Who Are You: Discovering your protagonist

Hey everybody! Welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. All month long, we’re talking about first drafts, and the checklist of things you need to know (or do) in order to set your first draft up for success. These are all things that I wish someone had talked to me about before I started writing my very first book, so I thought I’d go back and talk to all of you about them. I’m nice like that ;-)

So far, we’ve talked about choosing your genre, really locking down the setting in your story (whether you’re writing in the real world or not), figuring out how you’re going to start writing, and even knowing where to start your story… now, let’s actually start writing, shall we?

Who Are You: Discovering your protagonist

Usually, this is the easiest part of writing (at least for me). My protagonist is generally the first character who introduces themselves to me. They’re the one who first makes their presence known and needs to be written lest I go a little bit crazy. But I understand that it’s not the same way, for a lot of writers. So, how do you discover your protagonist?

I have suggestions!

If your protagonist isn’t coming to you (which I’ve had happen, believe me), sometimes it helps to start thinking about them as a person. You probably have a little bit of an idea of what the story is about, what needs to happen in this magnificent book you’re writing,

So start there.

You know what the story is about, so what kind of person does there need to be, in order for this story to work? Yeah, you’ll be working backwards a little bit, but you’ll get there from here, I swear. Focus on the things your character will need to be good at, will need to be proficient in or need to have gone through, in order to succeed in the quest you’re sending them on.

Write down everything you can think of that might help you in shaping who this character is. If it helps, go to a name generating site and see if you come up with something you like.

From there, go take some personality tests—all from the POV of your protagonist—and keep the results in the file you’ve been working on. Write literally everything down. Determine their hair color, their eye color, shape them into what they need to be, and when you have all of that figured out… start writing.

Now, for me, it doesn’t always work this way. As you know, I’m a deer-in-the-headlights kind of writer—so doing a lot of beforehand research into a character isn’t always the way to go for me. And in that case, you’ll need to be extra vigilant in keeping a file of all the things you think might be important at some point down the line. Note everything you find out about them while you’re writing, so you can be sure to keep them as pure a character as possible. Why? Because while you’re writing by the seat of your pants, it’s really easy to start inserting yourself where your character should be.

Either way, your protagonist will come to you. For some it’s easy, for others it takes some doing—but they will come to you, and hopefully they’ll be the most fun character to write, in your whole book. If not, I’m sorry. I’ve been there, too.

[love]

{Rani Divine}