Everyperson Blues

[truepenny]

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, January 7, 2010]

It’s the day after the Feast of the Epiphany and it’s snowing like a mad bastard. I have 85,000 words of The Goblin Emperor, which is due on February 1st. My word limit is 110,000 words, which means I need to write the equivalent of a novella this month.

Good times.

And, of course, what I’ve mostly been doing in this, the coldest and darkest part of the year, is playing a game called Torchlight. It’s a sort of Diablo meets Angband dungeon crawler with a horror marinade and a generous garnish of steampunk. I love being able to wander around !Moria killing undead dwarves with a pistol. Seriously. Never gets old. And it sends me on quests. I am stupidly, stupidly easy for a game that will send me on quests.

I’ve been thinking about that and story-telling, and the way that my relationship with a story is different from my relationship with a game. Because a novelization of Torchlight is not something I would read. The characters are two-dimensional, the storyline is utterly predictable (“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”), and the narrative structure is nothing but quests. None of which is a complaint, mind you, because Torchlight is not a novel, and I don’t mind that the characters and the plot don’t get in the way of the game’s real business, which is monster-slaying.

The game’s real business, in other words, is not the story. Because it’s, you know, a game.

But how about the real business of a story? Where I’m going with this is an attack on my least favorite piece of writing advice, the one that says “Readers want to identify with the protagonist. Therefore, your protagonist must be an Everyperson, so that everyone who reads your novel can identify with him/her.” There are a lot of things I disagree with here:

1. If the reader wants it, the writer has to give it to them.

I don’t think that a writer should go out of his or her way to deny readers what they want. But I think it’s a mistake to write with one eye on the gallery all the time. Especially as what actual readers actually want is next door to impossible to predict.

And sometimes, what readers think they want, and say they want, will not be as satisfying to them as something they haven’t thought of. That, after all, is why we want new stories. But you can’t get there if you’re afraid to go beyond the boundaries of “what readers want.”

2. Readers want to identify with the protagonist.

I know that some readers do get great pleasure out of reading in this way, reading as a method of self-insertion into fantasy, but not all readers do. I personally prefer to read about people I don’t identify with–because, honestly, if my own life was that fascinating to me, why would I be reading fiction? I think it’s more accurate and useful to say that readers want to empathize with protagonists. We want to feel for and with the people we read about. But that’s not the same as identifying with them.

Some of the greatest reading pleasure I had as a teenager was in reading about characters who were NOT LIKE me. And not just the characters who were elves or aliens or vampires, either, but the characters who were Australian, or who were living in the Depression, or who were members of large families–or who weren’t well-behaved over-achievers. I loved that they were different. I loved that they gave my imagination more stuff to work with. I most disliked the books with protagonists most like me.

And that’s only me, of course, but I don’t think I’m the only one.

3. Readers only identify–or empathize–with protagonists who are NOT UNLIKE them.

Notice, please, the difference between LIKE and NOT UNLIKE. Because it is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE, and it’s the difference that results in protagonists who have no identifying characteristics, or who only have “quirks.” Readers can and do empathize with a vast panorama of characters–frequently to the bewilderment of writers who thought that X was a walk-on, or a villain. Frequently, that empathy comes not from any way in which the reader is NOT UNLIKE the character, but in a likeness that runs well beneath the surface, in the way the character isn’t afraid to make jokes about serious things, or the way he or she endures adversity. These are the things you cannot predict as a writer, and they’re the things that you can’t get to with a formula. We are most likely (I think) to empathize with characters who feel real to us–it only makes sense, doesn’t it? And Everyperson will never feel real, because s/he isn’t. S/he is an attempt to be all things to all people, and if we don’t like that in our politicians, why should we want it in our protagonists?

4. [and this is implied, rather than directly stated] The real business of your story is not your protagonist.

Because if it’s the real business of your story, you’re not creating it based on what your hypothetical readers are hypothetically going to want. The protagonist, in this model, is merely a vehicle for getting readers to read whatever it is your story is really about, whether that’s the mystery your protagonist is going to solve, or the werewolf your protagonist is going to fall in love with, or the fabulous underground kingdom your protagonist is going to explore.

Now, I don’t for a moment deny that the real business of a story can be a mystery or a werewolf or a fabulous underground kingdom. But I think, and am going to go on thinking, that this is a BOTH/AND situation, not an EITHER/OR. Sacrificing the protagonist will never make the story better. I’m greedy; I want everything–the mystery and the werewolf and the fabulous underground kingdom and a protagonist who’s a real person, who I can empathize with and thus come to love.

Because, for me, all those things are the real business of a story.