Diagnosis: You've got protagonist problems
A collection of beautiful ideas about writing from my curation bucket.
Hey, y’all—
It’s easy to become so enamored with a protagonist’s particular point of view that we overindulge them. We let them overanalyze, over-question, and overemote. We let the story come to them instead of making them go out and change the story through their agency, or we allow them to bog down in a mire of self-pity. We let them soak up information from other characters like sponges, brightly looking the other way and pretending that’s not an infodump.
Join me in exposing these protagonist problems and more, in another week of practicing The Writes of Fiction.
4 ways your protagonist is sabotaging you
“Whether a book is in first-person point-of-view or third, narrators who talk at the reader beyond what is needed threaten to wreck your reader’s experience. With every word the character says to the reader, they’re stopping the flow of an active scene. They’re stealing work from your reader. They’re doing the analysis or overly controlling what your reader thinks or feels. They’re hovering like a helicopter parent and not allowing the reader the freedom to engage with the scenes and draw their own conclusions. And oftentimes, they’re pointing out the obvious and giving us way too much information.”—Read the rest from Marissa Graff at Writers Helping Writers.
More on taking control of the storytelling: “Empowerment means giving yourself the permission and the authority— the authorship, if you will—to be powerful. Being powerful means possessing the ability and the willingness to act. When you are empowered, you give yourself permission to have power (i.e., be powerful).
The kicker, however, is that you cannot be powerful or empowered without also being awake and conscious. When you wake up and become empowered, the trances of the writing gurus are broken and the charms of the writing-process charismatics are dispelled. You become free: free to make creative choice, free to act on that choice, and free to become the author of your own process.
It’s time writers took back the word ‘empowerment’ and made it our own.”—Read the rest from Jeff Lyons at The Conscious Writer: Taking back your creative power.