On Writing: Designing a Protagonist

Should Your Protagonist be Reactive, Active or Passive?

Photo by DJ Johnson on Unsplash

Ten Shun!

The word protagonist literally means ‘the person who struggles’.

The most important character in a drama is the protagonist.

The protagonist is the person in whom we are most interested, who represents us in the form of an avatar; that is, they are the character we most identify with.

As Robert McKee puts it, the cast is a solar system, and the protagonist is the sun.

The cast are held together by the gravitational pull of the star at the centre.

The protagonist, in that sense, creates all the other characters.

The other characters service the character of the protagonist.

It is the character of the protagonist we are primarily concerned with as writers, although a story may have several or multiple protagonists. But once a character is designated ‘a protagonist’ then the writer has to start thinking deeply about what sort of character they are.

They are no longer merely the postman or the man with the red beard.

The same applies to all characters who have a major part in the drama, including the antagonist (unless you are writing a villain in a Scooby-Doo cartoon).

So what are the key characteristics that the protagonist should display?

As a rule, a protagonist will be multi dimensional. That is, they will have a number of internal contradictions that define them. Also, they will have changed, or at least tried to change, and possibly failed to change, by the end of the story.

The most obvious to the answer to this question though, is that a protagonist should be proactive rather than passive. ‘Drama’ means ‘a thing done’ - not a thing happening to you.

It’s a simplistic principle in many ways. Many great characters appear, at least on the surface, and at least at first, very passive. Things happen to them, and they are buffeted around by circumstance. The journey of a protagonist is usually from this very disempowered state to a state where they are active in pursuit of their desires.

There are stories where the protagonist either doesn’t awake from their slumber of passivity or only awakes very very late in the story. Macon Leary in Anne Tyler’s ‘The Accidental Tourist’ is almost entirely passive, after having lost his son in a random shooting. He is spiritually dead. Blanche Dubois in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ is also passive throughout. She just soaks up the suffering.