I Object!
By Donald Maass | December 6, 2017 |
I have some doubts. Please answer these questions honestly:
Was your father a “bagman”, delivering cash payoffs on the teeming and corrupt waterfront of New York City in the 1940’s?
Did your mother hunt down her kidnapper, who escaped from prison, before he could find and kidnap you?
Was someone in your Shaker Heights extended family an arsonist, and everyone else harboring a dark secret?
No, I didn’t think so. Things like those don’t happen to most of us. They happen in novels*, though, and we’re glad when they do. We’re entertained. We buy into those preposterous plots. We voluntarily suspend our disbelief and happily accept the actions of a bunch of characters who haul off and do things we would never do.
But wait…I object. We have so often invoked the “willing suspension of disbelief” that we accept it as a given. Of course readers will buy into whatever is happening in your paranormal romance with its shape-shifting hero! Of course readers will believe that your desperate-to-be-a-mom heroine bought a baby in a shady adoption!
Of course! You made it up! It’s a story! Everyone knows that. It couldn’t have happened and for that reason we’re entirely willing to believe that it could. Right? Um, wait a minute. Think about that. It doesn’t make sense. That’s saying that readers buy into preposterous plots precisely because they are preposterous. That’s relying on readers to proclaim, sure, give me characters who act in ways that no rational, law-abiding, well-adjusted citizen would act. Bring it on. The less I believe in your protagonist, the more I will be eager to see what insane thing he or she will do.
That isn’t true. It can’t be. The suspension of disbelief is not willing. Readers objections must be overcome. What is preposterous must become plausible. When human beings act outside the boundaries of family, community, law and reason, there has to be a reason that we believe that they will.
Causing readers to suspend disbelief starts with introducing a story world that feels real. The key to that is details. My mother’s kitchen is one thing. To you that probably doesn’t feel real. However, you might believe it more if I describe it like this: My mother’s kitchen with its gingham curtains, praying angel salt-and-pepper shakers, misshapen paper napkin holder made by me in seventh grade shop class, and shiny aluminum bread box. That’s more likely a kitchen you can believe in. That’s because you can see it. It’s humble and recognizable. It’s the “ordinary world” from which an adventurous protagonist will depart.
The preposterous events of a story aren’t automatically embraced by readers either. They key to that is admitting to readers, yeah, actually things like this don’t happen most of the time. This time is an exception, though, and here’s why…
Next, what causes the crazy, contrary-to-custom actions of protagonists—who are otherwise presented as smart and productive members of society—to become believable? You might think that the key to that is manipulating circumstances such that a protagonist has no other choice. Make your character boxed in, alone, disbelieved, on the run, or in any other way forced to go outside the boundaries and norms of their world, and you’re good. Right? Under extreme circumstances any of us would do extreme things, wouldn’t we?
I object. No, we wouldn’t. Empirically, we don’t. We don’t investigate murders on our own. We don’t take strangers into our homes on slight pretexts. We don’t harbor horrible secrets for thirty years. Instead, we call the cops, run background checks and talk to therapists. Traumatized people, especially, do not keep their traumas a secret. Your pre-therapy girlfriend who was sexually abused by her uncle tells you about it within twenty-four hours and emotionally makes you, the proxy, pay for it for the next four years. The homeless opiate addicts in my neighborhood are in distress, indeed, but camp out in pairs. We humans are rational, careful, self-preserving, and do not stay isolated but seek to share our miseries (and joys) with others.
So, how do the unlikely actions of protagonists become believable? That happens when we believe not in the circumstances but in the people. I don’t mean making protagonists crazy enough to act crazy, though that is possible and sometimes fun. I mean making them protagonists whose inner lives and narrative voices are open to us.
When characters disclose their feelings to us and invite us into their worlds, we follow. When we also like them, we give them the benefit of the doubt. When in addition we admire them, we cheer them on regardless of their choices. That is especially true when they are doing crazy things for the right reasons or, even better, because they are upholding a principle.
Okay, let’s make this practical. Here are some questions to answer. The first few are for you; the others are for your protagonist.
For you:
Apart from what makes your story world a place where extraordinary things can happen, what first makes it ordinary? What is normal about people? What is routine about the place? What in this world might make it feel, to us, like home? What in this world are things that would make us want to pack up and move there?
The extraordinary thing that happens in this story…sorry, we aren’t buying it. In the real world, many factors would keep it from happening. How in your story do those factors—this one time—fail to prevent it from happening?
For your protagonist:
Protagonist, what do you care about? What motivates you not to help others, but to pursue what makes you happy and fulfilled? Whom do you love to hang with? What do you love to do? What do you remind yourself when you feel down? Who inspires you and makes you a better person?
Protagonist, there’s something big you must do in this story…but why can’t someone else do it? Aren’t there others who are more capable, better equipped, more expert and simply better at it than you? Why you?
Protagonist, if you feel singularly charged with making things come out right, what makes you think you are right in the first place?
I object, but what I would like to feel in reading your novel is that my objections are swept away, my heart belongs to your protagonist, and that when your protagonist does crazy things they are crazy-good, crazy-wonderful, crazy like I would like to be. When your story world becomes mine, your unlikely plot becomes inevitable, and when your hero or heroine becomes my proxy—because they are true-hearted—then guess what? I’ll shut up and believe.
What objections might readers have to what happens in your story and to what your protagonist does? How will you overcome those objections?
(*The bed stand novels the premises of which I cited: Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng.)
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).
Sustained!
Seasons Greetings and Thank You for this post Don.
One objection a reader might have for my WIP is about the motivation of my main character, at least until a twist towards the end of the story. I’m offering little in the reasons department at the moment, but need to add some plausible explanations which should help the impact of the twist.
Go get it, James.
Thank you, Donald!
I’ve always thought this was one of the great keys of storytelling: convincing the reader that they –meaning the character, and themselves in the character’s place– actually would do these awesome, dramatic things because they have no choice. That most of plot, character, and dramatic buildup comes down to establishing that “no other choice.”
“Why not?” should never be a rhetorical question for us. The more of those Nots we find and block off, the more concentrated the story becomes.
Ken-
It’s not wrong to box in protagonists, so that they have “no other choice.” It is, however, the weakest way to help us believe they would do what they do.
When our hearts are open to a hero, we are more willing to accept what they feel they must do. The key, then, is opening our hearts. Bonding us.
Plot circumstances don’t do that. The open heart of the hero does, and that is what must be on the page.
I was thinking how truth is often stranger than fiction. That’s when you really have to suspend belief. In my WIP the antagonist gets away with his misdeeds (this is the truth)–they come back to bite him at some other point in his life but that’d be part of a different story, one of monumental regrets, and one I’m not yet ready to write. I know how difficult it is for an audience to stomach the true ending, but when I write a more “satisfying” conventional end it leaves me dissatisfied. See, I think the best revenge is a life well-lived, not necessarily one where the villain gets justice in the worldly sense. Thanks for your post. It’s opened some new thoughts for me to mull.
Fascinating! You’ve got me curious, now.
Me too! “the best revenge is a life well-lived,” can I read this story already?
Thanks Naomi and Don. Someday this will be a book with a spine and heaven help me not to make it a trilogy :)
Don, your response to Ken Hughes, sums it up nicely. “When our hearts are open to a hero, we are more willing to accept what they feel they must do. The key, then, is opening our hearts. Bonding us. Plot circumstances don’t do that. The open heart of the hero does, and that is what must be on the page.” I may have to print that one out and stick it next to your other quotes I have taped to my monitor!
Make sure you can still see the screen! That’s important.
I do want to read LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE. Wow.
Your approach to some protagonist puzzles, your questions about my protagonist–like “there’s something big you must do in this story…but why can’t someone else do it?” another wow, it merits attention.
For me, that question needs to come up when we meet other characters. That question needs to be answered on every page. Drip by drip, the building begins as one character after another reveals their inability to solve this story problem. In my WIP, it’s almost foretold, only my protagonist can stumble, then awake, then pursue until the very end.
Once again, thanks for your questions, Don. Yes, I will be considering them, every one.
The truth is that readers do not approach a story feeling, “Sure, I’m in.” They have their arms folded, thinking, “Not buying it. Convince me.”
Thing is, what convinces them is not what they–or we–imagine. Seduction is subtle. It starts with a felt connection.
Hey Don – Excellent way to get into storytelling mode this morning. Much appreciated.
While I’m a bit reluctant to use an example from the screen (does it seem like we’ve been doing that a lot lately here on WU?), when I read your prompt for protagonists about “why you?,” the first thing that popped into my head was a line from Steve Trevor, in Wonder Woman. It comes in an early scene with Diana. She’s asking him why he would sacrifice so much to stop WW1, and he says, “My father told me once, he said, ‘If you see something wrong happening in the world, you can either do nothing, or you can do something.’ And I already tried nothing.”
I suppose Chris Pine’s performance might have been a factor, but the statement is so humble and easy to identify with, and yet admirable. It makes him seem world-weary and perhaps a bit flawed—maybe even resigned—and yet it makes him believably proactive.
But that got me thinking about the importance of key secondary characters in the willing suspension of disbelief. Diana begins to believe in Steve. She’s clearly more than smitten (first man she’s met, and all). Though that scene works in reverse (Diana’s the protag, Steve the side-kick), perhaps we’re more inclined to see what’s admirable in a protagonist when a secondary character finds them admirable. If so, seems to me this could be even more important for difficult, dark, or prickly protagonists. And the interactions between two characters provides innumerable ways to show a protagonist’s heart and feelings. Caring about others is pretty potent stuff, after all.
Thanks again for the storytelling kick-start. I’ve got just the characters to apply your lessons on today. Hope you and the family are finding some time to enjoy the holiday season.
“Caring about others is pretty potent stuff, after all.”
Amen. It’s the magic juice that makes stories work. I’m very glad they wrote in that little moment (“Why you?”) in the Wonder Woman script. That’s when my heart truly opened up to that improbable story.
I’ve thought along these lines for my antagonists as well. The vicious drug lord who’s anxious about the quality of his hairpiece. His driver, a hitman, upset about getting stains out of the car upholstery. The badly trained trio of guard dogs they both have to contend with. Sometimes it’s hard to keep from comedy when menace is what I’m after, but then I remember Tony Soprano shuffling down his driveway in his robe and shorts to get the paper. I think that keeping them all real on some level makes the mayhem, when it comes, more believable.
Thanks for the juice and this early gift, Don.
Yes, whether heroes or villains, it’s their feelings–grand or petty–that make them real to us. Once they are real, we believe what they do.
Writing a character who will go from innocent, story-loving boy who believes the world is a good place to a cynical, hardened young man whose life is being controlled by a Necromancer is a tough act to pull off. Not because that itself is implausible (to a fantasy reader at least), but because ultimately, I’m telling a story about hope and want to show how one can become misled, yet still rise above. In earlier drafts, I struggled a great deal with the hopeless side of the story and for this reason the story was too dark, and hence incomplete. It wasn’t until the last few years, when I drew deeply on my personal life experience that I was able to bring more emotion into this story and show how one can go through life misled and wander even to the extent where there seems no redemption, yet still rise out stronger than ever–and stronger because of the depth of struggle. There’s still a lot of work to do, but at least I feel I’ve gotten to the heart of just *what* objections I have to address, and by this, I’ll go deeper into my protagonist, deep as I can go.
John-
Tricky. “Dark” is an unhelpfully vague term. We use it to mean grim and oppressive, with a nuance of depressing.
I think, though, that so-called “dark” characters can be as emotionally open, and therefore as winning for us, as any other.
Editors tend to call this making characters “accessible” or “approachable”, but I think what they mean is that those characters are emotionally available and understandable by the reader.
Sounds like you’ve got a nicely objective eye on what you’re writing. Good luck with it!
“When your story world becomes mine, your unlikely plot becomes inevitable, and when your hero or heroine becomes my proxy—because they are true-hearted—then guess what? I’ll shut up and believe.”
Beautifully said, Don! This post actually had me thinking a lot of Lady Bird, a movie that just came out. The story-line isn’t anything fantastic, but the way it’s painted made me shut up and believe. It pulled me in from the very beginning because Lady Bird’s world became mine, and she was so raw and real. The entire film left me thinking for days. As I grow, I’m finding that I must find those misshapen napkin holders in my characters’ lives and find what gives them meaning.
Naomi-
Actually, in my case it was misshapen bookends that I made for my mom in shop class. She still has them fifty years later. And yes, if I were a character, relating what that fact means to me would be a way to make me real for readers.
Goodness, Naomi, do I owe you an e-mail from way back??? Must scroll down my nightmare inbox…
First thing I’ve read this morning, and already have it up on the wall, where I can re-visit it…
I disagree with the idea that no one has 30-year-old secrets, since I have at least one such weight to carry through life. I have also known people who would do something extraordinary or allow an extreme event to take over their lives. They were broken by it, and my hope was that they could somehow survive and be ‘okay’ again.
I tend to use people I’ve come into contact with as character models. Knowing that no one presents the whole truth of themselves right away, and that we build personalities in bits and pieces, I know my characters, and their quirks and secrets, need to evolve in ways that make sense — that are believable to the reader.
I control how much the reader learns about a character and when, which is the opposite of life, where other people control how much we get to know about them.
Appreciate your thoughts, Don, as always, they take me in many directions.
You’ve got me wondering if I am harboring anything secret…in my case, it could be longer than thirty years! Hoo-boy… (Runs finger under shirt collar.)
Seriously, though, my point is that it isn’t plot circumstances that make us believe in what characters do. We believe in those characters’ actions because they disclose their feelings to us. We believe in them.
You always make me think about writing in a completely different way. Thanks for sharing!
Making a connection with a character can be as magical as falling in love. Once the reader is hooked, they commit to going on a journey with them. But sometimes that’s not enough. In Jennifer McMahon’s, Winter People, I got to the climax of the book and laughed out loud. I think the promise of the premise wasn’t clear from the beginning and the ending, well, I don’t want to spoil it for someone who has a different take. I finished it because I was hooked and she’s a good storyteller.
I love your question: “What in this world are things that would make us want to pack up and move there?” It makes me wonder how the Hygge “movement” will impact writing… Some of my favorite books were set in locations I would love to visit.
Falling in love, I think, involves opening oneself up, disclosing things, becoming vulnerable to another. When characters do that, it’s easier for us to fall in love with them.
Don, helpful stuff in conveying how establishing a sense of credibility and familiarity in a world is the most beguiling place from which to depart for more jarring realms. Your post made me remember something I hadn’t thought of in years: my sister’s husband, regular, by-the-book guy, VP of UPS operations in Southern Nevada in the 70s, goes in early to the Vegas office, steals a huge deposit from the safe, and disappears. For four years.
There are many more background details of course, but everything seemed fine on the surface (I lived in Vegas at the time and stayed in their house for a while before the event). That he would do that came as a total shock to my sister, who thought the marriage was going along swimmingly. The kind of thing where only in retrospect you see that there were actually some telltale edges, where the surface seemed smooth.
Thanks for the thought bubbles.
Tom, what a fascinating, and tragic, story. Hindsight has a way of bringing clarity, doesn’t it? Your sister was fortunate to have you close. I hope she has rebuilt her life.
On another note, that would be a fascinating story.
Interesting. In that case, the intimacy shown by the husband, and which caused your sister to believe in him, was false. Nasty.
But as Deb said, what great story material.
One of the highest compliments I’ve been paid was in an Amazon reader’s review of my novel, The Vampire Kitty-cat Chronicles, in which the reader says it was “somehow strangely believable.” This is a story narrated by a cat that has been turned into a vampire. The thing is, the character is real to me. Perhaps that’s where suspension of belief in an outlandish character begins.
To make readers believe in a kitty-cat vampire is quite a trick. Kudos!
My WIP is magical realism and when I began writing I focused on the magical elements. But as the story progressed, and went through revisions, it was the realism of my protagonist’s dysfunctional family life that offered the greater opportunity for her to change the world around her. Your observance that even the drug addicted homeless camp out in pairs is such a strong image. It illustrates that what everyone craves is to make a difference to someone who makes a difference to them. When our characters can demonstrate that – whether lovers or enemies, heroes or villains – the reader will believe.
Exactly! Thanks.
Hi Don
First of all, I send you a belated thank you for your insight during the Surrey International Writers Conference. I followed your advice and reduced the setup of the story I pitched by two-thirds and lost none of the essential introduction. Less was definitely more.
My question regarding today’s post is how do these story logistics apply when the story-world is pure fantasy, the premise is metaphysical, but the characters behave in logical ways according to their extraordinary experiences?
In my current work-in-progress, an autistic boy and his troubled mother rescue a woman trapped in a painting. The premise absolutely cannot happen. But the events that trapped the woman are, to some extent, ordinary personal problems. The trapped woman is the Mona Lisa.
I assumed, perhaps naively, that a setup delivering an immediate ‘heads up this is not the normal world’ would engage the suspension of disbelief from page one.
Is that too simplistic?
Great question. In fantasy, magic is normal. Characters operate within a magical world. But they are still human, and it is their humanness that causes us to believe in them and what they do, ask me.
So this set my mind to REELING this morning, Don, which is the best apology I can muster for the following long comment:
Your article immediately called to mind four different writings on the suspension of disbelief, all of which deal (in some way or another) with, as you say, “When human beings act outside the boundaries of family, community, law and reason, there has to be a reason that we believe that they will.”
The first was from the original source of the phrase “willing suspension of disbelief,” Coleridge.
In Biographia Literaria, he explained his and Wordsworth’s reasons for writing Lyrical Ballads like this:
“In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”
So they wrote Lyrical Ballads trying to give a first-person, intimate feel to the supernatural (making a Ballad lyrical) and by taking the intimate feel of the natural world — things like hangnails and dirty dishes — and making them feel wondrous (making a Lyric poem as tragic or comic as a ballad).
The way they did this was by inviting poetic faith through the willing suspensions of disbelief made possible by transferring “a human interest and semblance of truth” onto whatever preposterous thing they planned to write. They planned on writing unbelievable things in a way that made them believable.
Now it’s interesting because that brings into play the second voice, Tolkien, who disagreed with how “the willing suspension of disbelief” was used in everyday speech, even back in his day:
“Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.”
In other words, writers who do it poorly only have readers who suspend disbelief. Their worlds aren’t consistent enough to invite true poetic faith. So Tolkien and Coleridge actually agreed on this idea of poetic faith, even though it looks like they disagree and we’ve carried on the disagreement into today’s conversation about the suspension of disbelief.
Faith in anything, of course, depends first upon good reasons before it can turn into living, breathing trust in the relationship. Before we wed, I had to have faith in my wife’s love for me before I could build up enough courage to trust her enough to attempt to get down on my knee and propose. Trust has replaced faith, but it all started with damn good reasons for wanting to try. Stories work the same way: good reasons and explanations of the internal realities of the narrative world that leads to a reader’s trust. That trust — that poetic faith — must be continually built upon or it yanks them out of the story.
Which is where the third guy came into play in my mind, George MacDonald:
“The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms–which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation….
“His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the story, by its own postulates, incredible.”
(meaning unbelievable)
“To be able to live a moment in an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of another, immediately, with the disappearance of Law, ceases to act.”
He goes on in The Fantastic Imagination, but the point is that you can be as preposterous as you want as long as your entire world is that preposterous. The internal consistency matters more than anything.
Which leaves us with a fourth guy who does it VERY well: Brandon Sanderson whose Laws of Magic Systems show us, quite clearly, that you can you can be as preposterous as you want as long as you set out clear rules by which the entire society abides and then keep to those rules.
Sanderson does this not only in his magic systems, but in his Worldbuilding. For instance one society has a class system based on eye color, not skin color. Therefore when someone comes in judging people by skin color, you expect every single person who judges by eye color to laugh in their faces. And they do. And it works.
Sorry for the long comment, but like I said, I’m really stewing on this one. Great thoughts.
Lance-
Lending a “first-person, intimate feel to the supernatural” is what Stephen King does beautifully. I tend to agree more with Coleridge than with MacDonald and Sanderson. Made up worlds do need their own rules.
However, I maintain that it is not the clarity of those rules, nor their consistency, that cause us to believe in preposterous plots or crazy character actions. We believe not because the made-up world feels different, but because it feels like ours and because the people their seem like us.
Awesome comment, Lance. I feel like I’m back in college. All that’s needed now is beer.
I think we agree. And that’s actually what MacDonald goes on to say (which I originally clipped to save us all):
“In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were no offense to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must obey–and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.”
That is to say that even if we place our characters in different skin and with different technology, geology, geography, survival, education, transit, communication, economy, social structure, traditions, regulations, and art — with different externals of every shape and shade on the worldbuilding checklist — we must never change their internals: that they struggle with greed while moving towards generousity, that they lose friends over quests for power and gain them in service and faithfulness, that they love and lose and die trying.
Said shorter, Harry Potter isn’t about dragon-heartstring-core wands and ferret-eating hippogriffs.
It’s about love’s triumph over death.
The laws of the world changed.
The laws of human nature did not.
I think we agree, but I still might not be understanding you completely. Still loving reflecting on all of this, regardless.
(I’ll bring the beer next time.)
can’t tell you how many books i’ve read and thought, “why is this person (character) doing / acting / saying that? no one would do / say that.”
and yet, i did actually keep my secret for years. verbal abuse, not physical, but i didn’t want to shame the speaker of those words, “You’re nothing but a failure.” (still makes my eyes water) I know better now, and while i’m not shouting it from the mountaintops, neither do i hide the fact.
and so, too, my character – whom i sometimes wish to konk on the head with a stick! but that’s the story, eh?
Now, you’ve brought up an interesting point, one somewhat raised in comments above, too.
Secrets. Real humans keep them for long periods. But here’s the thing about fictional characters: They don’t. They may not have disclosed their secrets others in their stories, but in many cases they have disclosed to we readers.
Even if they don’t–if secrets are withheld from us–when those characters are emotionally open to us, we will tend to believe in them and what they do anyway.
Thanks for chiming in!
Hi, Don:
Interestingly enough, I’m writing my own post for next Tuesday today, and the topic is “Motivating the Reluctant Protagonist.” This goes very much to your point about credibly earning the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The character is reluctant for perfectly good reasons, at least from his vantage. What obliges him to act counter to that? How do we make that feel believable.
More next Tuesday. Thanks for the kickstart.
This reminds me of Sanderson’s slider system on this episode of Writing Excuses. They treat each one as if controlled by a fader or slider, like on a mixing console, and look at what the relative positions of those sliders do to a character.
The three sliders are Competence, Proactivity, and Sympathy. So in this case, a character who doesn’t protag — a “reluctant protagonist” — would need to be very competent and very sympathetic in order to keep the reader’s interest.
You’ve probably heard of all of that, David, but that’s what I thought of when I read your title.
Looking forward to next Tuesday!