Hooking those pesky readers on your protagonist

Readers are demanding. Specifically, they demand that we create tension in them, that we disturb them with questions so provocative that they are compelled to keep turning pages. That's on the story side. As an author, I've always felt pretty good about my ability to do that, and my critique readers have agreed.

On the character side, readers demand a protagonist that they can care about. Not necessarily "like," but care about. Uber fiction agent Donald Maass, in his Writing the Breakout Novel book and workbook, tells us that one key characteristic of the 100 bestselling novels that he analyzed is that the authors created protagonists that readers care about.

Thus it comes to pass that acquisition editors at publishing houses demand that your manuscript and mine have that characteristic.

Intellectually, I've always understood this. As a reader, I want it. As an editor, I help writers achieve it. As an author, however, I recently learned that maybe I hadn't quite gotten the hang of it.

The protagonists in my WIP and in a novel that my agent is shopping begin their stories as troubled people. Because of an event in their pasts, they are -- from a reader's point of view -- cold. Distant. Unfeeling. And they do nasty things to other people. This has to do with a character-building technique that I've written about here before -- that of giving characters "ghosts," events or deeds in the past that haunt them at some level.

I started my characters out that way because I wanted them to have true character arcs, to change significantly over the course of the novel. And I had included later in each story the tragic event that motivated their problematic attitudes and behaviors.

Author-me thought I'd done a good job, believing that their behavior would raise a story question in the reader's mind: why is this character this way? I felt had other strong story questions that kept readers moving forward until they learned what they needed to come to care about the character.

But fellow writers in a critique group finally brought me to an epiphany: I wasn't creating the "care factor" soon enough. Three writer/critiquers pointed out the distance and aloofness of the protagonist in the WIP and the fact that they were not really caring about what was happening to her. I defended my work with the strategy outlined above, saying, "But you will."

One critique partner persisted in saying, in essence, "Maybe I will. But I don't. And I need that to want to keep reading about her."

Dang. Okay, I was forced to think seriously about whether or not my approach was working. Drawing upon the wonderful flexibility of writing on a computer, I created a version of the WIP manuscript in which I moved the tragic backstory event that showed the motivation for their behavior to the front. In each case, the former flashback was a complete scene, with plenty of tension and conflict.

Hmmm. When reader-me read the result, with the motivation for the character's coldness, aloofness, and hostile behavior now in my reader-mind, I perceived her differently. More sympathetically. The story question had changed from "Why is this character this way?" to "How will this character deal with this problem?" From a reader involvement point of view, I felt that was a much more compelling question. I cared more about the character and what might happen to her.

Next I went to the highly polished novel that my agent is representing and moved the protagonist's tragic, motivating event from page 244 up to become the first scene in the novel. You guessed it, the new light that this cast on later events made me see them very differently. Now the reader-me wondered how this man would handle the tragic problem he suffered from. At last I understood what my critique partners were telling me.

Why had I gone wrong? Actually, not "wrong" -- the earlier versions of the stories still worked. But maybe not as effectively. I now understood that I was comfortable with the original approach because, as the author, I already knew the motivating event and therefore saw the characters' behaviors in a sympathetic way -- but my readers did not, and that caused problems with the kind of engagement that helps draw a reader deeper into a narrative.

So, thanks to those fresh eyes and, I think, to my own openness to this fundamental criticism of my work, I have changed the openings of both novels. I believe they are just as involving from a story point of view, but they also work much better in terms of connecting the reader with the protagonist.

In terms of technique, for my novels I did not create prologues -- it's a personal bias, but I'm resistant to those and, as a reader, often feel the impulse to skip the prologue and get on with the "real" story in Chapter 1. I turned the dramatic backstory scenes into first chapters, not as past events but as real-time scenes. Then I simply provided a time transition for the next chapter or scene, and away we went.

What's the point of all this?

• First, be aware that your deep knowledge of character motivations that are not on the page can blind you to shortcomings in the narrative's ability to engage readers.
• Second, make sure you road test your narrative with readers who are objective enough to give you insightful feedback. Unfortunately, these do not usually include family and friends.
• Third, be open to and especially sensitive to comments that let you know that readers are not connecting with your protagonist in some way, preferably a sympathetic one.

If you don't, it can cost you. I had an agent at a major New York literary agency sufficiently interested in one of my novels to give me editorial input and work with me on a rewrite. We got to a point where he liked changes in the story and felt that only one thing was lacking -- a sufficiently likeable protagonist. Now, I had added strong new elements that did build sympathy over time, so I felt I had done the job and was not willing to alter what I saw as the essential nature of the character. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to articulate the need to create caring for the character when the book opened in ways that helped me understand what was needed. What I failed to understand -- and he to communicate -- was that I didn't need to change the character, just the timing for when the reader learned his motivation. We parted ways amicably, and we're still in touch. But I'd blown a chance at representation with a bigtime literary agency. I suspect that the new opening would have done the job for him.

The manuscript did succeed with another agent who is more of a story person, and I have representation. But I now wonder if it hasn't yet hooked an acquisition editor at a publisher because of the care factor. We'll see -- he's now working with the new version.

For what it's worth.

Ray

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© 2006 Ray Rhamey

Comments

[Shelly]

This is very interesting to me because I'm thinking on something very similar. A beta reader didn't care about my protag for my Mars novel from the start, tho he did come to care about him by the end of the book. The book starts right after a tragic moment in the protag's life (the loss of his parents), so it's not like I'm hiding everything, and as I go, his backstory is revealed, the timing of which matters re: suspense and revelations that if they come sooner, will kill the surprise/suspense. So I have to see what the other beta readers think and what else, other than moving flashbacks forward, I can do to make him someone readers will care about sooner.

BTW, the idea of a cold, distant protag is not always off-putting. I'm still not sure how Barry Eisler made me care so much for John Rain, an assassin, in the first chapter of the first book which describes in great detail Rain's hunting down and killing his target. I don't know when else I've read such a cold protag and yet, I fell deeply in love with the character. If I can figure out how he did that, I'd have something very valuable I could perhaps apply to my own writing. :)