Hello, writers. So a comment I get pretty often from editors is “But how does [protagonist’s name] feel?”
The question sometimes annoys me, because of course I know how my protagonist feels. Therefore it seems to me like it should be perfectly obvious to the reader. Surely I don’t have to keep writing stuff like The lion came toward her. She felt scared. or “Can you tell me?” he asked, really wanting to know.
Well, this past week I read a really annoying novel.
The protagonist was resisting an arranged marriage that his parents were pushing on him. Arranged marriages were not the custom in his culture, but they’d arranged one, and he was saying no. Meanwhile, he was carrying on with a neighbor woman. After a while, he changed his mind and agreed to the arranged marriage. I kept turning pages and thinking WTF?
Little things I would have liked to know:
-How did he feel about the neighbor woman? Was he in love with her, was it just booty calls, or what?
-Why was he resisting the arranged marriage? Out of love for his main squeeze? A dislike of being ordered about by his parents? A lack of interest in marriage, period?
-Why did he later agree to the arranged marriage? Out of respect for his parents? Disgust for his main squeeze? A need to get out of the house?
No clue. The writer never gave us the tiniest hint how the protag felt or why he was doing what he was doing. I only kept reading because I was too tired to get up and look for something else. In the end the above questions were sort of half-answered, but I bet a lot of readers didn’t stick around to find out the answers, because a lot of readers probably felt no connection to the protagonist.
You need to tell your reader how your protagonist feels. You can do it bluntly, as in my examples above. Or you can do it subtly, using dialogue, action, description (eg the landscape looks very different when seen through the eyes of someone who’s found true love than it looks to someone who’s been given 24 hours to leave town.)
Example of blunt, which is fine:
His mind was made up. He hoped Madge would approve. He really like Madge.
Example of less-blunt:
Yes, his mind was made up. But what would Madge think?
The thing is, too, you have to show your protagonist’s feelings pretty frequently. Once or twice in the course of the novel will not cut it. Whatever happens, your character has to react to it by feeling something.
At the same time, if you’re writing in first-person or third-person limited viewpoint, which are the two most commonly used viewpoints nowadays, you can’t really show anyone else’s feelings. You can have your protagonist speculate about said feelings, or you can have other characters express said feelings through words or actions. But anything else is head-hopping, and to get away with head-hopping you have to already be famous.
Tonight’s challenge:
Edit the scene below. Pick a viewpoint character and make sure we know how that character feels. You can change the words in the quotes, change the words out of the quotes, add description, not add description… whatever you want.
The woman at the desk looked at the credit card. “James Tabouli? Any relation?”
“Yes,” said the man. “She’s my ex-wife.”
“What’s that like? Being related to the woman who—“
“She was never convicted,” James Tabouli said.
“Well, there was no trial,” said the clerk. “After all, she was dead.”
“That’s true,” said James. “But if there had been a trial, I don’t think she would have been found guilty.”
(Honest to FSM, that’s how the above snippet would’ve been written in this book I just read. But you can do better. Have at it.)
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