May I introduce you to Dale, a reluctant protagonist? I can’t tell you much about him, but that doesn’t matter. He takes orders from his author, which means he’s guaranteed to stay well within the banks of the plot of that exciting book you’re reading!
If you’ve ever run across a reluctant protagonist, then you know the book doesn’t stay exciting for long. Once the reader catches on to the fact that the main character isn’t contributing anything to the plot, it’s impossible to stay engaged.
A reluctant protagonist doesn’t actively choose their objectives and behaviors. The result is a plot that seems to occur independently of them; they just happen to show up in it. This weakens both the plot and the character.
The reluctant protagonist has a few flavors.
The inexplicable participant
This type of protagonist opposes the actions required of them by the plot, but inexplicably does them anyway. For example, a heroine announces that she doesn’t eat mint chocolate-chip ice cream because, when she was a child, a carton of it melted on the kitchen counter and dripped onto the floor, causing her grandmother to slip and break her hip; in the next scene, without explanation, the character orders a scoop of mint chocolate chip at the ice-cream parlor.
The easily convinced
Some protagonists protest or resist the plot in some way but are then convinced (often on a weak pretext) to participate anyway. This happens more than once or twice, or it involves a major plot point. An example of this would be a protagonist announcing that she doesn’t eat strawberry ice cream because she is deathly allergic to strawberries. When the handsome scoop-meister behind the counter convinces her to try a taste anyway, she suffers a severe reaction and has to be rescued by her poisoner using the EpiPen in her purse. They start dating and live happily ever after.
The undesiring
This protagonist apparently doesn’t want anything at all. For no reason, she goes into an ice-cream parlor and orders a vanilla ice-cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. Another customer says that vanilla ice cream with rainbow sprinkles is his child’s favorite food and offers our heroine a babysitting job on the spot—which she accepts, though the reader has no idea whether she wants or even needs the job.
How do reluctant protagonists get written?
Reluctant protagonists have three sneaky ways of getting into manuscripts. One is when an author gets a great idea for a plot and then develops a vaguely conceptualized main character to implement it. The protagonist is subservient to the plot, rather than a believable being whose actions respond to and influence the plot.
A reluctant protagonist can also come about because the author intentionally conceives of them that way. It’s part of the character’s nature to be fearful, skeptical, introspective, or “above” ordinary wanting. Writing a protagonist like this is not necessarily wrong, but it is very easy to mishandle—resulting in a boring, unlikeable, or unbelievable character. Desire makes both plot and characters compelling.
Which leads to the third way reluctant protagonists sneak in: through the author’s own beliefs about desire. Depending on our cultural backgrounds, religious beliefs, and personal experiences, we all have opinions about whether wanting things is OK, what things we should want, and how intensely we should pursue them. We might lack awareness of what we want or what it feels like to want things. We even have superstitions: If I want something, I probably won’t get it. Be careful what you wish for.
There is much that human beings cannot control; we are shaped by our circumstances. Yet we shape our circumstances, too, by choosing actions based on what we want. Fiction must reflect this through a believable interplay of plot and protagonist.
In the next post, I’ll talk about ways to prevent and remediate a reluctant protagonist in your manuscript.
Banner photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash