I’ll be exploring how making your characters suffer is important for keeping the conflict active, keeping your story entertaining, and giving your character an interesting arc.
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There are various ways you can keep your audience invested in finding out what happens in your story, but here I’ll be talking about Unresolved Sexual Tension.
One of the most important things to consider when you’re writing a story is the relationship between your Protagonist and your audience. If your audience don’t care about what happens to your Protagonist, they won’t care what happens in your story.
When it comes to constructing a villain in your story, you need to put as much care and time into that character as you do the hero. No matter how interesting your hero is, and how exciting the conflict is, a boring villain will make your story boring. I’ll be exploring how to make sure your villain is an interesting character.
The Protagonist of your story is the main character. You join them at the beginning of the story, and ride with them until the climax. At points you might move into the Point Of View (POV) of other characters, such as the Antagonist, but for the most part you stick with the Protagonist. In this post, I’ll be explaining about how to transition your Protagonist from a passive character into an active one, and why it matters.
Your Protagonist has to have strengths to make them worthy of being your Protagonist. You’re telling a story about them so they need qualities that make that story work, be it strength, intelligence, or determination to succeed. However, their weaknesses are just as important as their strengths. I’ll be writing about why.
In reality, your characters exist solely to serve your story. They were born the moment they first appeared on the page, and they will die at The End. That is their entire world. However, your characters need to feel to your audience like they live and breathe in a world far beyond your pages. They need to be complete people, people who your audience can believe in. If your audience doesn’t believe in your characters, they won’t believe in your story.
Your story, be it fantasy, action, or romantic comedy, is about a character going in pursuit of what they want. They want something, they go out to get it, and things get in their way. The story resolves when they either have it, or have accept they won’t get to. But to make your story really powerful, you need to think about what they have to give up during that journey.
When you’re writing a story, it’s obviously important to make sure your Protagonist is well motivated. However, if your Antagonist isn’t motivated equally, and exists solely to disrupt life for your Protagonist, your story will lack depth. Considering your Antagonist to be the Protagonist in their own story will mean you make your Antagonist an interesting and complex character, which in turn will improve the quality of your story.
When you write a story, quite often you’ll find that you will write your Protagonist to be an essentially “perfect” human. They don’t make mistakes, they don’t make bad decisions, they don’t do things wrong. Your Protagonist will interact with bad people and flawed people surrounding them, but they themselves are flawless. The problem is, if your main character is perfect, they’ll be boring, and they’ll be unrelatable.