When Protagonists Go Wrong: Three Fatal Character Pitfalls
From Boring to Brilliant in Three Easy Fixes
Have you ever noticed that writing the villain’s scenes is often way more fun than writing the hero’s?
You’re not alone.
In Chapter 19 of The Art of Character, David Corbett digs into several reasons why this happens, and what to do about it.
First there’s the usual advice:
Maybe you haven’t spent enough time thinking about the character’s desire—what your hero wants, why he wants it, and what he might lose if things don’t go his way.
Maybe you haven’t structured the premise well enough to truly understand the hero.
Maybe you haven’t articulated the moral argument of your story to yourself yet to really grok the meaning of it all.
Standard stuff, but fair.
But then he delves into some more niche reasons your hero might be falling flat, and here’s where it gets really interesting.
Three reasons your protagonist sucks, and some strategies for making it all better
The hero’s conflict is mostly internal
There’s a piece of craft advice going around that advises authors to establish a ghost or a fatal flaw for a story’s main character. (Even Corbett mentions it in his book, where it’s referred to as the ghost and the revenant.)
The ghost is a well-used structural element in fiction: give the hero some big issue or wound that she needs to correct by story’s end. It’s a fan favourite, and something I will also recommend every time.
But sometimes we get so caught up in developing and elaborating on this internal problem that the story we’re writing gets completely taken over by it.
We end up with a protagonist whose biggest conflict is to overcome some internal flaw.
Especially when writing novels instead of scripts for the screen, it can be very tempting to descend into the interior world of the main character’s very soul and explore all the nuances of the battle playing out down there.
But here’s the deal: in this regard, novels aren’t all that much different from screenplays, and the advice is going to be the same. You are going to have a really hard time dramatising a main conflict using only the abstract landscape of the character’s interior.
To put it another way, if I ask you who your hero’s main opponent is, and you are tempted to answer “Why, herself, of course,” then that’s alarm bells going off.
Like in screenplays, your job as author is to draw out the conflict from that innerscape and encode it dramatically in order to convey it to your audience.
A character who has only herself as an opponent (or even just as a main opponent) will struggle to draw in the audience, because let’s be real, she doesn’t really have an opponent. If you’ve taken even just a single lesson from our discussion on characterisation, it should have been that you cannot make a compelling character without a desire, and desire doesn’t mean anything without opposition. That opposition is important enough that it cannot come solely from within the protagonist. It needs to come from outside in some way, shape or form.
An interior opponent is better framed as a character weakness or flaw, something we’ll look at in a future post.
But what if you really, really, really want your hero to struggle mainly with his internal demons?
Okay fine. We’ve got a strat for that.
This technique—what I call dramatic anchoring—draws out internal conflict by tying it to external characters and goals. (Creative, right?) Remember that name, because we’ll be returning to it now and then.
Let’s see how it works.
It can be helpful to think of a protagonist’s internal conflict as a fundamental choice—between one or more values, or one or more ways of living (we've discussed this too). Once you’ve formulated his conflict like that, then it simply becomes a matter of tying each option of the choice to some external thing, either to another character or to a goal. Something the reader can see and understand the significance of, and something the protagonist can actually interact with or pursue.
And voilà, now you’ve taken what was only internal and you’ve externalised it.
In The Godfather, Michael Corleone is caught between his desire to live an honest, legitimate life and his loyalty to his family. These duelling values are externalised expertly in the script, and represented by his innocent wife, Kay, who stands for his aspirations for legitimacy, and the crime business of his family, which stands for the family’s hold on him. By showing his interactions with these two elements, we can track Michael’s internal conflict (and, uh, it does not go well).
Something similar happens in Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne’s struggle between justice and vigilantism is externalised through Harvey Dent (idealistic law and order) and the Joker (chaos and moral nihilism). But instead of just debating ethics (wow, what a rollercoaster ride…), Batman is forced into direct conflicts revolving around these two moral poles.
Pixar’s Inside Out pushes this concept to its natural extreme: Riley’s internal emotional turmoil is externalized through the personified emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, etc.). Instead of an introspective story, the film depicts her internal journey as an external adventure.
This is literally what it means to dramatise a conflict: to render it as an interplay between characters and goals, and how the various characters either help or hinder each other to move closer to or farther from their goals. You’re staging the conflict in a compelling, highly visible way. That’s what story is, and this applies even when you conceive your protagonist’s main conflict as mainly internal.
One pitfall to watch out for when you use this strategy: These characters you create to represent the different options? Well, you can’t cheat the system. You can’t make them be only anchors. They have to be fully rounded characters with their own needs, desires and agenda, and they need to play a significant role in the progression of the plot, or else… you guessed it… they will be the ones that fall flat, and you will only have kicked the can down the road instead of fixing your problem.
Your approach needs to be holistic, and these anchoring characters must be an integrated part of the story body.
The hero has a dysfunctional relationship with her desire
Most standard protagonists want what they want, they know what they want, and they go after their goal with gusto.
But once in a while, we try to get a little more nuanced, and we might create a hero who starts off the story being unclear about what she wants. There is some confusion there for the character (and usually for the audience too, unless you’re adept at creating privilege gaps—something we’ll get to in a future post).
Or maybe the hero knows what she wants, but she’s afraid to want it (ooo, this is giving tortured romantic hero, but what do I know?)
In either case, you have a problem. Come on, you know this one by now.
Without a clear desire for the hero to go after, you cannot have clear opposition, and without that, do you even have a character, let alone a story?
No. The answer is just… no.
So what do you do? Toss out your attempts at nuance and commit yourself to a writing style of unmitigated bluntness?
Uh, all the way no to that.
Here’s what you do: you come up with a false goal for your hero.
Relax, we’re not lying to the audience or anything. We’re allowing the hero to lie to herself.
She convinces herself that this false goal is the thing she really wants. And pay attention: this fake-out goal can’t just be any random old thing. It has to be kind of sort of somewhat related to the real thing she wants. It must be a reflection of who she is, and what she desperately needs.
In Tangled, even though Rapunzel ultimately dreams of freedom, her initial goal is much more modest: she just wants to go see the floating lanterns, and she explicitly intends to come right back to the tower (i.e. her prison) afterwards. This goal is sort of just there to get her moving and acting in the story. We as the audience know that she wants (and deserves) so much more than just seeing the lanterns, and soon she will realise that too.
Notice how even if this first goal is “fake” (in the sense that it’s not what she’ll end up the entire story wanting), it’s very real in a deeper sense: it hints to the audience through subtext what it is she really wants, and also shows us how she’s gone about trying to satisfy her needs as a character (even if she herself doesn’t yet understand what those true needs are).
But (and this is important) you can’t just leave her wanting the wrong and/or fake thing throughout the entire story! That would be an entirely different story than the one you wanted to tell, where she wants the real thing that you wanted her to want in the first place! (Geez, my head is spinning…)
So you need a second step: the hero’s attempts to go after this false goal should gradually lead her to understand that this fake goal isn’t actually what she needs. There is something else, something deeper, and the resolution of the story should at the very least bring her to realise this difference, even if it doesn’t ultimately grant her that true desire. (Luckily Rapunzel does get her desires fulfilled, yay.)
When the protagonist is designed to be a “vessel of virtue”
Oof, this is a big one.
Okay, so we all get invested in our characters, especially our heroes. Sometimes we even (gasp) identify with them more than with any other characters we create.
That’s fine in theory.
But sometimes this leads us to creating heroes that are just… a little too perfect?
We talked about a story’s moral argument earlier and also played around with figuring out a story’s moral premise.
The thing about morality is that its very best lessons are usually framed in counterform: Don’t just tell me some virtue is good. Show me how bad it is when that virtue is lacking.
Having a protagonist who is perfectly good and virtuous may sound enticing to you as the author (”Look how good and pure and wonderful he is! Doesn’t he deserve his happy ending?”), but it’s a snoozefest to readers!
[These perfectly good heroes] invariably pale beside the scurrilous, earthy, villainous scene-stealers around them, plodding through the story aglow with virtue like a night-light—and generating just as little heat.
David Corbett, The Art of Character
Aggression, wickedness, foolish mistakes. These things are what’s interesting to readers, and the crucial components of effective moral messaging.
I don’t care to see a beacon of goodness get his happy ending because he is just so great (yay?).
Show me instead how a damaged disaster of a person can wrangle his way to a happy ending despite his flaws. (Here I can’t help but think of Wicked Little Letters again. That movie may have its flaws—it’s somewhat predictable, for one—but man does it make you root for a massively flawed character!)
Superman v Batman: Dawn of Yikes
Superman is the classic example of someone who is just such a swell guy: the ultimate Mary Sue (or Gary Stu). You’ll never catch him badmouthing anyone. He never betrays anyone. More importantly, he never kills anyone* (disclaimer below, calm down), and for the most part isn’t even shown to hurt anyone all that much (except if they’re extraterrestrial aliens — then he gets a free pass to go hog wild).
The problem? Superman isn’t actually a character as much as he is a concept: the personification of the human desire for justice.
And like a concept, he lacks agency.
Oh no! A bus is about to crush a mother and her baby stroller! Whatever will happen? Will Superman swoop in to save the—
Of course he will. He must. He has no choice in the matter.
He is an abstraction given human(ish) form, and he cannot choose to act any other way than that concept dictates.
This problem of Superman’s overwhelming virtue is such an enduring challenge when it comes to writing good stories about him that in the Cavill movie iteration of the character, the writers actually had him kill the main opponent (something wildly out of character for him), just to try to squeeze a little drama out of it. This tactic’s success was limited: the killing upset the Superman purists, and on the flip side did very little to humanise this otherwise godlike figure.
Remember when we discussed giving your characters vulnerabilities?
Yeah, turns out that’s really hard to do when your “character” is basically Jesus Christ punching bad guys.
Watching/reading a series of Superman shows/comics is usually just about seeing how kryptonite will be snuck into the storyline this time. Is it a fallen meteor shard? Is it an ancient ring with a green stone? Is it distributed as dust in the water? Is it green, blue, gold, red or white kryptonite?
(This kryptonite fever got so out of hand that in 1971 an official storyline made sure to wipe out all kryptonite on Earth just to stop the madness! That didn’t stop it, of course, just slowed the roll, and to this day it’s virtually impossible to tell a sensible Superman story without bringing in some form of the vulnerability-inducing stuff.)
Perfection (both of character and of physicality) renders Superman pretty hard to get invested in, at least from a character perspective.
Compare that to Batman. Bruce Wayne is an eminently flawed character: he has severe psychological damage from multiple bouts with childhood trauma, he’s a serial womaniser (even if it’s just a part of his playboy persona to protect his superhero identity), and yes, he hurts people. A lot. He usually tries not to kill them directly, but his decisions and actions sometimes get them killed all the same.
Gotham is a fundamentally darker place than Metropolis, and that’s okay. Better than okay, in fact. Batman’s stories are broadly speaking more compelling than those of Superman, and it’s not hard to see why. Bruce Wayne is a character, and by watching him we can go on a psychological and moral journey that can teach us something about human nature.
That is something Superman really struggles to do.
I’m sure I don’t have to provide a blow-by-blow for how this applies to your work as an author of awesome fiction, do I?
Okay fine, short and sweet: Ditch the paragons and give us some real flaws. Let your character struggle, make bad choices, and earn their victory. That’s what makes for a hero worth rooting for.
Simple, right?
There are definitely a whole bunch of other reasons your hero might be coming off as lacklustre and boring, but this post is already too long.
Worry not, we’ll circle back around to some more of these in the future. For now, I hope you found these musings useful.
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In this week’s Friday supplement, we’ll explore the technique of dramatic anchoring, and step through the process of externalising a conflict that is too internally focused.
See you then!
Referenced Posts
Awesome article!
And now I want to write a post or start a chat thread about my issue with one of my characters... It's not like I didn't have enough on my plate already. Well, it's more like a world building problem but it boils down to that single character.
Also, I think Smallville managed to give Superman a well rounded character. Young Clark has flaws and moral dilemmas throughout the series.