This character is your protagonist.
Think about a time you've started a new class, a new job, a new church—any social setting where you don't know anybody. More than likely you developed a connection with the first person who was nice to you. It's no different for audiences watching a movie, they connect with the first real "good guy" they encounter.
Even in ensemble stories with a cast of multiple good guys, there should be one focal character who the audience can attach to and identify with. This is the one character the story cannot exist without. Maybe you have two characters the story can't exist without—then your job becomes choosing which one is your protagonist and which ones are supporting characters. That doesn't mean your supporting characters are any less important than the protagonist, or any less rounded, it just means your protagonist takes on the role of leader for the ensemble. Typically, this will be the strongest character within the ensemble, although they may not yet have ascended to a place of power within your story yet.
The key to creating a good protagonist is identifying what they want and / or need. The more basic, more primal, more animalistic their wants / needs, the broader the audience that can identify with it. This is why so many movies revolve around sex, revenge, and survival, because these are some very primal wants / needs. Every adult an understand sex, revenge, and survival.
What happens if the protagonist doesn't get what they want / need? It is vital that the audience understands this because these are the stakes of your story. This is what will be lost forever if the protagonist doesn't get what they want / need. Again, think primal and basic. In a well-crafted story, the stakes are life-altering.
If the protagonist doesn't get revenge, then he'll spend the rest of his life awake at night, gut eaten by an ulcer. If the antagonist doesn't win the heart of the girl he loves, she'll marry some jerk and he'll be alone the rest of his life without his soulmate. If the mob enforces catch our protagonist, they'll put a bullet in his head and / or the heads of his wife and children. Yes, all three of these are cliche. Yet all three work because they're primal, anyone who's lived through any kind of life experience can understand them.
Good stakes are not trivial. A protagonist racing to develop an operating system for a new mobile phone so that he can win a $15,000 bonus offered by the company he works for is not life altering.
Examine your stakes and if they're high enough, figure out how to raise the stakes. Don't be afraid of cliche. It's better to have a cliche situation as part of your story than to have dull stakes and opposition so dull that nobody is invested in your characters or cares about the outcome of their story.
Think about a time you've started a new class, a new job, a new church—any social setting where you don't know anybody. More than likely you developed a connection with the first person who was nice to you. It's no different for audiences watching a movie, they connect with the first real "good guy" they encounter.
Even in ensemble stories with a cast of multiple good guys, there should be one focal character who the audience can attach to and identify with. This is the one character the story cannot exist without. Maybe you have two characters the story can't exist without—then your job becomes choosing which one is your protagonist and which ones are supporting characters. That doesn't mean your supporting characters are any less important than the protagonist, or any less rounded, it just means your protagonist takes on the role of leader for the ensemble. Typically, this will be the strongest character within the ensemble, although they may not yet have ascended to a place of power within your story yet.
The key to creating a good protagonist is identifying what they want and / or need. The more basic, more primal, more animalistic their wants / needs, the broader the audience that can identify with it. This is why so many movies revolve around sex, revenge, and survival, because these are some very primal wants / needs. Every adult an understand sex, revenge, and survival.
What happens if the protagonist doesn't get what they want / need? It is vital that the audience understands this because these are the stakes of your story. This is what will be lost forever if the protagonist doesn't get what they want / need. Again, think primal and basic. In a well-crafted story, the stakes are life-altering.
If the protagonist doesn't get revenge, then he'll spend the rest of his life awake at night, gut eaten by an ulcer. If the antagonist doesn't win the heart of the girl he loves, she'll marry some jerk and he'll be alone the rest of his life without his soulmate. If the mob enforces catch our protagonist, they'll put a bullet in his head and / or the heads of his wife and children. Yes, all three of these are cliche. Yet all three work because they're primal, anyone who's lived through any kind of life experience can understand them.
Good stakes are not trivial. A protagonist racing to develop an operating system for a new mobile phone so that he can win a $15,000 bonus offered by the company he works for is not life altering.
Examine your stakes and if they're high enough, figure out how to raise the stakes. Don't be afraid of cliche. It's better to have a cliche situation as part of your story than to have dull stakes and opposition so dull that nobody is invested in your characters or cares about the outcome of their story.
How do you raise the stakes? Well, in the case of your computer programmer trying to win a $15,000 bonus—what if he's in debt to a violent bookie for a bet he lost and he has until the end of the month to pay back the money he owes?
A protagonist with a gambling addiction isn't very sympathetic, though. That's considered a sin-vice, and any repercussions he faces because of his sin-vice are the cost of sinning. But, what if he was gambling because his dementia-addled mother is in a nursing home and he can't pay her bills anymore? And if he doesn't pay the bookie back they're going to kill his mother? Is that a movie you'd want to see?
Be careful when constructing protagonists with sin-vice problems. Gambling, adultery, drug addiction—these kind of sin-vices will make many audience members resent the protagonist.
A lot of beginning writers hate the idea of one protagonist. They want the story to be told through multiple characters. This can be done, but it's not advisable for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, each member of your audience is an individual who has experienced life as an individual. They may be married, they may have children, but they've experienced the totality of life through their unique individual point of view. This is how humans are hardwired to experience life.
Secondly, in a screenplay especially, you have such little time to develop your story and build your world. Trying to split audience attachment between multiple characters divides the amount of time you have to establish a bond with the audience. Even in an epic like The Godfather, spanning over three hours, we experience the world through Michael Corleone. Any scenes that deviate from Michael's story exist only to give context to Michael's life and decision making processes.
Once you have your protagonist clearly established, you need to decide who or what is going to get in the way of the protagonist getting what they want / need. If that opposition comes in the form of a person, then the character who opposes your protagonist—who stands in the way of the protagonist getting what they want / need—is called the antagonist.
People often equate the protagonist with the good guy and the antagonist as the bad guy, but in the hands of a skilled writer, there doesn't have to be a bad guy. In fact, sometimes a story can be more compelling if the audience likes both the protagonist and the antagonist.
Instead of thinking in terms of good guy / bad guy, look at protagonist and antagonist as characters with opposing personality traits, values, and goals.
This view of protagonist / antagonist was was exemplified in the movie and subsequent TV show THE ODD COUPLE, where a highly educated neat-freak man who craves order and control takes in a roommate who is messy and thrives on chaos and spontaneity. Neither were bad guys per say, but they clearly frustrated each other at every turn just as any well-crafted protagonist and antagonist should do.
This view of protagonist / antagonist was was exemplified in the movie and subsequent TV show THE ODD COUPLE, where a highly educated neat-freak man who craves order and control takes in a roommate who is messy and thrives on chaos and spontaneity. Neither were bad guys per say, but they clearly frustrated each other at every turn just as any well-crafted protagonist and antagonist should do.
Think about a story where two interns are competing for one highly desirable job. Only one can get the job. Maybe both candidates are good-natured, loving, kind, and supportive. They're both good guys. But, if one of those good guys is your protagonist, and if the only thing standing in the way of your protagonist getting that job are the efforts off the other intern, then that intern becomes the story's antagonist.
In a love story, the protagonist and antagonist may be the couple around which the story revolves, especially if one party is resistant to the whole affair and tries to find happiness elsewhere.
In an abstract sense, the protagonist doesn't even have to be a person. The protagonist can be a force of nature or societal pressure or even the internal motivations of the protagonist. It doesn't matter so long as the protagonist's journey to get what they want is made as difficult as humanly possible and even more difficult than that.
The key is that the antagonist frustrates the efforts of the protagonist to get what they want, and possibly, the protagonist frustrates the efforts of the antagonist to get what they want.
This frustration is what leads to the heart of your story, which we'll get to next...
-The Illiterate Writer
No comments:
Post a Comment