This is a follow-up to my post on the Spoiled Protagonist, which seems to be resonating with a few people. Since I wrote that post, I’ve read another book with a seriously spoiled protagonist. How spoiled? Would you believe, the villain has his minion rescue her from certain death, reunite her with the only weapons that can stop his evil plan, and help her get to where he is – and all he seems to get out of it is a brief villain-gloat?

Characters like that are what I call “plot puppets”. They do things, not for reasons that make rational sense within the world of the story, but in order to advance the author’s preordained plot. Plot-puppetry is a particular risk if you’re writing to a formula, like the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey.

How not to spoil your protagonists

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I recently read and very much enjoyed Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (the link is to my review on Goodreads).  His plot is as old as the hills: kill the monster. We’ve been reading that plot since Marduk and Tiamat. But what he does to make it interesting and fresh is that he gives each of his characters something they desperately want but can’t have, and something they must do even though they don’t want to. These elements are almost completely apart from the main plot, but they upstage it because he does it so well.

There’s the secret to avoiding plot puppets: Give each character a clear agenda. If everyone, definitely including your villain, is acting out of obvious, understandable motives that are consistent with who they are, your protagonist won’t get the chance to be spoiled, either. The grim, duty-bound, important people she meets in the course of her adventures won’t neglect their responsibilities in order to help her, for example.

Some of the best advice Kathleen Dale, my editor for Realmgolds, has given me is to give my main character a clear goal right from the outset. I’ll write another post soon about how I raised the stakes for that character and made his goal more personal, but as soon as I did so, the book picked up momentum. A pressing goal that’s emotionally important to a character is one of the best gifts a writer can give them to help make them a strong protagonist.

It’s not all about you

Here’s the other part of not spoiling your protagonist, and I owe it to Robertson Davies.

Robertson Davies was a Canadian academic and novelist. He wrote literary fiction with a weird twist, sometimes, though not always, supernatural. But to me, the most interesting thing about his writing is the way he wrote his trilogies.

As specfic readers, we’re used to trilogies that tell one long story. Davies’ ones don’t, or at least, it’s not that simple. What he tends to do is take minor characters from his first book and put them at the centre of the next book, relegating the main characters from the first book to relative or complete obscurity. Or he tells the second book from the perspective of someone who doesn’t even appear in the first.

The extreme example is his incomplete “Toronto Trilogy”, his last work, of which only two books were written. In the second book, The Cunning Man, the narrator obsesses over the son of his mistress, speculating (despite her denials) that he is also his son. The young man is tremendously important to him, and yet when you read the first book, Murther and Walking Spirits, which is narrated by that same young man, he never mentions The Cunning Man‘s narrator even once. The older man apparently has no significance in his life at all.

What reading Robertson Davies taught me is that everyone is at the centre of their own story. When I’m walking down the street, I often look around at the people I pass and think about that fact. Each one of them has their own story, as important to them as mine is to me, and I don’t know, and will never know, what that story is.

While I work on the last edits of Realmgolds, I’ve started the next book, currently called Hope and the Clever Man. It’s set during the same time as Realmgolds, not far away, and some of the events in each book very much impact the other, but the main character isn’t even mentioned in Realmgolds. And yet her story is very important to her and the people around her, and without her the events of Realmgolds would have gone very differently.

She lives in a Robertson Davies world. Despite her considerable talents, I hope that will help keep her from becoming a spoiled protagonist.

Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.