So you have a story idea. Maybe a pizza shop is struggling to stay open, or aliens are invading a toy store, or reverse vampires are injecting people with too much blood. Now you need a main character! To start creating a great protagonist, ask yourself three questions:
- What kind of person would be a good choice to resolve the story conflict?
- What character flaw would keep them from resolving the conflict too easily?
- How are the central conflict and the protagonist’s flaw connected?
The answers to these questions will help guide your other character development decisions, from the character’s name to their dialogue and more.
Three Questions to Creating a Great Protagonist
1. What kind of person would be a good choice to resolve the story’s conflict?
Imagine that you work in your story’s HR department. What would you list as the required skills in the protagonist’s job description? What type of character would be a good hire, without being overqualified?
Creating a great protagonist is about balance. The protagonist’s victory should feel believable, but not inevitable. An unbelievable victory feels like cheating, like plot armor or a deus ex machina. An inevitable victory robs the story of dramatic tension, and robs your character of growth. Both can make your story’s resolution feel unrealistic and unsatisfying, and make your readers less likely to pick up your next book.
Before the protagonist faces a challenge, give them some tools to overcome it. If they need to take out a bouncer or a security guard, there should be a clear reason why they know how to fight. If they don’t know how to throw a punch, they should have another way to get through it – intimidation, flirting, or even distracting their opponent with magic tricks. Be creative, be funny, be exciting, but keep it believable.
However, the more ability you give them, the more you risk making the resolution seem too easy. If the conflict is about keeping the family pizza shop in business and the protagonist is the greatest chef who has ever lived, you will need to give them problems elsewhere to keep your story from ending on the first page. Protagonists should always have something standing in their way. Otherwise, the path to resolving the conflict won’t be challenging enough to keep the story interesting.
Try to avoid “Swiss Army Knife” characters, characters that always have another skill, talent, gadget, or super power to get through every challenge. If your character never needs to learn, grow, or ask for help, readers will find them difficult to relate to, and maybe even boring.
To create room for character development and to give the story a sense of progress and forward momentum, your protagonist should start off missing something they need to succeed. This also gives you the opportunity to introduce more types of characters – a sidekick to make up for their shortcomings, or a mentor to help them learn and find that missing piece.
Even when the protagonist needs training in something physical like combat or a sport, a good portion of their training will likely be focused on some missing internal quality that they need to succeed, like patience, determination, or inner peace. This internal lack is your protagonist’s flaw.
2. What character flaw would keep them from resolving the conflict too easily?
Again, balance is important. The character flaw should add enough of a challenge that they need to grow as a person to succeed, but you don’t want to choose a flaw that will make their eventual success seem unbelievable or completely impossible. If the conflict is their struggle to become a top concert pianist, making them a lava elemental who instantly disintegrates any piano they touch could be a little too far.
If one of the protagonist’s flaws is being in denial about their flaws, then you may want to include a character who can give them the tough love they need to face the truth. This can be a mentor, a foil, a love interest, maybe even the antagonist. Almost any relationship will work.
Characters who inspire change in others are often static and unchanging themselves, as they are already in the right, at least as far as the story’s theme is concerned. If your theme is “bravery is facing your enemies despite your fear,” and the mentor teaches the protagonist to face his fears, then the mentor will likely not change much throughout the story. They are already brave. Their character arc is already complete. If you do decide to give the mentor an arc, their change will come from learning something different about bravery, connecting them to a different aspect of the theme.
Any time you add a character to help guide or motivate the protagonist, make sure that they have goals of their own. Characters should feel like real people, not plot devices. If the protagonist didn’t exist, how would this secondary character have handled the conflict? Would they have kept searching for a “chosen one,” or would they have gone after the bad guys on their own? What character flaw would they have to overcome if they were the protagonist?
In addition to making the resolution more challenging, the protagonist’s flaw should have a clear relationship to the story’s main conflict. The protagonist’s inner conflict and the story’s outer conflict should work together like a pair of gears. When one moves, it should move the other.
3. How are the central conflict and the protagonist’s flaw connected?
The outer conflict of the story should be thematically connected to the inner conflict, the protagonist’s efforts to cope with their flaw. This doesn’t mean there has to be a causal relationship, although there certainly could be. For example, a protagonist’s struggles with the office bully might lead to problems with their self-esteem, or their fear of intimacy might lead to arguments with their romantic partner.
It can be easier to see the thematic similarities between the two conflicts if one is directly caused by the other. However, thematic relationships can be more complex and esoteric than simple cause and effect. For example, if the outer conflict is the protagonist trying to buy his childhood home so it won’t be torn down, his flaw could be an inability to let go of the past, refusing to face adult responsibilities, or immersing himself in work to avoid facing his feelings about his parent’s death. While none of these flaws would directly cause him to need to buy a house, any of them could be part of his psychological motivation to do so.
The psychological motivation (character) causes the goal that causes the outer conflict (plot). All of this forms the thematic context (theme) that gives the story resonance and meaning. Theme makes a story feel like it’s “about something,” and not just a bunch of stuff that happens. A strong theme can make any story feel important, whether the characters are saving the world or saving their pizza shop.
As the protagonist works on the outer conflict, they should have inner growth as a result. They should learn something, develop a strategy or skill, or gain some insight that allows them to better understand and cope with their flaw.
Similarly, working on their inner flaw should make them stronger and better equipped to deal with the outer conflict.
The protagonist doesn’t have to completely overcome their flaw, especially if you’re writing a series and need to save some character development for the next book, but they should make enough progress that readers will be able to see and appreciate the change. If they do completely conquer their flaw, you can find another way for them to grow in the sequel. People are complex creatures. As anyone who has gone through therapy knows, when you peel away one psychological issue, there’s usually another one hiding underneath.
Wrapping Up
Once you answer these three questions, you’ll be well on your way to creating a motivated, thematically effective protagonist. The three main story elements of plot, character, and theme will naturally begin to influence each other and will work together to drive the story forward. That’s when stories become art.
