Three reasons your main character isn’t working
So your main character isn’t working. Why is that?
Writing is tough, it really is. Telling a story is like trying to spin multiple plates at the same time.
One of the most important plates in your main character (often abbreviated as MC). Now, for the record, I’ve never actually spun a real plate; I can only imagine that it’s really hard to do. But I also imagine that if a plate were warped or broken, it’d be next to impossible to spin it easily.
If your main character is not properly formed, you might have a lot of trouble getting it to spin properly. Here, we’ll be covering three main reasons why your main character might not be working the way you want them to.
They’re not believable;
The “unique” factor;
They make bad decisions.
But, before we get into issues with your main character, we should establish a few things first. Before we try to fix your character, it’s important to understand who they are.
Main characters vs. protagonists
This is the most important question that you can ask about your character before you get too far into the writing process. Is your character a main character or are they a protagonist?
Here’s a better question: are they driving the story or not?
You can have a main character that isn’t a protagonist, and you can have a protagonist that isn’t the main character. There’s a lot of debate on the specifics of a lot of these cases, so we’re just going to discuss them generally.
Protagonists
Before we talk about main characters, we need to discuss protagonists. In many ways, a protagonist can be more important than the main character. Not always, because sometimes the main character is the protagonist, but not always.
How?
A protagonist drives the narrative of the story. They are working towards a goal (or set of goals). Without the protagonist, the events of the story would not unfold.
A protagonist tends to be fundamentally a “good” aligned character. An antagonist is the opposite. Antagonists exist to be in opposition to the protagonist. But even though protagonists and antagonists are opposites, they work towards the same fundamental narrative end—they drive the story forward.
Examples of protagonists and antagonists
Captain Ahab in Moby Dick is an example of a protagonist (albeit a bit of an antihero), but our main character—the one we see the world through—is Ishmael.
Sherlock Holmes is another example of a protagonist who isn’t the main character (the Sherlock Holmes mysteries are all from Watson’s perspective; he’s the our window into that particular world).
Katniss Everdeen and President Snow are a protagonist and an antagonist, respectively. While Katniss is the one making the decisions and participating in the Hunger Games, Snow is the one holding the games and running the show. Very simply, without Snow, Katniss has nothing to fight against.
Think of how these characters affect their respective stories. How do they drive the narrative forward?
Does your character drive the story or are they passive? Knowing what kind of character you have is important if you want to understand what they will do in the world you’ve written.
Main characters
The main character is sometimes called a POV character. They’re the eyes through which the reader sees the world.
While the overlap between main characters and protagonists is significant, it isn’t always the case.
Here’s an example, and it’s one that causes a fair bit of debate. In Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, the main character is Scout. She is our point of view character. Atticus Finch, however, is the character that drives the narrative of the story forward. The events that he is involved in are the ongoing backdrop for the events that Scout deals with.
Now, with this all clarified, we can start talking about your MC.
“Knowing what kind of character you have is important if you want to understand what they will do in the world you’ve written.”
What role do main characters play?
Our MC is almost always the POV character, and because of this, issues with an MC can disconnect the reader. Going back to the initial question, “Is your main character a protagonist or are they a main character?” Now that you can answer this, you can start to figure out what any issue with your character might be.
The passive main character
So your character isn’t so much a protagonist as they are a lens through which we see the world. Great. No worries. Characters like this tend to have qualities that prevent them from actively dealing with issues or taking control of their lives. If you’ve ever read a Haruki Murakami novel, you’ll be very familiar with how a story can take shape around a passive character.
It’s very important to keep in mind that a passive character is not a bad character. Often, they grow into characters who are assertive and able to take control of their lives (in some way or another). But passive characters can be difficult to connect with because of their inability to take control of their own lives. A reader may find them boring or frustrating, so it’s important to make sure that some element of the story be sufficiently interesting that we are willing to tag along for the ride.
The active main character
Ready to take the bull by the horns and fight for their cause, the active main character is assertive and central to the story. Where the passive character has the story happen to them, the active character is engaging with the world around them. Events that occur to these characters are often due to their own actions. In Susan Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss Everdeen’s choice is what led her to participate in the games.
Her decisions had measurable consequences that she needed to deal with (or that she benefited from).
Similarly, Andy Weir’s The Martian is about an astronaut, Mark Watney, who is trapped on Mars. While the inciting incident happens to him, all the decisions that he makes while on Mars lead to positive or negative results. Active characters are the protagonists that drive their stories.
The concepts of “hero” and “antihero” are typically active characters. These characters are usually active in what they do (though motivations are quite different).
“[…] Andy Weir’s The Martian is about an astronaut, Mark Watney, who is trapped on Mars. While the inciting incident happens to him, all the decisions that he makes while on Mars lead to positive or negative results.”
Why isn’t your main character working?
Everyone will have different opinions about characters. They have different opinions about stories.
At their core, I think that the vast majority of issues with characters tend to fall into one of the three groups we listed above.
1. They’re not believable
This is a surprisingly common issue and is easy to fix. There’s an important caveat here: They’re not believable in the context of the story.
Let’s imagine that you wrote a fantasy novel and your character is a wise-beyond-their-years YA protagonist. But they’re nobody and have no inherent abilities. But they know magic. And they can pick locks with twigs. And they speak rare languages (and a number of them at that). Maybe your malnourished hero is always operating at peak physical fitness.
When a character starts breaking the consistency of the world by existing when they shouldn’t a reader may roll their eyes and put the book down. If the character never seems to face adversity because they’re unnaturally equipped to deal with the plot points that you put in their way, the reader may check out.
Characters that are perfect or lack flaws break the rules of their own worlds, and when adversity is absent what is it that the reader is supposed to sympathize with?
How to make your character believable
Characters need to be realistic. They need to go through a journey in the same way that everyone who will ever pick up your book and read it goes through journeys. While you may not have ever needed to take the One Ring to the steps of Mt. Doom to destroy it, you’ve probably been faced with a challenge that felt insurmountable. The core of a reader’s connection to a character lies in how much they relate to the character.
Start by giving your character the flaws that will cause them problems in their quest. Give them challenges where they fail. We want to feel the heartache of loss and the joy of success.
Start with a Success/Fail chart. Draw a line down the middle of a page and then at the top write “Success” in one column and “Fail” in the other. Then, go through the character’s arc and start putting your lists together. If you find that your successes far outweigh the failures (especially if the failures are trivial relative to the successes), you might want to consider eliminating some of those successes and replacing them with failures.
Another thing to make sure you’re tracking are failures that are actually successes. For example, the character was kicked out of a party for being “too poor” but then everyone at the party dies because a monster attacks. This is less a failure and more of a “luck” trait.
2. The “unique” factor
Let’s me be clear: there is no inherent issue with characters being unique.
Quite the opposite. Memorable characters are memorable for a reason. Lots of characters are unique, from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to King Kong, to Don Quixote, to Holly Golightly. They’ve all got a sort of special quality to them that truly separates them from the rest of the characters in the world that they live in.
Where the uniqueness of a character becomes problematic is if they start breaking the logic of the world they’re in. Here are a few examples of things that characters do that might break a reader’s suspension of belief.
The money-grubbing toothless merchant that tries to profit from everything and everyone will give services away to the main character reason because of their “charm”.
The merciless king and queen of a kingdom, famed for executing people for backtalk, will allow the peasant to explain how they’re wrong at length without any kind of retribution.
A character who has never seen a technology before is able to use it without explanation or even trial and error.
Characters being referred to as “impossible to hate” despite being insufferable or terrible to others.
How to write unique characters
A character being unique is not a problem, but if the world sort of distorts around that character then there’s little reason to fear for them. They’ll accomplish their goals in the end because they are written in a way that makes threats meaningless. This is similar to what people refer to when the say “plot armour”. The story is there in service of the character and not the other way around.
As we mentioned above, success and failure matter to a character.
Make a list of all the unique traits that your character has. How many of those traits are there only because they get the character through a problem they face in the book. Is there another way for them to accomplish a task without relying on how “special” they are?
If they mouth off to the king, the more interesting thing is how they break out of jail, not that the king has a change of heart for no apparent reason.
If they’re impossible to hate, why is that? Is it magic? A charm? A curse?
Unique should be memorable, not immune to the plot. Remember, earned strength is always worth more than granted strength.
3. They make bad decisions
One of the ways in which we relate to characters is through sympathy and empathy. We know (or at least can imagine) what they’re going through. One of the fastest ways to break this is to have characters do things for inexplicable reasons.
Here’s an example:
Your MC is a scientist who specializes in xeno-biology and alien parasites. They are part of a research group studying a completely new planet full of alien life. Upon arriving, they see a plant that produces fruit that looks like an apple, so they take their respirator gear off and take a bit of the fruit, exclaiming “it tastes sweet!”
Why?
Why did this person do this? Why would they make the baffling decision to ignore all their training and specialization? To ignore all the potential risks that they are very well versed in (presumably as we’ve been told that they study alien biology and parasites)? These decisions may not break your book, but too many of them can. A particularly egregious example can cause a reader to check out of your story completely.
“Your MC is a scientist who specializes in xeno-biology and alien parasites. They are part of a research group studying a completely new planet full of alien life. Upon arriving, they see a plant that produces fruit that looks like an apple, so they take their respirator gear off and take a bit of the fruit, exclaiming ‘it tastes sweet!’
Why?”
How to avoid bad decisions
This can be tricky, because you might, for example, want that character to contract an alien parasite. The obvious way to achieve this goal then is to change the way in which the parasite is spread. If it must be from that particular fruit, use a different character that has no understanding of why eating fruit from an alien world without testing it is bad.
Bad decisions can be very clear indicators that the hand of the author is at play.
Avoiding these sorts of bad decisions is a very easy fix. Ask yourself the question, “Given X factors, would I do this?”
“Given that I know how dangerous alien parasites are, would I eat fruit that I’ve never seen before?”
“Given that I can’t swim, would I dive into the ocean unprompted because I see something shiny?”
If the answer is “no” then you just need to go back and adjust how you achieve the same results.
Why bad decisions happen
Main characters making bad decisions can often occur by accident. For example, a scene could be a remnant from an earlier draft of the chapter and simply got missed. Sometimes they’re added in as placeholders for further expansion. Other times, they’re due to the narrative being rushed.
Another common reason for this occurring is that there are too many things going on at any time. The more complicated the story is, the easier it can be for these sorts of decisions to occur. The complexity forces a bad decision to be necessary because changing that decision requires significant changes to other elements of the story.
Remember that writing is about telling a story and that you want to make sure that you get it right. Writing a book isn’t a race, it’s a very very long-distance marathon. Take the time to figure out how to turn those bad decisions into sensible choices (with bad results).
When to get help with your characters
Sometimes you know what you want to achieve with characters, but figuring out the details can feel overwhelming. Usually, this is a sign that you need to bounce your ideas off someone. In a lot of cases, this is what an alpha reader (or beta reader) can help you with, and if you want to learn more about what different editors can do, I recommend you read my article on editor types.
A developmental editor or book coach can be pivotal in the early stages of the writing process to get these details fixed up. But they often cost money and sometimes we just don’t have the budget for it.
You can ask friends to read your work if you think that they can provide feedback, but remember something important. You’re not looking for a pat on the head, you want actionable advice from people about what doesn’t work. Advice can sting, especially if you thought that something was a great idea, but remember that it is all in service to making your story better.
Good luck with your main characters.
