Do you ever struggle to make your protagonist come to life on the page? When I face this challenge, I remember the advice I’ve read on so many writing sites — drop your protagonist into perilous danger. But what constitutes perilous danger? Is it just physical? Surely not, otherwise all stories would be nothing but car chases and gun fights. Lame.
I think what we’re really talking about is determining what threatens your protagonist to their core. Each of us has what I think of as pillars — core concepts of who we are as a person. These pillars might be your religion, your identity as a parent, or your profession. They could be a lot of things, but the important thing is that they define you as a person; you simply wouldn’t be you without them.
One of my pillars is academia. At the start of my first year at the University of Alberta, I figured I’d be the smartest guy in the room — after all, I’d always excelled in school without really trying. Like I’m sure many fresh-faced high school graduates discover, real life — or even post-secondary, which is like real life with training-wheels — ain’t no walk in the park. Graduation is, for most, the start of the journey from childhood to adulthood, and with this transition usually comes the dawning realization that you’re not nearly as special as your parents and supportive grade school teachers had always led you to believe. It’s a cold and bitter truth that you need to swallow, for it’s around this time that you start to figure out who you really are in the world. In other words, you’re building those pillars.
I was living far off-campus to save money, and had just broken up with my high school girlfriend, so I was feeling bummed and alone. Also, for the first time in my life, I was totally unsupervised — nobody to tell me I had to get to school, tend to my hygiene, or even get my sorry ass out of bed. This all combined into the perfect recipe for teenage malaise — most mornings I slogged to the bus stop to either miss my ride entirely, or convince myself I couldn’t handle classes that day so I should just go back to bed. When I did attend, I discovered university was harder than high school. Way harder. I was only going to a quarter of my classes, and I soon realized that when I was there I had no idea what was going on.
At the end of my first year, the Dean called me into his office and politely asked me to think about whether I really wanted to come back after the break. Defeated, I dropped out and moved to British Columbia to live with my father, who offered me free room and board as long as I got a job. I worked at a gas station, and as I filled tanks, swept floors, and checked oil levels, I knew I didn’t belong there. I had to go back and try again. It wasn’t just a wish to do better — it was a burning need.
I moved back to Alberta and got into Concordia College, accepted on probation because of my previous bad grades. Studying endlessly, occasionally pulling all-nighters, doing whatever it took, I achieved my Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics with high distinction. I received a cash award one semester for pulling perfect grades in all my classes; to this day I don’t know how I managed that, but I do remember the feeling that I had no real choice in the matter — I simply had to achieve academically, because I didn’t know who I was if I didn’t. I’d spent a summer at a gas station in BC feeling so out of my own skin that I would do just about anything to not feel that way again.
Since then I’ve come to know the other pillars that define me — as a software developer, a husband, and a father, for instance. We all have these pillars, without which we would really cease to be who we are. And if you dig, you’ll find that your fictional characters have them as well. Determine what they are, and put your characters in situations that threaten to smash them to smithereens. Many great stories, both life-affirming and tragic, do this — they threaten to bash their protagonists to death against an existential rocky shore. Think about Ishmael in Moby Dick, or Hamlet in Hamlet.
This method exposes your fictional character’s tender clock-work, and your reader will recall times they defended their own identities, or when they tried and failed, and, sadly, one of their pillars crashed to the ground. They will see your character as more than a puppet for your plot; they’ll see him or her as a living, breathing entity. It’s the literary illusion that’s not really an illusion at all, because our pillars are the passions that define us as human beings. In writing about them, you’re telling the story of all of us — of humankind.
Happy writing.
