The World According to You
By Donald Maass | February 4, 2015 |
How do you see the world? Is it the Land of Milk and Honey or The Hunger Games? Is the glass half empty or half full? Is our human existence hilarious, serene, tragic or full of hope? Do you sort, filter, organize and understand everything around you primarily through feelings, family, cost versus benefit, politics, law, sin and salvation, astrology or whether things add to, or subtract from, the chances of the San Jose Sharks winning the Stanley Cup?
You and I live in the same world and yet we don’t. It’s different for each of us. The quality of my days begins with whether my kid’s school bus is late and the intensity of my morning coffee. The purpose of my days is determined by competing deadlines at work. My days achieve meaning when what I read transports me or if what I write is clear. My measure of self-satisfaction is whether I strike a balance and get through it all with aplomb.
What about you? What, for you, makes a day good or bad? Is it whether things go well at work? Is it whether you eat right and hit the gym? Are days good when you connect with friends or bad when you accidentally take a call from your doctor instead of letting it go to voicemail? Does a Lenny Kravitz tune lift you up? Does the news from Lebanon drag you down? Do you look forward to a good sleep or fear that you’ll lie awake?
What gives you a sense of purpose? Facebook and Twitter? Your inbox? Your kids? Your kitchen? Your manuscript? Your mind? Your prayers? Your mission, whatever it is, and if you sell a lot of muffins at your bake sale? Winning her over? Getting rid of him for good? Finding out the truth? Surrendering to what is?
How do you judge yourself in a given day? With a morning mirror check? By whether you’re on time, in charge, ready and empowered? According to what you get done? By how well you meet your own standards of behavior? Whether you stick to your guns or stand up for your principles? By how well you stay humble, flow, and show compassion for others? Whether you make someone laugh?
What matters more than the details of our days is the disparity in how we experience them. That’s what’s interesting. That’s what’s engaging. That’s what we talk about. To the degree that we’re in accord about our experiences we feel satisfied and safe. When we assert the differences in our days, though, we waken each other and enthrall.
This is important in writing fiction because it reminds us that capturing the world as it is only accomplishes a little. Creating sympathetic characters with whom we can identify is fine but only takes us so far. What interests readers is not the specific details of a story world but the specific ways in which that world is felt and understood by its characters, especially protagonists.
If you experience the world as someone else does then you are bound to feel about it differently than you do. That excites awe and engages deeply. When your characters feel, weigh, judge and wonder in ways that we don’t we’re more than interested, we feel things both unfamiliar and desired. Our emotional world expands.
To get us to feel strongly as we read your story, get us to feel differently. That’s the key. There are many ways to work on that but let’s try a few. What we’re going to focus on is not feelings about things that happen in your protagonist’s story world, but your protagonist’s experience of his or her own emotional world.
Makes notes as you ponder these questions:
At any given time things are going well or badly for your protagonist. How does he or she know that? How does he or she measure it? According to what calibration? What results are way good? What setbacks are way bad? What is lucky? What sucks? Do things sometimes line up nicely or is snafu the rule? In the story highlight three things that affirm your protagonist’s suppositions, and one thing that is wildly contrary to expectations. Try that within one scene.
What gives your protagonist a sense of purpose? How does he or she know that something has meaning? What indicates that something matters? What signals how much? Create a scale of measurement, a litmus test or a sixth sense that reliably says “pay attention”. Apply it in four places in the story.
In what terms does your protagonist judge himself or herself? According what standards? Pick a scene somewhere in the middle of your manuscript…is your protagonist happy or unhappy with himself or herself? How much? Rate that feeling with your protagonist’s unique units of measurement. What is the ideal way to be or your protagonist’s best self? What is the worst? Give a name to each and then find the spot in the story when your protagonist hits both a personal high and low.
You and I live in the same world and yet we experience it differently. It’s hostile or beneficent, full of purpose or void of meaning, and above all a reason to measure ourselves by whatever criteria we choose. When our characters do that too—especially when their experience is different than ours—we don’t pull away but draw closer. We don’t get less emotionally involved but more. And isn’t that what we want?
What’s the world according to your protagonist, and one way in which it’s different?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
This is what I love about your posts and books, Don. You get my mind wandering in directions I hadn’t considered before. Here’s how my protagonist sees the world:
My eleven year old protagonist, Jack Harvey, lives in a world that is stable and expected. Mom will always have a snack waiting for him when he gets home. His best friend will always walk to school with him. His dad’s navy submarine will always return to the pier. It’s the life of most eleven year-olds who haven’t yet faced the uncertainties that seem to clobber us beginning with our teenage years.
His world is different from most because of his age and the time he lives in. In 1968, Vietnam was finally waking up most Americans to the horror of war, but a kid could still live in the fantasy world of John Wayne and Gregory Peck, where there were clear lines between good and bad, right and wrong. It’s a wonderful, but brief time in the lives of most kids in affluent nations.
Naturally, for my protagonist (because I want a story), he’s about to experience reality. His quest is to face it and overcome it.
Thanks for another great post, Don. And it was great meeting you last month in Lansing.
Ron-
Yes, it was great to meet you too–and too brief! Where did you disappear to? Back to your room to write, I’m guessing? Shame! Writers belong in the bar!
Back home! I had a 90 minute drive. I’m trying to keep the conference costs to a minimum this year. But you’re right, I should have mingled with my fellow writers at least one night. Maybe next time.
Are you asking how it’s different from our own world vision, or where does the protagonist’s world contradict itself?
I can answer both, actually, for that same WIP I was talking about last month. The protagonist is raised to believe that strength is everything and weakness and vulnerability are the worst faults one could have, and that mercy is weakness. (I personally believe that strength, as in physical and financial strength, are at least partially the result of luck rather than virtue, that sometimes the courage to be vulnerable is a type of strength. Random acts of mercy and kindness are among the things that give me occasional hope for our species.)
Yet when his brother’s life is at stake, he throws himself at the mercy of a king he once openly scorned as too soft to be able to keep the throne, fully aware of the hypocrisy of his actions. Because he owes him both his own life and his brother’s and he was also taught that to remain in debt to someone is a form of vulnerability, he comes to serve this king. Discovers that he loves him because of those very characteristics which he once scorned. And learns to see that the loyalty the king’s ways create in his subjects and his guard are a strength in and of themselves.
Is this what you meant? I know it’s more character arc than maybe what you were getting at, but it does start with the basic contradiction of his drive to protect his weaker brother at all costs, even appealing for aid from the very king he one scoffed at for his gentle ways.
Shawna-
All good, though what I’m getting at here is less a protagonist’s dynamic views of the world outside him, and more his sense of his own emotional world inside him.
To put it differently, how characters experience their own emotions can be as compelling–maybe more so–than how they experience the plot, other characters, the setting or anything else you can work with on the page.
Love this post. I’m starting a new book and the siblings are as different as can be. The oldest, a 13-yr-old boy probably sees things as they truly are and turning into a cynic already. Even though I’ve not written the story, I know he will commit his father’s mistakes … as much as he tries hard to be unlike him. The youngest is the stark contrast. She is not stupid, nor is she immune from cruelty, but she has been given love and so she expects it, esp. from family. Her demands for simple affection might well be the glue that keeps it all together. I’m not sure. I think my middle girl is going to be the enigma. As fully developed the older boy is, the middle one is a shadow of him … but she’ll come to me. I love beginnings with all the possibilities, when I get to daydream lives. I’m coming to your workshop this week and really looking forward to diving into this new book more thoroughly, give it some structure so that I’m not going completely wild with it, or perhaps this is the time to go wild. This is a notebook, exploratory phase. Draft zero!
Vijaya-
See you tomorrow!
Hey Don – I’m about to hit the road on a snowy day, but you’ve given me lots to mull as I drive. My protagonist’s worldview is definitely skewed. The whole world has wronged his father/family, and thereby everyone’s against him. It’s up to him to right it. When he’s unsuccessful, it’s expected. It’s because the deck’s been stacked against him. Ah, but when he wins, it’s divine justice. At his hands! Heady stuff. And, it does go to his head. I think there’s more to be gained by the self-judgement yardstick you describe here.
I’m nearing the end of this draft, and I’m already playing with the personal high coinciding with the personal low. Particularly for protagonist #2. She’ll be elated and deflated in a few moments time. Sort of like the AFC championship victory, now that I think of it.
Another keeper. Thanks for the driving brain-fodder.
Vaughn-
Yes, football is really quest fantasy, I agree. I believe there’s even an office game you can play called “fantasy football”? See?
Don–
“Less is more” is definitely not a philosophy you subscribe to–witness the blizzard here of perceptions, questions, assertions. Like other WU posts rich in content, yours today doesn’t–or shouldn’t–lend itself to a shoot-from-the-hip response.
But that’s what we do, so here goes: “What matters more than the details of our days is the disparity in how we experience them.”
As Graham Greene might say, this is the heart of the matter: To what degree does a book reflect a vision that’s fresh with new life, not with life we’ve experienced in other stories?
I would add, though, that how we experience the details of life ARE the details. You can’t separate the dancer from the dance, the medium from the message, etc.
As Renoir is supposed to have said, “The only things that matter in life are the things we remember.” He was right, and I believe this is consistent with the emphasis you place on emotional power in writing: we don’t remember what doesn’t “mean” for us. And the degree to which the writer can translate this power of memory into language will determine the success or failure of stories.
But there’s no unified field theory of how to get there, no Enigma Machine, courtesy of Alan Turing. Many roads lead to the Promised Land, to that sense of rightness and value that readers most hope for in a book. And even more roads leading to stories with no chance of being remembered.
Barry-
That’s a deep response, will have to spend some time with it. From the hip, though, I do believe that how characters experience themselves (and, today, their own emotional world) is a big part of why we connect with–and remember–them.
Wonderful post, and very timely. I recently was trying to give a fellow writer some advice on how to make their main character more real and relatable, and had a hard time putting my finger on how to do it. This is a great roadmap.
And this is a classic insight:
“To get us to feel strongly as we read your story, get us to feel differently.”
Thanks, Don – you’ve done it again. You oughta work in publishing or something.
Keith-
Publishing as a career? I dunno. Too many meetings…
You are always thought-provoking and amazing at stoking the fire. Thank you!
Amy-
I stoke–you fire!
A great day for me is when I’ve got a long stretch of quiet work hours ahead of me and no chance of running out of coffee. Oh, and getting to have a morning craft session with Mr. Maass! One particular prompt made a light go on for me. My protagonist is a teenage girl who sees auras. She’s learned to read peoples’ moods by looking at the colors, but when she’s angry, upset, (or in love) she can’t ‘see’, and she has to rely on her other 5 senses, which aren’t as finely hones. When she has to function this way, she’s forced to recalibrate her way of judging herself and others. This dynamic is already in place, but I actually didn’t see it this way until this morning. Thank you!!
Susan-
Fascinating. I’m especially interested in how your protagonist experiences her own self when her ‘sight’ is turned off and other senses are unreliable.
You say, “What interests readers is not the specific details of a story world but the specific ways in which that world is felt and understood by its characters, especially protagonists.” Very true, in life as in art. How I’d love to have a do-over and actually understand this the second time through. Best I can do now is get a firm grasp on it for all my characters, clients and real-live folks. Great post, Donald.
Mia-
Art reflects life but we also live through art. Writing fiction is a do-over, only better.
Thanks for posting such a wonderful lesson on character building.
Great prompts, as always. Thanks for this!
Oooh, what a thought-provoking post! I’ve thought long and hard about what gives my MC a sense of purpose, but it never occurred to me to consider your other two questions: how does she know things are going well or badly, and what terms does she use to judge herself. Off to work on your prompts now! Thanks.
Thanks for all the thought-provoking questions. Back to work.
My protagonist is an artist, which makes her a criminal since all forms of artistic expression are banned in the world my tale is set in. When she weaves intricate patterns in secret, late at night by candlelight, she comes alive and marvels at the ability to create, to give life to her innermost passions, but such an experience is laced with fear. She’s been caught before, and has been given a new chance…she never wants to be caught again. How long can she keep it secret? What a world to live in, where the one thing you love to do the most is considered wrong, especially when it’s wrong for no rational reason.
Fortunately, my world is a little less oppressive. I am blessed to be able to enjoy my art. For me, as I go through life collecting golden-nugget moments, I see story. A conversation with a friend on turing machines soon turns into a new component of my manuscript. A walk down a snowy oak-lined street in mid-afternoon invokes a scene to revisit so I can add a subtle touch. A two-hour run is an inevitable time to fantasize about plot. Never mind that, traffic jams are better; beats honking and swearing (seriously, I am not prone to that, but monkey see, monkey do, and monkey sees a lot up here in Winnipeg). For me life is story and it is rich. Like a beaver that must chew on wood to save its life (sorry for another Canada reference), I must do something with these stories. I am not a good writer by nature, so I’ve had to train myself from scratch–it is a necessity!
What does hope look like for me? What is it that determines if my day is great or not? Wisdom from craft gurus, such as yourself. Being part of a community that has helped me grow, which gives me faith I will continue to improve. Whether or not the WU post has resonated with me.
Suffice it to say, today is going great. And now, to writing. Thank you so much for your generous giving here at WU, Don. Happy February!
John-
You do two-hour runs? Oh man, color me shamed. You’re welcome anyway, though! Your own contributions here are considerable, ask me.
I’ve been running for about nine years now. I love those long ones. Two hours (or so) is a good limit. Instead of going for more time, I increase speed a bit then try to work back up to two hours and the same heart rate. Keeps me healthy, and is a great meditation time.
Don, you have done me the cruel disservice of making me realize that the novel I thought was done a year ago needs the full toolbox of wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers (and 3 & 1 oil) applied to its protagonist and a couple of secondary characters as well. I’ve got this post and others from posts back that prove you have no mercy. But at least you’re gentlemanly about it.
As for whether our human existence is “hilarious, serene, tragic or full of hope?” — Yes.
Tom-
Cruel? (Dusts hands.) Well then, my work here is done. For today!
Christ, another lightweight post from You-Know-Who:
I actually had to read this twice to be sure I had gathered at least a portion of its wisdom. You really know how to pack ten pounds of instruction into a two-pound bag.
A few things sprang to mind once I got my hands around all the ideas you generated in my wee brain.
First, I love the idea of identifying some metric for how your character — and especially the protagonist — measures success or failure, and making that metric unique from your own (the author’s).
One reason I love that is because it’s extremely helpful in solving one of the most common protagonist problems: creating a hero too similar to oneself. Yes, we need to “write what we know,” though Eudora Welty wisely amended that to “Write what you don’t know about what you know,” and that applies here. When the hero is too similar to the author, that intriguing difference that you point out, the thing that makes another person fascinating to us — their unique take on the world — is missing. As a result we tend to take for granted or assume the emotional reality of the character instead of rendering it clearly for the reader. The prose and the emotional intensity and the drama flatten out. (I speak, sadly, from experience.)
The other reason I like creating a metric is it underscores the importance of desire and yearning. On the surface level — desire — the character may be able to tell pretty clearly whether he’s closer or further from success. The girl laughs at his joke. The summit is reached. The witness stops lying and tells the truth. The father asks forgiveness.
But it’s on that deeper level of self-worth, meaning, and purpose that the rubber really meets the road. I’m a big believer in stories in which the hero only glimmers his true yearning or purpose at the story’s start, or he’s torn between two equally powerful ideals, and he only gets clearer about what he truly values and what he must do as his struggles intensify and the threat of loss looms closer. But that assumes that at each step of the way, even as the hero becomes more aware of what he needs to do, he also becomes more aware of his changing values, the increasingly clarity he gains of what’s truly meaningful to him, and why.
And that brings me to the last takeaway: That in the best stories the characters are not fighting merely over personal wants or personal gain. They’s trying to create, maintain, or defend a way of life — a way of living among others. And this requires the hero not merely to succeed for his own sake. His success is tied to the well-being of a community, and that forces him to reassess at every point in the story: what will it mean if I fail? Who will be harmed? Can I live with that?
I’ve shared this post with my class at Litreactor. Great stuff, as always. My brain is churning.
David-
You’re so right. Many authors feel close to their protagonists, which makes their protagonists close (in nature) to them.
That’s not wrong but it does mean that a lot of interesting character exploration can be left out for the simple reason that it’s already done and filed away by the author.
Something I’ve noticed about engaging characters is that they’re engaged by their own emotions. They take their inner life and the condition of their moral selves seriously. They regard themselves. They struggle, scold, spur and hope for themselves.
Which I think is similar to what you’re saying.
Don:
Yes, I’m saying much the same thing, just being customarily long-winded about it. The character becomes aware of what’s truly necessary and meaningful by asking key questions about what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, what it will mean if he fails, etc. I think that questioning creates empathy because it reveals vulnerability through doubt — and doubt reveals a capacity for insight.
I think it was Oakley Hall who pointed out that all of Shakespeare’s monologues ended either in a resolve to act or a change of heart. And I think this is the purpose of inner life in a novel — not to extravagantly navel gaze, but to show the character struggling with what action he needs to take next, and why.
David–
“…one of the most common protagonist problems: creating a hero too similar to oneself.” I know what you mean, but I see it a little differently. Writers guilty of this aren’t actually creating heroes too similar to themselves. Like most of us, most writers live conventional, even boring lives, so they work from an idealized notion of themselves. But often it doesn’t work. If the idealization is also conventional, based on imitations of other idealized heroes, the character comes off as fake rather than imaginative or authentic.
I agree, though: Don’s idea of establishing some basis for the character to gauge success or failure–one different from the author’s–makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for chipping in, David. As always Donald is amazingly clear, helpful and inspiring, and your comment is a meaningful contribution to that.
Thanks, Mary.
“Get us to feel differently…” Create your protagonist’s own emotional world.
For when reading, we come upon a character’s response that strikes us as emotionally different, we find ourselves drawn to that character, pulled into his or her life. I am thinking of BEL CANTO and all the different ways the characters in that novel responded to the same circumstance.
Thanks of this post, Beth Havey
Thanks for a really chewy post. Right now I’m writing non-fiction, so the whole idea of creating my characters’ lives and how they experience the world is a little different. But this post, and its way of looking at things, is so very interesting that not only am I going to file it away, but I might also start my next fiction project sooner than I’d planned.
Ah, great stuff! Just what I need. I’m in the second draft now of my current WIP, and my characters are causing me some trouble…all of your questions will help me understand them more. A good bit of “character building” as opposed to “world building”.
Thank you!
There’s so much more I could say to such a thought-provoking post, but…I’ve got go mull over it a while.
How my character responds to his world is hilarious. He spends a lot of time maneuvering things so as to maximize his luck but even when something unusual or unexpected happens, it’s about luck. Because that is how he measures his life – either he is lucky or he is unlucky. So when he hits the sweet spot, he’s the luckiest man on earth. Overly confident to put it lightly. But never fear. There’s always that big anvil in the sky heading his way. And then he thinks he’s the unluckiest man as he twists in the wind. Then he’s all end of the world drama. Until…
Great writers always write thus. The rest of us need to learn, to be taught, and thank you for this lesson.
What richness in writing. Create the character, (show it to the reader) and then create the filters through which the character sees himself (and show the filters to the reader).
I have an MC, smart as a whip, (awesome GPA etc. etc) whose mother once said to her, “You are dumb.” No matter what happens after, her filter, her one emotional truth is that she is dumb. “O wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”
And to add another layer of complexity, the reader brings to bear his own filters, so two readers read the same book, or see the same movie, and perceive different stories.
Thank you, Don. Your posts are always a feast! You’ve tripled the courses in this one. See you in April.
Gillian
Nice. This put a little twist on the way I was approaching Andy’s emotional tension. Her sister’s intrusion into Andy’s new life was not having significant impact, which I’ve been working to externalize. Honing the internal (motivation), and both the deliberate withholding of expectation (frustration) or the intentional/hyper-intentional feat of bringing issues to light (consternation), I’m working to make the reactions uniquely Andy’s.
Thanks for the nudge!
See you in WFWA land next week.
Deni