by Special Guest Donald Maass
In his new book, The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great, New York literary agent Donald Maass illuminates the techniques of master contemporary novelists. Some authors write powerhouse novels every time. What are they doing differently on the page? Maass not only explains, he shows you how you can right away use the techniques of greatness in your current manuscript.
What if your protagonist is a genuine Everyman, a regular Joe or Jane who is going to be tested by irregular events? Do we care about such protagonists? Well, why should we? We don’t spend much time with such people in life, why would we do so with our valuable reading time?
What if your protagonist is dark: wounded, hiding, haunted, self-loathing, outsider or simply unpleasant? What about protagonists who are simply lost, wandering, down-and-out or without hope?
Outsiders, outcasts and pariahs are plentiful in contemporary fiction and in submissions to my agency. I want my protagonist to be flawed, is one of the most common remarks I hear when manuscripts are pitched to me at writers’ conferences.
That’s nice, but too often when the manuscripts turn up later I find that the flaws are fatal. Quickly turned off, I find little reason to continue reading. I not only want to turn away from these characters’ unhappy situations, there’s often little reason to feel they are worth my pity.
Anxious to delve into their suffering, their authors forget to give me a reason to wish their protagonists’ free of it. To put it differently, even when a protagonists are dark, or just everymen, I need a reason to care about them.
And I need that reason right away.
A literary agent in New York, Donald Maass’s agency sells more than 150 novels every year to major publishers in the U.S. and overseas. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004) and The Fire in Fiction (2009). He is a past president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, Inc.
The Fire in Fiction is available at the publisher, Writers Digest, as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers.
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I’ll never forget when I was in my last year of grade school, there was a boy who was trouble. He smoked, swore, and made the French teacher cry with his awful behavior. I was a timid girl, a little afraid of life, and definitely afraid of that bad boy.
One bitterly cold winter day I turned the corner of the school on my way home for lunch and there was that bad boy, kneeling in front of a very little girl, doing up her coat and wrapping her scarf around her neck, and I never forgot that, nor the look on his face as he gazed at his little sister, tenderness on that thin cruel face as he admonished her to stay warm.
A redeeming moment in the character of an otherwise irredeemable seeming (to my young mind) fellow. I never looked at him the same way again, though I never told anyone else about that moment, and I never forgot the lesson.
Show the tender moment to make a reader care.
I’m writing a series with a psychopath as the leading character. (Second book, coming this summer)
Some readers find him compelling, seeing how awful he will get, how far he will go for the man he loves.
Some find him hard to stomach.
It’s all in the reader.
I know a hero or heroine has to have flaws, but there has to be a believable chance at redemption or growth. Sometimes the protagonist is so bad, or mean or without moral boundaries, I hope he fails or get sent to prison. If he really has a side deserving of compassion, the author has to show me before I put the book down.
Especially in Romance. Otherwise I think the Heroine is a complete idiot and shove the book back on the shelf and walk out of the store.