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Writing Tips for by Melanie Anne Phillips The Hero Breaks Down Receive Melanie's Writing Tip Newsletter Groucho Marx once said, "You're headed for a nervous
breakdown. Why don't you
pull yourself to pieces?" That,
in fact, is what we're going to do to our hero. Now many writers focus on a Hero and a Villain
as the primary characters in any story.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But as we are about to discover, there are so many more options
for creative character construction. Take the average hero.
What qualities might we expect to find in the fellow?
For one thing, the traditional hero is always the Protagonist.
By that we mean he or she is the Prime Mover in the effort to
achieve the story goal. This
doesn't presuppose the hero is a willing leader of that effort.
For all we know he might accept that charge kicking and
screaming. Nonetheless,
once stuck in the situation, the hero drives the push to achieve the
goal. Another quality of a stereotypical hero is
that he is also the Main Character.
By this we mean that the hero is constructed so that the audience
stands in his shoes. In
other words, the audience identifies with the hero and sees the story as
centering around him. A third quality of the most usual hero
configuration is being a "Good Guy."
Simply, he intends to do the right thing.
Of course, he might be misguided or inept, but he wants to
do good, and he does try. And finally, let us note that heroes are
usually the Central Character, meaning that he gets more "media
real estate" (pages, screen time, lines of dialog) than any other
character. Listing these four qualities we get: 1. Protagonist 2. Main Character 3. Good Guy 4. Central Character Getting right to the point, the first two
items in the list are structural in nature, while the last two are
storytelling. Protagonist
describes the character's function from the Objective View described
earlier. Main Character
positions the audience in that particular character's spot through the
Main Character View. In
contrast, being a Good Guy is a matter of personality, and Central
Character is determined by the attention given to that character by
the author's storytelling. You've probably noticed that we've used common
terms such as Protagonist, Main Character, and Central Character in very
specific ways. In actual
practice, most authors bandy these terms about more or less
interchangeably. There's
nothing wrong with that, but for structural purposes it's not very
precise. That's why you'll
see Dramatica being something of a stickler in its use of terms and
their definitions: it's the only way to be clear. At this juncture, you may be wondering why we
even bother breaking down a hero into these pieces.
What's the value in it? The
answer is that these pieces don't necessarily have to go together in
this stereotypical way. For example, in the classic story of racial
prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Protagonist function and
the Main Character View are separated into two different characters. The Protagonist is Atticus, played by Gregory
Peck in the movie version. Atticus
is a principled Southern lawyer in the 1930s who is assigned to defend a
black man wrongly accused of raping a white girl.
His goal is to ensure justice is done, and he is the Prime Mover
in this endeavor. But we do not stand in Atticus' shoes,
however. Rather, the story
is told through the eyes of Scout, his your daughter, who observers the
workings of prejudice from a child's innocence. Why not make Atticus a typical hero who is
also the Main Character? First,
Atticus sticks by his principles regardless of the dangers and pressures
brought to bear. If he had
represented the audience position, the audience/reader would have felt
quite self-righteous throughout the story's journey. But there is even more advantage to splitting these qualities between two characters. The audience identifies with Scout. And we share her fear of the local boogey man known as Boo Radley - a monstrous mockery of human form who forms the stuff of local terror stories. All the kids know about Boo, and though we never see him, we hear their tales of his horrible ways. At the end of the story, it turns out that Boo
is just a gentle giant, a normal man with a kind heart but low
intellect. As was the
custom in that age, his parents kept him indoors, inside the basement of
the house, leaving him pale and scary-looking due to the lack of
sunlight. But Boo ventures
out at night, leading to the false but horrible stories about him when
he is occasionally sighted. As it happens, Scout's life is threatened by
the father of the girl who was ostensibly raped in an attempt to get
back at Atticus. Lo and
behold, it is Boo who comes to her rescue.
In fact, he has always been working behind the scenes to protect
the children and is not at all the horrible monster they all
presupposed. In a moment of revelation, we, the audience,
come to realize we have been cleverly manipulated by the author to share
Scout's initial prejudice against Boo.
Rather than feeling self-righteous by identifying with Atticus,
we have been led to realize that we are just as capable of prejudice as
the obviously misguided adults we have been observing. The message of the story is that prejudice
does not have to come from meanness, but will happen within the heart of
anyone who passes judgment based on hearsay rather than direct
knowledge. This statement
could never have been successfully made if the elements of the typical
hero had all been placed in Atticus. So, the message of our little story here is that there is nothing wrong with writing about heroes and villains, but it is limiting. By separating the components of the hero into individual qualities, we open our options to a far greater number of dramatic scenarios that are far less stereotypical. Copyright Melanie Anne Phillips The Top 10 Most Popular Articles Be a Story Weaver - NOT a Story Mechanic! How to Create Great Characters! Conflict Can Limit Your Characters Writing From A Character's Point Of View Writing Characters Of The Opposite Sex Our Most Popular Products |
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