Main Character Energy

To flaw, or not to flaw. That is the question

My main character is the thing I am usually the clearest sense of when I begin a manuscript. I don’t necessarily know what they look like and I couldn’t necessarily describe their traits, but I do feel I have some sense of them, I guess as a kind of psychological energy. Perhaps because for me, they’re often a kind of vessel for something I’m trying to explore. By the end of the book, they feel ‘real’ to me in so much as it is possible for a collection of words to feel ‘real’.

Main characters are important, because they are the entity that your story is built around. Fiction is only fiction because it is happening to someone. If what’s happening isn’t happening to someone in particular, if there isn’t someone who is deeply invested in it or concerned about it, we’re probably not writing fiction, but some other form of writing. Even if we have an apparently inanimate narrator, the something is happening to someone because we are implying a human voice there — that’s what we do as humans. Perhaps it is the only thing we can do: most of our perceptions about the world are based around perceiving a closeness to or distance from ourselves. As Lisa Cron explains:

‘The events by themselves mean nothing: it’s what those events mean to someone that has us compulsively turning pages. That’s why the protagonist is the portal through which we enter the novel. Remember, when we’re lost in a story, we’re not passively reading about something that’s happening to someone else. We’re actively experiencing it on a neural level as if it were happening to us. We are — literally — making the protagonist’s experience our own.’

That’s why even stories built around minor events, minor moments of suffering can seem immense, because these events are important to, and are mattering to someone else. That someone else, our main character, is often a stand-in for us as readers, allowing us to think, even if it’s only subconsciously, how would I feel if this happened to me? Even if we never ask ourselves that question outright, if the writer has done their job correctly, they are perceiving the events in the story in this way.

There are two things going on with your main character in a novel:

1. Who they are as a character at the start of the novel.

2. How they respond to the immense stress they face in the novel. (which creates the pressure to change)

To take the first point, often the advice that is given is that a writer needs to know what their main character is like from the start of the novel. That you need to know who they are or what they are in order to know what sort of ‘change’ is needed in the novel. Lisa Kron again says:

‘You can’t write about how someone changes unless you know, specifically, what they’re changing from. You can’t write about a problem unless you know, specifically, what caused it. And as real life has taught us all too well, by the time we’re forced to face a thorny problem, chances are it’s been building for a while — years, decades often our whole life up to that moment.’

Once you know who the character is at the start of the novel, so the logic goes, you can then set up the events in the novel that places them under the stress that is needed to reveal themselves.

The need to put a character under stress makes sense, because the word ‘protagonist’ in fact comes from Greek. ‘Protos’ means ‘first in importance’ and ‘agonistes’, means ‘actor’, but can also mean ‘combatant’ or ‘champion’. In other words, your protagonist is the ‘one who is engaged in a struggle’. It’s not just that your main character is at the centre of your novel, but they are also at the centre of the narrative and at the centre of the suffering.

A novel is not just a sequence of events. It’s a particular set of events that your main character faces that places them under the stress they need to change. It’s a peculiar type of existential stress they are facing, not the kind of run of the mill, every-day stress. The resulting transformation, or the potential for transformation, is the thing that gives your novel its forwards momentum. Once you know who your character is at the start of your story, then you can place them under the stress they need to either transform, or refuse to change in the face of that stress.

This is why the events in your novel is so closely linked to the character. It might be that for most people the circumstances the character faces are not particularly for most people, but for this character the events have the potential to be life changing. And the conventional wisdom goes, this is why we need to know the precise ways in which our main character is flawed at the start of the novel, because without that, we cannot know the precise strain or struggle that is going to force our character to change (or to refuse to).

Often who your protagonist is at the start of the novel is described in terms of flaws. John Yorke, for example, writes,

‘All three-dimensional characters, when we first meet them, are flawed. In psychological terms they are victims of neurotic trauma: there is a mismatch between their wants and needs; they are dysfunctional and in order to cope with that dysfunction they have adopted defence mechanisms that help in the short term, but if sustained can cause profound psychological damage.’

And so by the end of the novel, your protagonist has overcome this flaw or neurotic trauma. They have dealt with their dysfunction. They have become in some way whole or better than they were at the start of the story.

Except, this is where my own thoughts on writing main characters differs from conventional wisdom. I’m not sure that a main character’s wound is healed, or their flaw overcome by the end of the novel. I do think they are often changed, but I’m not sure that change or transformation comes in the form of making the character a ‘better’ person. In fact, I often baulk at stories that offer this ending: then the main character was better forever more and faced no more challenges of this nature because they were ‘all better’.

I think possibly what happens in a good story is simply this: the main character is able to see themselves, their flaws, more clearly than they could at the start. That it’s not that they were right and the rest of the world was wrong, but their reality exists in a myriad of realities and they are now able see themselves more realistically. And now that they can see that, what they are able to see is their role within the world around them and that, ultimately, gives them agency and power. Moreover, it gives them more self- compassion.

That is the only thing we really can do with our flaws: is become aware of them and to allow space for them. The best fiction, I think, recognises this. It’s not about getting rid of or supressing the things we don’t like about them, but discovering they are there and understanding them.

I think the best example of this is the novel I’ve used before in this newsletter, because it’s such a masterpiece of characterisation and that is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. For much of that novel, the main character, a butler, Stevens is deeply invested in his own reality. He believes deeply, unshakeably in the importance of ‘dignity’ in his profession. Throughout the majority of the novel he demonstrates how fully wedded he is to this idea of his own professionalism, to the extent that he has, in fact, denied himself indulgence in his own personal desires. He has put everybody else’s needs ahead of his own, at immense personal cost to himself. Even during the death of his own father, he has maintained the façade of professionalism and service. He even allowed the woman he loved to leave his employment without ever acknowledging the nature of his feelings or even really being aware of them.

At the end of that novel, what happens is not that Steven turns around and sees, oh wait, I’ve waisted my whole life in my extreme dedication to my role as a service professional, I have engaged in all forms of self-denial, including forsaking true love and intimacy with my father. I have internalised a reality of servitude that is extremely convenient for the upper-class, but that has really meant that I have engaged in an extreme form of self-abnegation. We don’t even get the sense that Stevens is about to break free of this system that has imprisoned him. It’s simply that he has become more aware of his own role within it. That’s it.

I sometimes think about the ending of a book to be like those photos of earth you see taken from space, when you finally see this extremely narrow portion of the earth we tread on each day for what it is. You see it in the scheme of the reality of the universe. The ending of a novel should often be like that moment when your character sees themselves for what they finally are: flaws and all. And often this involves them seeing their part in a broader scheme.

It’s like that last, shaky, final act, of the Voyager turned around and used its last moments of power to take a photograph of our planet. And there, without judgment, is that uncertain, distant, miniscule blue dot in a vast sea of black.

That is us. The end of a good novel is often a bit like that. The character can see finally who they are. That’s it. It’s so small and insubstantial. And yet, it’s everything.

The exercise

If you’re having trouble identifying your main character’s flaws, answer these questions:

1. When was a moment your character lied (or failed to disclose the truth)?

2. When was a moment your character did not speak up about what they wanted or needed?

3. Who does your main character avoid in life and why?

4. When was a moment your main character did not feel like themselves?

Reflection

These questions are designed to get at some common defence mechanisms and defence mechanisms are designed to protect the ego from knowing or understanding a difficult truth. Once you know what your character’s defence mechanism is, it will probably give you a pretty good insight into what their flaw is. I had a character, for example, who did not feel like themselves at their own wedding, because expressing their love for their spouse in a public situation made them feel vulnerable and exposed. Now there’s a flaw to work with.