What makes a novel really tick? Is it the plot? All the shenanigans the characters get up to? Is it the setting? The prose? All of these things are important, of course, but they aren’t the end-all, be-all. The core of a successful story is a protagonist whose journey absorbs readers, whose emotions become the readers’ emotions, and who stays in readers’ heads long after “the end.”
Why is that? Thanks to all sorts of biological and neurological hijinks, our brains see good stories not just as stories we’re reading but as experiences we’re actually having. In other words, as far as our brains are concerned, whatever the protagonist of a good story is going through, we’re going through it, too.
So, how do you create the kind of protagonist I’m talking about? Good character development requires a lot of work, and there are countless viable approaches to creating a character. But no matter how you go about it, there are two things you must know about your protagonist’s life before page one:
What has she always wanted?
What is her big misbelief that’s standing in the way of getting it? (And how, exactly, did she develop that particular belief?)
These two defining, opposing traits create the foundation for the worldviews and expectations that novel’s events will challenge (and ideally shatter). They establish what your protagonist must overcome and what she will evolve from over the course of the novel. And they dictate how she reacts to the world and why she makes every decision she makes. In short, these two traits bring your plot to life.
Consider, for example, a protagonist who wants to effect change in her community. She sees a systemic injustice, and she wants to turn it around. But some defining moment in her past has her convinced that individuals can’t drive change — that the risks of shaking things up are too great and she’s better off keeping her head down.
The desire to right a wrong — which would require her to get loud — combined with the deeply ingrained fear of rocking the boat make for a powerful internal tension. So, let’s add an inciting incident (the beginning of the novel): her very best friend of thirty years is hurt (badly) by “the system.” If our protagonist wants to help her friend, she’ll have to overcome her big misbelief (and likely other external obstacles, too, but they’ll all be tied to this internal one in some way) in order to achieve her goal of changing the system. And that goal has suddenly become so much more immediate because, now that her best friend has been impacted directly, the stakes are higher than ever.
Obviously, we’ve got some specifics to fill in here, but by establishing both our protagonist’s desire and the misguided belief that’s stopping her from going after it, we’ve set up an internal conflict that lays the foundation for a captivating story.
In your work-in-progress, what has your protagonist wanted since long before page one? What internal obstacle has stopped her from going after it?