Ever watch a fat soprano shatter a wine glass with her voice?
It’s called resonant frequency – the pitch at which something vibrates. Everything has it – the table I’m typing on, the car keys hanging from my carribeaner and the engine block on my car that, judging by the smell of burning rubber, may or may not need a check up.
Friggin’ serpentine belts…
Vocal chords vibrate a column of air to its resonant frequency, allowing the sound to fill your mouth with song and then enter the world by leaving your sound hole. I wonder if musical mothers ever use that phrase in vain? “Shut your sound hole!” If the frequency exiting your sound hole matches the exact resonant frequency of, say, a glass? BUM-CHINSH go shards and wine all over your table.
The glass says “that sounds like me” and explodes in an emotional encounter. Protagonists are the songs we writers sing, the notes that resonate deep in the caverns of our readership’s soul. Each of us is a glass begging to find something that “sounds like me.”
Protagonists come good or bad, evil or righteous, living right or dead wrong. They can be rich or poor, powerful or weak, accepted or rejected. Regardless of looks, they must resonate. They must sound like us often enough that when their story finds the breaking point at climax, we too shatter. Analysts dub that phenomenon “catharsis” – our human desire to discharge emotion in one satisfying purge.
I offer four solid words to describe protagonists: volition, ambition, predisposition, qualification, and fortune.
VOLITION
Does your protagonist have a say in the matter? Does she get another option? Will he have a shot? Do they see two roads diverging in the yellow cliche? Can he find at least one other path illuminated by something, anything – candles even?
Conflict will enter your character’s world if you have good antagonism and when it does, your protagonist faces a long series of limbos. Can they choose their own way? Their choices MUST affect their world or they will not affect your audience. Will-less protagonists ensure the pettiness and frivolity of every scene.
Give yours volition instead.
AMBITION
We know what they want.
Ethan Hunt in MI3, after the inciting incident, wants the safety of his pupil and his wife. Frodo, learning of the ring, wants to get the it as far away from the Shire as possible. Scout wants to learn about Atticus. Noah wants… well… Allie.
Without an ambition, dream, wish, hope, aim, without a cyclopean hankering your audience holds few reasons to cheer them on. Make your character want something obvious.
PREDISPOSITION
Their predispositions, however, might hide.
Many protagonists feel shallow because their authors chose to make their impulses THE EXACT SAME as their desire. Subconscious and Conscious always in agreement?
Really?
The characters we love most are predisposed to something contradictory to their ambition. They want to lose weight, but they’re predisposed to Ghirardelli chocolate. They hope to downgrade America’s debt and earn a killing in stock swings, but feel this impulse to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor. They’ve got a hankerin’ for piracy, but deep down they want a life that matters.
The audience may or may not recognize the subconscious predisposition of your protagonist, but they will by the time the story’s told. Is Luke good or bad? Will Harry do what’s right or what’s easy? Does Daniel Plainview pull himself together? Their choices show what they’re predisposed to do, and whether they will stick with that predisposition or change.
QUALIFICATION
In Stranger Than Fiction, we want Harold Crick to find his author and tell her off. Conflict: the receptionist at the friggin’ publishing house thinks Harold’s crazy and refuses to give him information. Harold’s in limbo. What can he do?
His options are:
(A) quit and accept his fate or
(2) find a way to contact his author.
Pause.
What does Harold do for a living?
If you answered “audit people for the IRS,” you win. Harold has little available to him. His handful of skills lounge deep inside the giant white hall of filing cabinets. Here’s his choice: risk going to jail for fraud or risk dying. Both end negative for him, which makes a great dilemma, and therefore a great turning point.
BUT that whole scene could never happen if Harold had zero resources at his disposal to track down that chain-smoking hermit. With the right qualifications, Harold at least has the ability to chase after the thing he wants. He might fail miserably and get hit by a bus, but at least he can try.
Why?
Because he’s qualified.
FORTUNE
Fortune smiles on all of us at least once. I don’t mean something like “luck” or even “chance” but more like “opportunity.” Even if but for one shining ecstatic moment we see our window open, we all get a chance.
We can always botch it.
Miss our shot.
“Do not miss ya chance ta blow, this opportunity…” Okay, sorry. First and last time I quote Eminem on here. The whole movie, novel, comic or oral tradition could be a complicated series of opportunities or one blistering solitary moment of chance, but your protagonist needs the good fortune of an opening. A window. A turn to play her cards.
There you have it: volition, ambition, potential predisposition, qualification and fortune. I could have said will, desire, impulse, skill and chance, but I would have missed my one blistering moment to use Latin-influenced words.
