Writing.Com General Discussion

Excellent points, Ken, proving you are smarter than me (and no, I wasn't paid to say that).

I'd like to point out that making your protagonist irrelevant is literary suicide, which is more or less what Ken was saying, but luckily we have a very famous example of this. Raiders of the Lost Ark.

As a movie, it works because we don't get time to think about things, we just get dragged along from one exciting (and funny) scene to the next. However, as a novel it would probably never have made it into print (unless someone made a movie out of it).

The reason is simple: Indiana Jones is irrelevant to the story. With or without him, the Nazi's get the Ark, take it to the island and open it. He doesn't even get to put it in a museum, which was the demand he made for getting involved in the first place.

Neither does Jones emerge at the end a better character. There has been no evolution from internal-conflict resolution, nor has he fixed an error from his past. He did get back together with his old squeeze, but pay attention to the reasons they broke up in the first place and you'll see that even this isn't character advancement.

Reader's use a different part of the brain than movie-watchers, and they get much more time to think about things. At the end of the novel they'd be wondering why they were following Jones and not one of the Nazi's (who'd probably be pretty interesting and we'd really like to see them get their come-uppance).

Your protagonist (not necessarily the POV character, as in the case of Sherlock Holmes where the POV is with Watson) must play a critical role at the end, even if they fail.

As Ken suggested, sometimes you have to rethink your story. I've written stories where I've realised, after writing the first draft, that I've concentrated on the wrong character. I've mentioned before the difference between plot and story. Sometimes I've realised the basic plot was good but I've got the wrong story, or the right story and the wrong plot. Sometimes you have to write the first draft to see these things.

My current novel, which I'm writing for the fifth time (from scratch) typifies this. The plot is great, but I had quite the wrong story. In the first draft of the third version, I realised the protagonist was a passenger in the story. Imagine that, writing a story three times before you spot something that bad. Why was she a passenger? Because she never did anything that changed the direction of the story or changed the outcome.

Making mistakes isn't bad. Not correcting them is, and if you can avoid the obvious pitfalls in the first place, all the better.