On occasion a secondary or even tertiary character can become the focus of our hopes and fears for the purpose of our scene. We’ll pick up that observation in “Focus Characters” (see Focus Characters).
Further defining your protagonist requires you to first determine what sort of story you’re telling.
Is it primarily about confrontations with external obstacles? If so, you are establishing the main attributes of a procedural hero. See below.
If instead you wish to tell an internal story about emotional interactions with others, which resolves with a personal transformation (or failure to achieve personal transformation), you have a dramatic character on your hands. See Dramatic Characters.
Procedural Heroes
Procedural heroes operate in a world of adventure, peril, or mystery, solving external problems.
They may well also be serial heroes, who appear on an ongoing, episodic basis, in a series of novels, TV series, movie franchise, or comic book title. Examples include Wonder Woman, Jason Bourne, Miss Marple, and Conan the Barbarian. Any hero capable of bearing reiteration over multiple, unrelated adventures is almost certainly an iconic hero, described below.
Or they may appear over the course of a single narrative, sometimes a long and extended one, which ends on a note of conclusive resolution. Here we’re talking about Harry Potter, Tris from the Divergent series, The Great Escape’s Cooler King, or Ree Dolly from Winter’s Bone. Meant to support a single narrative arc, they are transformational heroes, as seen under Transformational Hero.
Iconic Hero
Built for repetition over an open-ended series of variations, iconic heroes complete each adventure unchanged—or changed in a superficial way that does not alter or threaten the character’s core qualities. Instead, they change the world around them. They encounter a disorder in the world, and using the abilities and mores that define them, put it right again.
Detectives solve the mystery, leading to the arrest of the murderer.
Superheroes defeat supervillains in costumed combat.
Special ops types shoots their way through the enemy until none remain.
Through dogged legwork investigative reporters uncover the truth.
With unflagging zeal underdog lawyers win justice from the corrupt and complacent system.
As the last two examples suggest, the disorder the hero sets out to correct may in fact be a false, corrupt, or decadent order upheld by tyrannical politicians, crooked cops, unresponsive bureaucrats, behind-the-scenes vampires, or the like.
Although you can reframe it more specifically to the incidents of your particular story, the throughline for pretty well any iconic hero story is order vs. disorder. Rephrasings might include:
good vs. evil
underdog vs. the Man
law vs. lawlessness
crime and punishment
impunity vs. vengeance
Iconic Ethos
Iconic heroes prevail by drawing on their iconic ethos, a core mixture of practical capacity and philosophical certitude. Each adventure tests both the inner compass and outward abilities of the iconic hero. The hero reiterates the ethos—sometimes having to rediscover the ethos after having repudiated it—and through this reiteration achieves victory.
Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries by piecing seemingly trivial disparate details into masterful deductive narratives.
Miss Marple does the same by hiding her sharp mind behind a deceptively sweet demeanor.
With barbaric vitality Conan overturns the false order of corrupt civilization.
Wonder Woman binds the evildoers of the cruel and violent patriarchy, provided she takes care to remain unbound herself.
Dana Scully fights conspiracies by cleaving tightly to scientific skepticism, no matter how bizarre events may seem.
Philip Marlowe goes down mean streets, without himself becoming mean.
When creating an iconic hero, craft a similar mission statement. Ask yourself if you can envision multiple plotlines in which the iconic ethos can be tested, and prove superior to its opposition. Look for something that will become more satisfying each time you reiterate it.
Your hero’s iconic ethos states or implies something about the sort of disorder she triumphs over in the course of each installment.
Each time you depict your iconic hero triumphing over disorder using his iconic ethos, you evoke a sense of mythic recurrence. Your stories become ritualistic, employing the repetition of familiar structures to tap into a deep human impulse spanning cultures and eras. If they seem overly familiar or rote, that’s because the variations you employ lack energy, wit, and skillful construction. Adept manipulation of emotional rhythm and transition become key tools in a framework where departure from expectations is not only unnecessary but actively undesirable.
This brings us to one of two reasons why, in a popular entertainment landscape dominated as never before by recurring characters, so many presentations of those characters ignore, to their detriment, the fundamental energizing power of the iconic character. New situations in which the hero can reiterate her ethos are harder to write from a technical standpoint than the simple arcs of the transformational hero.
The other reason is that most writing texts take their principles from dramatic or literary storytelling, and applying these to recurring pop culture characters constitutes a category error.
Bending an iconic hero to the rules of transformational or dramatic protagonists invites two big problems.
You burn your character out. Once your hero has gone from innocence to experience or selfishness to altruism once, she can’t keep doing it.
You wind up leaning again and again on the same arcs, particularly origin stories, or those in which the character tries to renounce heroism but then must re-embrace it. These have been so thoroughly mined that they are now less fresh than a well-wrought mythic reiteration. The speed with which key properties get rebooted these days only worsens this tendency. It’s a pop culture version of the tragedy of the commons, but with radioactive spiders instead of grazing lands.
Iconic Hero Team-Ups
Some pop culture properties intertwine the stories of multiple iconic heroes. You most often see this in the superhero genre, which established a tradition of combining various solo characters into a team book, then later created teams of heroes from scratch. Here the collective of heroes confronts a single disorder, all helping to restore order by applying their separate, sometimes complementary, perhaps sometimes conflicting, iconic ethoses. The need for each ethos to pay off in some way adds an extremely challenging level of structural complexity. When writing such a story you may find it fruitful to use thread mapping (see Thread Mapping), keyed to each of your iconic heroes, to ensure that all of them build to their culminating contributions to the taming of disorder.
Not all iconic hero properties with ensemble casts actually feature multiple iconic heroes. Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings both feature groups of heroes working together but privilege a key figure above the others. The other Enterprise crew members serve as supporting characters and functionaries to Kirk. Likewise the rest of Tolkien’s fellowship supports, and contrasts with, Frodo.
Single iconic heroes with foils, sidekicks, and supporters are easier to write than casts of iconic heroes. At the story’s climax they need merely assist the main hero in enacting her ethos, a moment that is far easier to realize.
A workaround occurs in media where episodes come out in quick succession, like television and comics. There you can choose one or two iconic heroes from the cast to focus on, having them enact their ethos and solve the problem while the rest of the cast assumes a support role. Then the next episode’s writer can choose to focus on another ensemble member, with the script after that moving on to yet another, achieving balance not in one episode but throughout the course o
f the season or series. This gives a rest to both the characters and the actors. In a marked contrast with the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and its successors employed this setup.
When creating an ensemble from scratch you might therefore want to take it easy on yourself and choose a central protagonist to bear your story’s iconic weight.
When assigned to write a preexisting ensemble, start by determining whether it features several equally balanced iconic heroes, or stars a single hero with support.
Transformational Hero
The transformational hero overcomes a series of primarily external obstacles over the course of a single story.
Transformational Arc
By confronting a series of impediments the hero undergoes a change in state from one emotional condition to its opposite. When the emotional arc fully completes itself, the character’s story has concluded.
This is the story arc your editors or producers want to hear about. It is also your throughline.
Although you could choose any throughline, procedural stories of transformation draw on a few classics again and again:
obscurity to greatness
weakness to strength
student to master
innocence to experience
selfishness to altruism
sin to redemption
These bleed into one another; when you go from student to master you very likely also go from weakness to strength. The first three items in the list all express, in different ways, the origin story template. The first four fit the hero’s journey structure famously codified by the mythographer Joseph Campbell.
The particular way you chose to phrase the two ends of the transformational arc colors your portrayal of it, and reflects your throughline, boil-down, and core question.
If you can’t see your hero changing in the course of the story, you are following the iconic hero pattern, even though you have no plans to serialize or revisit your protagonist.
When the Transformational Begets the Iconic
One prevalent structure, the origin structure, muddies the waters between the two hero types. The story of how an iconic hero became iconic is indeed transformational. However, at its conclusion, the character’s story doesn’t end. Instead the big finish sets her up to undergo a series of further adventures.
The transformational nature of the origin story explains its endurance—it allows you to take a mythically recurrent character and give him the story arc so coveted by conventional storytelling wisdom.
However, once you wrap up your origin story, you’re back to having an iconic hero on your hands and are again faced with the issues referred to in the section Iconic Hero.
Tactical Goal
The hero completes the transformation by achieving a tactical goal, the full details of which may reveal themselves through the course of the narrative, as he overcomes the various impediments to that goal.
Frodo must destroy the ring.
Civil war veteran Ethan Edwards seeks a niece kidnapped by Comanche—intending not to save her, but to destroy her.
Francis Wayland Thurston seeks the truth about a strange cult referred to in the papers of his deceased granduncle.
Buck, a St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd cross, must learn to survive in the wilderness after thieves take him from his home.
After blinding an innocent bystander during a triad hit, assassin Ah Jong promises to do the one last job needed to fund her eye surgery.
Unlucky ad exec Roger Thornhill flees foreign spies who believe him to be a rival intelligence agent.
Edmond Dantès escapes to seek vengeance against the man who had him wrongly imprisoned, in the process becoming Count of Monte Cristo.
Although the achievement of the tactical goal almost invariably restores order to the world, the transformational hero does not explicitly regard that as her task in life.
To achieve the tactical goal, the hero must successfully complete the transformation laid out in the emotional arc. This needn’t happen at the climactic moment; it might occur as an early turn, at the two-thirds mark, incrementally, or anywhere that seems apt to your series of narrative incidents.
The transformational hero differs from the dramatic protagonist, discussed below, in a couple of key ways:
To resolve the story the transformational hero must achieve his tactical goal.
The emotional transformation occurs as a precondition to the tactical goal, which need not occur at the climax of the story.
Theoretically, you could write a story in which a group of characters working in tandem all complete story arcs on their way toward the achievement of a shared tactical goal. I can’t think of an example, though. More often the transformational hero gains the aid of foils and other supporting characters.
Dramatic Characters
The stories of dramatic characters unfold chiefly or exclusively through story moments in which characters engage one another emotionally.
Poles
Dramatic characters either resolve or fail to resolve an internal conflict. Common conflicts include:
action vs. contemplation
mind vs. body
addiction vs. health
survival vs. self-destruction
oppression vs. liberation
irresponsibility vs. responsibility
rage vs. acceptance
man vs. monster
civilized vs. wild
skepticism vs. faith
isolation vs. community
guilt vs. expiation
open vs. closed
fearful vs. brave
certitude vs. doubt
hope vs. despair
love vs. hate
rage vs. peace
moral vs. amoral
caring vs. cruel
powerful vs. insecure
oppressed vs. free
victim vs. victimizer
hubris vs. humility
pen vs. sword
swagger vs. self-loathing
Most poles consist of a positive value the audience wants the character to move toward, and a negative value that threatens to take over the character entirely. Some pairs of poles might be balanced between contradictory values, neither of which is clearly all good or all bad.
Note the wide variety in this list, which barely scratches the surface of dramatic possibility. This reflects drama’s relative freedom from formulaic pattern. Compared to the procedural, drama traffics less in myth and more with the psychological and observational.
Although popular narrative favors the arc, in which the character undergoes a step-by-step progression from one state to another—usually from a negative state to a positive one—the dramatic character likely exhibits the messiness of real people. They take one step forward and then two steps back. Or two steps forward and one step back. They may lack a clear goal, or pursue a goal without being aware of it.
Your main character’s poles may also be your throughline. If not, they make a clear connection to your throughline.
Dramatic Resolution
The climax of your story forces your character to once and for all confront the contradictions of her conflicting poles. This confrontation induces a powerful and permanent change of situation. The character might:
decisively embrace the positive pole, achieving a happy or redemptive ending
decisively embrace the negative pole, earning literal or metaphorical destruction
decisively embrace one of a balanced set of poles, to a positive result
decisively embrace one of a balanced set of poles, to a detrimental result
reach a circular conclusion, remaining forever trapped between irreconcilable impulses
find a pos
itive balance between competing impulses and persevere
The first and second instances listed are by far the most common.
Examples of dramatic resolutions include:
After a life spent in pursuit of gangster status, Henry Hill enters witness protection, becoming a schnook just like everybody else.
After his self-loathing drives him to his deepest pit of despair yet, Don Draper recovers his swagger, turning a quest for spiritual enlightenment into an ad campaign for the ages.
Badly beaten, Terry staggers to take his place among the other dock workers, breaking gangster Johnny Friendly’s hold on the union and proving himself not a bum but the contender he always wanted to be.
Ninotchka goes from closed to open when she accepts western frivolity and the love of the charming Count Leon.
Nora sets aside the submission her husband and society demand from her to declare her liberation, no matter what the cost might be.
Othello, his raging warrior side overwhelming the peaceful man he aspires to be, strangles his wife Desdemona.
Seeking adoptive parents for her unborn child, Juno goes from innocence to experience.
(As an aside, our present canon includes relatively few narratives in which the woman acts as the true protagonist, as opposed to providing inspiration for a man’s transformation. When they do take a central role, women get the same poles again and again. So if you want to do something fresh and original, write stories about women with poles other than oppression vs. liberation, innocence vs. experience, or open vs. closed.)
Anti-Heroes
Protagonists whose actions we simultaneously deplore and vicariously enjoy can be considered anti-heroes. Their dramatic poles typically pit a responsible, socially acceptable value against a dark impulse we nonetheless find attractive: peace vs. vengeance, dominance vs. empathy, citizen vs. lawbreaker. Structurally they fit the same mold as any other dramatic character. The up notes (see Ups and Downs) we get from their unfettered behavior may be rapidly followed by down notes as we see its consequences, but rather than breaking the pattern, their heightened internal contradictions throw it into sharper relief.
Beating the Story Page 3
