The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 2: The Protagonist

You better believe that your protagonist is damn important to your story. Your protagonist is your lens to the world. They are the person who the reader is fitting themselves into, and they will, by necessity to fill all your story beats, be incredibly complex. It's not easy to create one, and you're not gonna be finished by the end of a five-minute or even hour-long brainstorming session; particularly not when you have the rest of your story to write.

But let us consider how to develop one from scratch, and start with a simple rule: the protagonist does not equal a hero. The protagonist often is the hero of the story, but not by requirement. The only role the protagonist needs to fill is the person who drives the plot forward. That's it. Do not worry about making your protagonist a hero to start with, don't think about their big battles and whatever. Start with the character. Not the image the character gives off.

(You can actually start with archetypes that outwardly project a specific identity or something, that is a thing that experienced writers use to subvert expectations about these characters but we're not going that far. Ahem.)

I like to start with a protagonist's personality because it informs a lot of other things about their character. What will their arc be? Will they be passive or active protagonists? (in other words, how much are they in control of the story?) How will they interact with the world around them? How will they appeal to the audience? All of that depends on who they are as people, and I find that the best reference are the people around you who you know. People are the characters of our real story, there's no better reference. Study your friends, study your elementary school bully, study everybody around you. What makes them interesting people? You can always apply this to a protagonist, because they should be interesting and/or entertaining so that the reader can emotionally invest in them. Of course, there's nothing wrong with creating characters who you don't have experience with, but do keep your own experience with people in mind.

From there, you have a structure to build on, and you can consider why they are this way and how they will grow (or fall) throughout the course of your story. Let us consider the first one—why? Some of your character traits will be a part of who they are because they were just born that way, that's true, but much more of our personality stems from our surroundings. Pessimists don't become pessimists just because of genetics. What do they think of their world and why did they reach these conclusions? What values did their parents raise them with, or did they not even have parental guidance to instill those ideals? How do they behave in the world, and what drives them to act like this? Whatever these ideals and conclusions are, they should remain consistent with that character unless their character arc or something demands that they change. These ideals and conclusions can be wrong, of course (this leads to growth!) and at least one of them should be challenged throughout your story for the purposes of conflict.

Notice how I say should be challenged and only say can be wrong. This is where we get to flaws in creating a protagonist. This is a thing that people will grill you on and say is required to make any given protagonist good, but I don't actually like describing character creation like this. Reason being that this gets people hung up on giving their characters stupid negative traits for the sake of giving their character an arc or something when it doesn't even make sense. I prefer using the word imperfect. This description naturally flows into how the protagonist works and gives them more sensible room to grow. And it's not like characters require flaws that you can easily summarize. What's Peter Parker's one-word flaw? Off the top of mind, he doesn't have one. He's just your friendly neighborhood doofus who happens to be able to lift a subway train. Your character can be a great person and still have character development, which is something that budding writers struggle to realize occasionally.

Of course, you can still have characters who are just straight-up wrong about the universe and the stuff around them. There's nothing wrong with that—people aren't magically right about everything. Some people do need a whole journey to get their heads straight about...something, I don't know what you want your protag's arc to be about.

As for the arcs themselves? I'll have another chapter for that later, since it applies to other characters as well besides the protagonist. But the last thing that is specific to the protagonist is psychic distance—arguably critical to the presentation of the entire story. Psychic distance is the term used to describe the perceived separation between the reader and the protagonist (or some other character) and generally it's perceived as a bad thing. To an extreme, it is. Why is the literature universe constantly furious with Mary Sues? They're too perfect, too psychically distant to be okay protagonists. Too much distance is an issue.

But some of my favorite characters in fiction are neurodivergent and autistic characters, and these are probably the most psychically distant characters you can find. Psychic distance isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's not like you can completely get rid of it anyways. These are fictional characters we are talking about, by definition they are separate from us. The reason why anything is interesting—from your characters to your world—they're not something you experience yourself. Psychic distance creates interest, autistic characters are interesting to me because they give me a window into a mindset that's very different from mine. Because we are separate, we want to understand it and are intrigued. Psychic distance is like sugar—you can't have too much, you can't have too little. It's a balance you have to nail.

So, to summarize: Study IRL people around you, keep psychic distance in mind, consider features and imperfections over flaws, make them unique, consider why they are unique, and think about their future arc.