I read a spectacularly bad book recently. (No, I can't tell you the title.) It was pure agony, but I had committed to finish it. As dreadful as the experience was, however, I am glad I got through it. I learned a couple of powerful things from the two of the book’s flaws—REALLY had them hammered home, as opposed to just absorbing them intellectually. These two interrelated things have informed my writing since then, and my work is much better for it.
Thing One: perfect characters are BORING and unsympathetic. Readers are looking for a powerful emotional experience when they pick up a book. If they wanted a ho-hum emotional experience, they wouldn’t read; they’d surf the internet or put the TV on a network sitcom instead.
Larry Brooks—one of my two personal Obi-Wans (more on them in a post to follow)—teaches that in order to have that powerful emotional experience
(and I’d shorten "powerful emotional experience" to an easy-to-remember acronym, but, um…no),
a reader must be able to sympathize with and root for at least one character in the story. This is ideally the protagonist, but a skilled storyteller can have the audience identify more strongly with the sidekick (Papageno) or even the antagonist (Hannibal Lecter) in some cases.
Note that the protagonist doesn’t have to be likable in the strictest sense. I think here of Orwell’s George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, or George R.R. Martin’s Tyrion Lannister. But the protagonist DOES have to be human, striking a sympathetic enough chord that the reader cares about the outcome of the story and will happily continue reading.
Fiction guru Dave Farland teaches that there are many ways to create sympathy between character and reader. For me, the most important is that the reader be able to see and feel the characters’ flaws. Not just at the beginning of the story, either. They need to surface frequently, coming up again near the climax of the story to be conquered—at least partially or temporarily—so that the narrative apex has depth as well as height.
The protagonist in the bad book I read had NO imperfections. Yawn. How would I, as massively and broadly imperfect as I am, be able to relate at all to such a wax figure? He was a simulacrum, not a human. He always made good choices; he was never deeply wounded. Which brings me to:
Thing Two: Bad things—really bad things—have to happen to your protagonist. Conflict is central to story. Without conflict you have mere anecdote—and no one wants to wade through 80,000+ words of anecdote. Trust me: I now know this from hard experience.
Though a soupçon of authorial schadenfreude may often occur, I confess —it’s not sadistic to embroil your character in awful situations. It’sexpected. When we yell at the dumb girl in the horror flick not to open the cellar door, we don’t actually expect her to listen. If she smartened up and high-tailed it out of the haunted house, the story would be LAME and SHORT.
So, yes: put your protagonist through a try-fail cycle or seven, with emphasis on the FAIL. I promise you: it will make the eventual victory (or tragedy) all the sweeter (or more tragic).
And, tying in with Thing One, make sure the conflict isn’t just external. It can’t only be a tornado or a poltergeist or an unskilled pedicurist that assaults your character. Those flaws, those inner demons need to rear their ugly heads and do some damage. Humans ideally learn from their mistakes, and so do characters—but they have to MAKE those mistakes first.
Have at it, fellow writers. Bring on the pride and the envy and the hurricanes and the IRS audits. I promise you: your readers will love you for it.
What’s your favorite example of a flawed and sympathetic protagonist? And what are the conflicts they encounter?