It's been a month since my last blogging gig as a pink fuzzy slipper, and I'm excited to start on my breakout journey with Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. The book has 34 chapters, and each month I'm summarizing a different chapter and doing one of the exercises at the chapter end.Maass has divided the chapters into three parts, and the first part is, of course, Character Development. The first chapter is titled From Protagonist to Hero. Donald Maass is sneaky. This chapter starts you off easy . . . but I've read the book three times and it doesn't stay easy. If it did, I wouldn't be going through this. There's an old song titled "Breaking up is Hard to Do." Breaking out is hard to do, too.
Maass tells us to create heroes that people want to spend time with. He says we need to give the reader a reason to care about our protagonist "in your opening pages." According to him, it doesn't take much to give the character qualities we like and admire. "A small show of gumption, a glimmer of humor, a dab of ironic self-regard can be enough for us to hang onto."
He gives an example from Tess Gerritsen's THE SURGEON. I'm sure you can think of your own examples. Instead I'm listing the five ways Michael Hauge gives in his DVD, "The Hero's 2 Journey," to create characters the reader cares about:
- Create sympathy.
- Put the hero in jeopardy.
- Make the hero likeable.
- Make the hero funny.
- Make the hero powerful.
Hauge says we need to reveal at least two of these qualities as soon as the hero is introduced. He's talking about movies, and we might have a bit more leeway in books, but you get the idea.
Back to Maass and his exercises. He asks: "Who are your personal heroes?" I put down my mother, who was widowed with five children between the ages of three and ten. Yet I never heard her complain. She did what she had to do and went on with her life.All my protagonists are like that. Not a whiny one in the bunch. The heroine in my wip had been married to a man who beat her, but she's not fearful and sorry for herself. Instead she's embracing her new life -- as much as she can with all the trouble I'm heaping on her head.
Who are your personal heroes? Have you given their heroic traits to your protagonists?
