I posted this early before going to Place Without Internet. The other Mad Genii will be clearing comments in Spam or in Moderation, so there might be delays.
You need a protagonist, a hero, a main figure in the story. Or two main characters, but that takes more work for most of us. And sometimes you might discover that your MC is not who you thought it was. Oops.
I’m having to do some work on the WIP in order to make clear who is the main character. It should be obvious, but the problem is that the secondary character also faces a major dilemma, related to the MC’s but not the same. It would be very easy for him to become the protagonist when he needs to stay a supporting character. So I have to keep asking, “Who drives the plot? Not just the PoV character, but who is doing or not doing things that move the story along?” That has to be the MC.
I suspect part of the difficulty is that I am fighting a double-headed plot monster. The main plot is the MC coming into her own as an individual and adult, which means being willing to politely stand up to people when they are wrong. She can do this easily in her profession, because she’s been trained that way since she was young. However, standing up to religious and political authority, so to speak, is much harder. Her default is to keep her mouth shut, head down, and not fuss when an authority figure “dumps” on her, or expects her to, oh, frame a house when she’s a landscaper. Her unwillingness to push back and stand up for herself not only puts the secondary character in a real bind, but could put lives at risk. That’s the main plot – the MC forcing herself to stand up and say, “No. This is what I can do, this is what I absolutely can’t. You have seen that I can’t. Don’t dump on me for being a kicker instead of a middle linebacker.”
The second plot is the outside threat. Someone is doing mischief that is starting to grow int active harm. That needs to be dealt with by someone. The MC can help sort out who is doing what, and has the tools to bring the person to spiritual as well as legal justice. The secondary character will be very important with the legal justice part, and can support the MC and protect her during the spiritual justice bit. That plot is easier, because it is more clear cut—find bad guy, stop bad guy, discipline as appropriate, clean up most of mess, go home and deal with Real Life™.
Running through these is the secondary character, who answers directly to the Authority. The secondary character is not happy about the MC getting dumped on. But he also doesn’t know a tactful way to tell his boss to go soak his head, or at least remember that kickers are not defensive linemen. So he has to find a way between the two tension points. That means it could be easy for him to become the protagonist. (It helps that he doesn’t want to be the lead in this book. He has other work to do.)
It would be easy to flip the story and make the secondary into the protagonist. He has all the typical characteristics of protagonists, and could easily become the MC, with the actual protagonist as back-up/secondary/love interest. Except … well, for one, I’m lazy and don’t feel like scrapping 35K+ words. And two, the actual protagonist has the longer journey to make. She’s got to find a way to stand up for herself and take responsibility for saying, “No, I can’t do everything that you told me to.” Her character development story is much larger than that of the secondary character. So she will stay MC.
What do you do when faced with characters who try to flip roles? What have you found helpful for corralling multiple plot?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Who Is Your Protagonist?”
the most blatant character reversal I’ve ever had happen to me is in the sweeping arc that I haven’t actually started writing yet but has been building in my head for years. A character that was originally created to be a middle stream villain character – the end of level boss, not the big show down boss – who was meant to be the kind of villain who played both sides to suit his own interests. Not only did he decide he didn’t want to be a villain and a second rate one at that, no. He told me bluntly he was going to be a good guy, and not only was he going to be a good guy, he has become the central main character on whom the entire saga revolves! And has wormed his way into my favorite character of all the characters I’ve ever made status!
The core protagonist team in my current series-in-process helps me deal with this. It’s the MC that does most of the heavy lifting, but the foibles of team members help team dynamics as well as plot dynamics.
For example, the MC is overloaded when a new project comes along, and assigns it to his insecure-ne’er-do-well cousin (team member), not expecting much, and sics another team member to help him, hoping for the best. They go off and do their work, with growth for the insecure guy, and then take over more broadly briefly when the MC is knocked for a main-plot-important blow by the very project they’ve successfully blossomed in (not their fault). The build of the project and its recovery from disaster benefits the individual character arcs, their interactions with each other (both now and over the long haul), and the MC’s evolving assessment of them and his own goals, etc. Win-win.
I like teams, where possible. Sometimes the core team is just MC + 1, sometimes MC + intermittent (esp. if travelling) handful, sometimes MC + persistent presence.
my Jaiya metaseries and the current series are on the model of “romantic leads=joint protagonists.” The space opera duology was more the team dynamic described by Karen (and in my case probably derived from Star Wars, Star Trek, and to a lesser extent OG Galactica).
One of the short stories for the fanfic thing, I realized I had to flip the main character and the viewpoint character. That was a brain twister.
It ended up with two complete story arcs going on on it, one obvious and and one necessary. One thing that surprised me was both arcs had to hit key points at around the same time, or it felt weird.
That’s actually a problem I’ve got with the current w(n)ip which has two main characters who are going through different arcs. Their story beats need to hit around the same times, even though they are both dealing with very different problems.
The late part, I think works, because each solution ends up opening up the solution to the other’s problems, so there’s a real natural back and forth dynamic, but not quite getting the initial moment going to get there yet.
Well, there’s Queen Shulamith’s Ball. I was playing around with a literary technique. Only when I fed it into a word cloud did I realize that Marjory must be the main character.
There are several plot threads with different characters that all collide at the same time. And a lot of fleeting glimpses of minor characters.
(Say, does anyone have a good way to generate a word cloud? the website I used before went away.)
Haven’t tested this one, but it claims to have a link to word clouds classic
https://www.wordclouds.com/
I wrote myself into such a corner, I realized a secondary character was the only one who could solve the problem. Had to do a great deal of rewriting and additions to make it clear that this was his story, and make clear both his internal values, and his personal problems.
Take over? No, he had his heels stuck in and really didn’t want to go there.