your Lead Character

Your lead character is the person the story is focused on. Your lead character generally gets the biggest share of the air-time in the story. Your lead character is the person your reader is watching.

Your lead character is usually the protagonist of your story. Usually, but not always. 

As an example, in Frederick Forsyth’s novel, The Day of the Jackal, the lead character is a ruthless assassin code-named “the Jackal.” Nobody knows his real name, but a French terrorist organization hires him to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.

The novel tells the story of how the Jackal buys fake ID, gets a brilliantly disguised sniper rifle, crosses the border into France, makes his way to Paris, chooses his killing ground, and …

You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens next. The novel is brilliant and was a major best-seller in its day. I can’t justify calling the Jackal the protatonist of the story. That honor would go to Claude Lebel, the French detective leading the effort to catch the Jackal before he strikes. 

But Lebel gets comparatively little air-time. The Jackal gets more of the action than any other player. 

So in my view, the Jackal is the lead character and Lebel is the protagonist.

Let’s be clear that usually the lead character is the protagonist. It’s just not an absolute requirement.

That’s why I think you have three options, and not just two.

Now let’s look at those options in a little more detail.

Option 1: Make Your Protagonist More Likeable

Why would you choose this option?

Maybe because when you started writing the story, you liked your protagonist. You thought he had some good qualities that more than balanced out his flaws, and you hoped to write a story with a good redemption theme. That’s very reasonable. We can all think of any number of flawed people who, like Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, turn out good in the end. 

If that’s what you intended, then it sounds like you’ve let your protagonist drift a bit. He’s done things you didn’t intend, or else you intended to show a better justification for those actions.

And if that’s what’s happened to your novel, then the solution is to work through the novel, find the bad things he does, and either soften them, or show his moral dilemma more starkly and give him a stronger reason for making the bad decisions he makes. And then show us the guilt he feels and the efforts he makes to turn things right again.

That could work.

Option 2: Make the Wife Your Protagonist

This could be a lot of work, so why would you want to choose this option?

Maybe because you were actually more in tune with the wife from the beginning, even though you didn’t realize it. 

It may be that, all along, your theme has been about repression of women by male authority figures and patriarchal power systems. In a year like this one, that could play extremely well. 

It may be that you didn’t realize this was your theme. It may be that the theme developed organically and now you’re seeing that it’s at odds with the story you started telling. 

If that’s what’s happened, then it completely makes sense to make the wife the protagonist. You may need to give her more air-time. You may need to rewrite a lot of scenes. 

Or it may turn out that you don’t actually have to change very much, if that’s the story you’ve subconsciously been writing all along. Writing a novel has a way of bringing out things from your core that you didn’t know were there.

In any event, this approach could work quite well.

Option 3: Leave Your Lead Character the Same, but Change the Protagonist

This is a lot like option 2. The wife (or some other character) would now be the protagonist, while the lead character remains this cruel man.

Why would you want to choose this option? 

Maybe because your novel is about the hidden cruelty in all humans, and you want to take a deep look into evil, using a person who thinks he’s a paragon of virtue. Could play well or play poorly, depending on who your target audience is.

This option might not take that much work. Your lead character has been getting most of the air-time and he gets to keep that. But now you just need to adjust the tone so that your reader empathizes with the wife and watches in increasing horror as the lead character turns more and more to the wrong. 

If you take this tack, I’d advise you to write the first scene in the point of view of the actual protagonist. I’d recommend you give the reader a strong emotional attachment to the true protagonist early on. And you’d need to find some compelling reason why your villainish lead character gets most of the air-time. If you can’t find that compelling reason, then this probably isn’t your strongest option. (In The Day of the Jackal, the compelling reason to give the Jackal so many scenes is because he’s really quite a fascinating person, meticulous in his preparations, making it look like a dead certainty that he’s going to succeed. And that makes for a great suspense novel.)

In any event, if you go this route, you’d have a strong novel about the nature of evil.

That could work.

You Have Options; Take Your Pick

So you have several good options, Emily. They all require a bit of work, but any one of them could make a good novel.

You get to decide how you’ll play it. 

Make your decision based on who you are, what you value, and what you want to say about life.

Good luck, and have fun!

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Can You Start Your Novel With a Minor Character?

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If your novel begins with a minor character, is that bad? What if you need to do that to make your plot work? 

Bruce posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

i began writing a novel whose first chapter is from the POV of an unimportant character but writing so is important for the plot. the rest of the novel is in third person narrated by the author, i feel that this is complicating things. what should i do?

Randy sez: I don’t see a problem with it. 

There are any number of reasons why you might want to start a novel using some minor character.

If there’s a good reason, then do it. If there isn’t, then don’t.

Usually my blog posts are much longer than this. Usually, there’s a good reason to write a longer post. Today, there isn’t.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Changing Your Novel’s Genre

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in Fiction Writing, Production Tagged: , ,

Can You Change a Novel’s Genre After Writing It?

Is it possible to change the genre of a novel you’ve already written? If so, how would you go about it? 

Ann posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Dear Randy,

Re: shifting genre of story from romance to crime – advice needed please!

Your Snowflake Method helped me to plan and write my first book(working title:”A Darker Burgundy”) and I submitted the early chapters for a First Novel competition in a UK women’s magazine and it was listed as a runner-up. The story is a romance where love turns to hate in Nazi-Occupied France. I have edited and re-drafted the work many times and I’m now thinking of switching genre from romance to crime, hoping this way to lend the story more pace and momentum in the hope that this may make it more appealing to readers/agents.

Please can you kindly advise me how to go about this daunting task?

Many thanks

Randy sez: this sounds tricky, at least on the surface. A romance novel is written for one target audience. A suspense novel (I think that’s what you’re really asking about, although I can’t be sure) is written for an entirely different target audience. 

A Tale of Two Genres

Let’s talk about these two genres first.

In a romance, the protagonist is the relationship between the two main characters. This relationship is in great danger of being killed. Usually, the reason the relationship might die is that one or both of the characters might pull out of it. Typically every scene (or almost every scene) includes one or both of the main characters. The story usually ends with the relationship blooming into a lifelong commitment.

In a suspense novel, you typically have one character as the protagonist. That character wants to do something or prevent something that would put some person or some group of people at high risk (possibly a nation or even the entire world). A suspense novel can have a large cast of characters and a large stage and you aren’t required to show the protagonist in every scene. 

So the problem here is that there’s not a lot of overlap between these two kinds of stories. It’s possible that you’d need to rewrite the entire story to make it conform to the suspense pattern.

But there is some overlap. The romantic suspense subgenre works as both a romance novel and a suspense novel. As in any romance novel, the protagonist is the relationship between the two main characters. And as in any romance novel, the relationship is in danger of being killed. But the reason the relationship is in danger of being killed is because one or both of the two main characters are in danger of being killed. That’s what makes it also a suspense novel.

So How To Make the Transition?

How would you transition your story to a new genre?

The first thing to do is to decide exactly what genre you want to write. Nobody can tell you what genre to write. You get to decide. What do you want the book to be? Romance? Suspense? Romantic suspense? Something else? Pick one. Amazon has hundreds of subcategories. Browse around until you find exactly the one that you can envision for your book.

The second thing to do is to make sure you know the “rules of the genre.” There aren’t any written rules, of course. You learn the rules by reading current books in your genre and learning what’s done and what’s not done. The rules will tell you what kind of story structure you can have and what the tone of each scene should be. And lots of other things.

If you’re very lucky, the manuscript you’ve reworked many times will be pretty close in structure to the new genre you’ve chosen. In that case, just tweak what you’ve got to fit the genre.

If you’re not lucky, you’re going to have to make structural changes to your novel to fit the “rules” of your new genre. Since you’re a Snowflaker, you can just make a copy of your existing Snowflake document and tweak that document. Then use that new Snowflake document to guide you in adding, deleting, and moving scenes around in your manuscript.

Finally, you will probably also have to adjust the tone of your writing. (Or maybe not. It sounds like you’ve already got a suspense-like tone, which is the reason it’s not having success as a romance. So if you’re lucky, the current tone of your novel is already appropriate for your category.) But the point here is that you should work on the tone of each scene after you’ve already fixed the structure of the novel. It would make no sense to change the tone of scenes before fixing the structure, because you’d be reworking scenes that you might eventually end up deleting.

Ouch, That’s a Lot of Work

Of course, this might end up being a lot of work. That’s not fun, but it’s your reality. If you’re stuck in a swamp, the only way out is to press ahead and get out. So grit your teeth and do it. 

And the lesson to take away from this for your next book is to define the category of your novel very early in the process of Snowflaking it. That’s a lesson that will pay big dividends for the rest of your writing life.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Can You Use MRUs Everywhere? 

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And more importantly, should you use MRUs everywhere? What if you don’t want to use MRUs everywhere?

Not sure what an MRU is? No worries, I’ll explain that before I answer these burning questions.

Kimbra posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

HI Randy, great site. I’m enjoying reading your blog.

My question is: How do you approach the MRU pattern rule when building in back story and providing character introductions? I understand the need for a constant driver pushing the story forward, and I try to integrate backstory into motivations and reactions, but sometimes I have a hard time forcing an MRU onto a brief exchange that conveys needed information–especially in the early chapters. There are other times that seem to require “quiter” moments, breathers almost in the rhythm of the story. I believe these can still be broken into MRUs, but they stretch. Can you give me an example of an MRU from a more mundane part of a novel than the moment a tiger attacks?

Randy sez: First a quick note to explain what MRUs are, since not everybody knows. (And if you want a more detailed explanation, I’ll point you to my long article on this site, “Writing the Perfect Scene,” which covers MRUs in much more detail than I can cover in a single blog post.)

What’s an MRU?

MRUs are Dwight Swain’s abbreviation for “Motivation-Reaction Units.” And what’s a Motivation-Reaction Unit? That’s the finest-grained level of storytelling that novelists use. You might guess that it’s a “motivation” followed by a “reaction” and you’d be right. But what are “motivations” and what are “reactions?” 

A “motivation” is the term Dwight Swain uses to refer to anything that happens external to your Point-of-View character. 

A “reaction” is the term Dwight Swain uses to refer to anything that the POV character does.

You might say that this is confusing terminology, and I whole-heartedly agree with you. But Dwight Swain was the master, and he created the language, so we’ll use his terms because his ideas are really, really good. 

Here’s an example of a “motivation,” taken from my perfect-scene article:

The tiger dropped out of the tree and sprang toward Jack.

This short paragraph is all about what the tiger is doing. Jack is mentioned in the paragraph, but he’s not the one doing the action. 

Here’s an example of a “reaction,” taken from the same article:

A bolt of raw adrenaline shot through Jack’s veins. He jerked his rifle to his shoulder, sighted on the tiger’s heart, and squeezed the trigger. “Die, you bastard!”

This short paragraph is all about what our POV character Jack is doing. He’s feeling emotions. He’s acting. He’s speaking. He could also be thinking, but in this particular MRU, we don’t show his thoughts. 

Why Should You Care About MRUs?

The reason you should care about MRUs is simple. In modern fiction, authors spend most of the story “showing” the story rather than “telling” the story. If you’ve ever gotten a critique from a professional editor with the words “Show, Don’t Tell” in big bold letters on your manuscript, and you  wondered how to know when you’re showing and when you’re telling, here’s your answer:

  • “Showing” means you’re writing in MRUs. 
  • “Telling” means you’re not.

Showing is usually a good strategy. Telling is usually a bad strategy.

But be careful.

“Usually” Isn’t the Same as “Always”

The problem is that “showing” is not always the best strategy. Sometimes you need to “tell” part of your story. Here’s why:

  • “Showing” is more fun for your reader, but it’s inefficient. It gobbles up page count like crazy.
  • “Telling” is less fun for your reader, but it’s efficient. You can “tell” something in a few paragraphs that would take many chapters to “show.”

As Kimbra noted, sometimes you might want to bring in part of the character’s backstory by “telling” it, rather than by “showing” it. (The way you “show” backstory is by using a flashback. The way you “tell” backstory is by using either narrative summary or exposition.)

How Do You Decide When to Show and When to Tell?

Here’s my almost-infallible rule for deciding when to show and when to tell:

  • Show the exciting parts.
  • Tell the boring parts.

The reason you show the exciting parts is because you want to spend as long as possible on the fun parts of your story. 

The reason you tell the boring parts is because you want to get through the boring parts as fast as possible.

Not exactly rocket science, is it? That’s fine. Not everything we do in writing fiction is deep. Sometimes it’s okay to be simple. 

The above rule is not an ironclad rule, but it’s a very good rule of thumb that will be right most of the time. There will be times when you violate this rule. Use your writerly instincts to guide you.

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

Where Do You Place Your Inciting Incident? 

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Can you start your novel with the inciting incident? If not, how do you decide where to put it?

James posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I have placed my inciting incident real close to the beginning, like 2 pages or so. In order for the reader to care about what happens to the protagonist in the inciting incident, my first scene has no conflict. It’s just some emotional stuff as he thinks about his girlfriend and proposing to her that night after work. I just didn’t know if I should have anything to overpower the inciting incident. Is this kosher. Given this, do ALL scenes have to have the three aspects: goal, conflict, and setback? If so, I’ll have to come up with something. I wanna do this right. Thanks for any help. If you happen to have time to answer this, will you answer Online or email to me?

Randy sez: First, let’s define our terms. The inciting incident is some “new thing” in your protagonist’s world. It marks the change that is ultimately going to pull your protagonist into your story. Usually, this is something external to your protagonist, but it’s possible it could be an internal change.

I don’t see a problem with starting the inciting incident in the first two pages of the novel. You can put it pretty much anywhere you want, so long as it’s reasonably early in the story and as long as it works. Some stories start fast out of the gate, and some take longer to get rolling. 

I do see a problem with a scene that has no conflict of any kind. Conflict doesn’t get in the way of your reader caring about your protagonist. Conflict is often the reason your reader does care, at least early on. When we see somebody in trouble, we instinctively care about them. We might later stop caring about them if we decide they aren’t worth caring about.

But let’s face it—when somebody’s in trouble, we care. The news this last week has been about twelve young soccer players and their coach in Thailand, trapped by rising floodwaters two and a half miles into a cave. The minute we heard about them, we cared. Because that’s what humans do.

I don’t know anything about your story, James, but I would think that “some emotional stuff” about a girlfriend your protagonist is about to propose to sounds reasonably interesting already. Fiction is about giving your reader a powerful emotional experience. I would also guess there’s some conflict here, even though only your protagonist is in the scene. Internal conflict is conflict.

James, you asked if all scenes must have a Goal, Conflict, and Setback. The answer is no. That’s one strategy, and we call that strategy a Proactive Scene. But another strategy is the Reactive Scene, where you have a Reaction, a Dilemma, and a Decision. (For much more on both of those, see my latest book, How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method.)

I strongly recommend that all scenes be either Proactive or Reactive. These are solid design patterns that work well and that your readers are already primed to understand. If you have a scene that’s neither Proactive nor Reactive, you should be able to explain to yourself what makes the scene work—why is it giving your reader a powerful emotional experience? And then you should ask whether you can make the scene better by turning it into either a Proactive or Reactive scene. Because usually, you can.

Let’s circle back to the inciting incident. I don’t sweat the exact location of the inciting incident, as long as it’s in the first several chapters. Remember that the inciting incident is not what makes your reader start caring about your story. The inciting incident usually comes much too late for that. Long before your reader reaches the inciting incident, she should already care about your story.

My thinking is that you want to start pulling your reader into your story with a strong first sentence.

Followed by a strong first paragraph. 

Followed by a strong first page.

Followed by a strong first scene. 

If you do all that, then it really doesn’t matter when the inciting incident happens, because your reader already committed to the story from the very beginning. The inciting incident just gives your reader words to explain why she’s committed. 

Got a Question for My Blog?

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer the ones I can, but no guarantees. There are only so many hours in the day.

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