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.

I’ve read a couple of books lately which have what I’ve started to think of as “spoiled protagonists”.

“Spoiled” in the sense that everyone treats them like a princess (or a prince – one is male), even though they’re very ordinary people. When they come on the scene, people with serious responsibilities will neglect them in order to help with whatever the spoiled protagonist is doing. Villains go out of their way to give them grief, but it’s all right, because everyone else is their humble servant. Their relatively small successes are treated as world-saving  triumphs and the cause for endless gratitude. They break the rules, or even the law, and are blithely forgiven by the toughest authorities when they explain their reasons.

If they want to go stupidly and unnecessarily into a dangerous situation (and they do), they only need to whine a little and stamp their feet for people who should know better to let them do so. Nameless spearcarriers or even minor characters will then be sacrificed to protect them, without a cross word being spoken to the precious spoiled protagonist.

It didn’t take me long to work out a theory of why this is happening. The authors have been reading too many Chosen One stories. The spoiled protagonist is the Chosen One by stealth.

See, a Chosen One is typically of humble origins, but everyone in the world wants to either oppose them or help them. They’re destined to save the world, but first they have to grow up, and that involves making stupid decisions that have a cost mainly to other people. Because they’re the focus of the Prophecy, it’s literally all about them.

The spoiled protagonist is the Chosen One without the justification of the prophecy. They’re a person who actually is ordinary, injudicious and inexperienced who’s stumbling around, doing a poor job of dealing with a situation that they weren’t prepared for. The unrealistic part is that everyone is downing tools and either helping or hindering them as if they were the most important person in the world.

To the author, of course, the main character is the most important person in the world. The world exists because of the character. But the other people in the world shouldn’t act as if they know that.

Stop spoiling your protagonists, authors. If they’re whiny, headstrong and inept, drop the consequences on them, not on hapless, uncomplaining minions around them. Better still, don’t make them whiny, headstrong and inept in the first place.

I was reading this post about period language on Wondermark this morning, and it got me thinking about language in fiction.

I love the English language, for all its quirks. My long-ago master’s degree is in that field, after all. I love to see it well and skillfully used, something which is becoming sadly rare. Perhaps it always was.

I’ve recently left a popular writers’ community on Google+, only partly because of the high volume of posts. What really drove me out was the high volume of posts that were along these lines: “So im wanna be a writer lol any advise?” I exaggerate only a little.

And to weave in another thread to my thinking, I was reading i09’s best science fiction and fantasy books of 2012 post today, having got there from a comment on N.K. Jemisin’s blog, and read this comment:

Is there anyone out there who is unimpressed by NK Jemisin? I keep reading these glowing reviews of her novels and how they’re destined to be classics, but all I could think when I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was that it read like mediocre fanfiction, especially the interactions between the protagonist and the scary love interest dude.

I mulled that over, and what I realized was that I enjoyed that book mainly because of the skill of the language, and not so much because of the story, which is largely made up of tropes. (Apparently her later books get better.)

I loved Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks, too, and was surprised to read reviews on Goodreads from people who just didn’t get what the fuss was about. They were bored by the 80s music references and all the band stuff, they said (honestly, that didn’t do much for me, either), and disliked the main character. Again, I loved it mostly because of the language.

Language by itself, though, isn’t enough for me. In both The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and War for the Oaks, the central characters have a strong moral core, which they act upon. They are actually strong women, not the fake “strong women” that you get in so much contemporary writing who are actually headstrong women, and cause most of their own problems, while relying on others, usually men, to solve them.

I think the character issue is why I can’t stand Gene Wolfe’s books, and have a love-hate relationship with Neil Gaiman’s work, although both are generally admired for their prose by people who love the more literary end of speculative fiction. Gene Wolfe’s protagonists are so emotionally alienated that I can’t even understand them, let alone identify with them, and Gaiman’s are often far too dark for my taste. I enjoyed American Gods, but I stay well clear of Sandman. It’s brilliant, but emotionally it’s too much for me.

What I’m teasing out here, I think, is that there are several different ways in which a book, or a writer, can be “good”. There’s language, facility with prose, which the authors I’ve already mentioned do well. There’s story, which includes things like pacing, suspense, the right mix of foreshadowing and surprise, as well as the structural elements of plot. There’s setting or worldbuilding, coming up with a world of wonder that has a believability to it, or at least a majesty or a richness to it. And there’s character and its close cousin situation.

Alongside these multiple ways to be skilled, there are matters of taste.

I don’t mind a little period language, since I’m well-read in English literature back to Beowulf (with a gap, I’ll admit, in the 18th century), but some people struggle with it. Those people shouldn’t read my book City of Masks, which has a “period” style taken from no actual period, and nor should people who obsess about historical accuracy. And for me, period language done ineptly is a complete turnoff, whereas for some people it won’t matter at all. Likewise, some people will give a book four or five stars even if it is full of incorrect homonyms and punctuated on the Jackson Pollock principle, but for me, that’s tiresome and distracting.

I personally don’t mind a story that’s constructed mostly of tropes, if it’s done well and the book has other merits. I also can enjoy a book that’s well-plotted even if the other elements are weak. J.K. Rowling, whose prose is often held up as an example of what not to do, whose worldbuilding is ridiculous and whose characters are thin, still holds my attention by weaving intricate plots, even if they have big holes in them. Personally, I like neat, happy endings that still leave the possibility of future problems open, but other people want their endings to be more ambiguous.

A wonderfully imagined world full of possibilities will seize my interest, but only if those possibilities are explored with characters who appeal to me (which is why I don’t read much hard SF, or China Mieville). This is actually one of the hardest things to do, and there aren’t many worldbuilding writers who come to mind. Tolkien, of course, is one. Part of the problem is that richly imagined worlds are hard to convey without either bogging down the story in exposition or leaving your readers confused for the first third of the book. I’m reading, or trying to read, Walter Jon Williams’ Aristoi at the moment, and it has the latter problem. I’m a worldbuilder, and I can tell you it isn’t easy.

You don’t need a completely original world to get a good review from me, but on the other hand, mashing up Jules Verne and Indiana Jones and hotgluing brass gears over the joins is not going to grab me. I like to see some effort.

There are kinds of worlds I don’t like and kinds of worlds I do like, too. Cruel empires, post-apocalyptic wastelands, and oppressive dystopias, however well done, have an uphill struggle to appeal to me.

Finally, I have strong and definite tastes in characters. I don’t like antiheroes, though unlikely heroes I’m all for, and I love a good rogue with a heart. Passive or silly women, Gene Wolfe’s alienated people with no recognisable human emotions, anyone cruel or over-the-top villainous, casual adulterers, these will not get my vote.

What I’m saying, as both a writer and a reviewer, is that there can be many reasons why a book may or may not appeal to me or you. There are matters of craft and skill. At the moment, there are a huge number of first-time authors putting books out. Those who persevere and improve their craft will rise, and if I see an author whose craft is a mess but who shows imaginative flair and originality, I will write them an encouraging review and urge them to get some editing and coaching.

And then there are matters of taste. I’ve written lukewarm reviews of books I thought were well done, because despite that they weren’t quite my thing. I’ve abandoned, partially read, books that are critically or popularly acclaimed, because they contain elements that I personally dislike. I try to distinguish in my reviews between “it’s not good” and “it’s not for me”.

And for my potential readers: I’m still learning the craft (of course I am, everyone is, but I’m early on in the process). I know I’m an above-average writer of sentences, and I’m working hard to become at least an average teller of stories. My books have highly inventive settings, simple plots, and main characters who are fundamentally moral, adult and in reasonable mental and emotional health, though they also tend to be socially awkward and unpopular. If that’s your thing, I hope you’ll read them.

Oh, I should mention here: I recently set it up so that, if you sign up for my mailing list to be notified when I put out new releases, you also get access to free short fiction and permanent discounts on my older books. You can also be notified when I review a new indie book that I liked, and get these blog posts emailed to you (both of those things are opt-in). Just go to the right-hand sidebar on any page of the site and put in your email address, and software I spent far too many hours tinkering with will do the rest.