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.
