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Blogs by Louise F Titchener
Protagonists 3/10/2014 5:56:43 AM
Where do you start when you sit down to write a novel? Everybody has different ideas about this. My idea is to start by thinking about your protagonist. Literary writers have the luxury of creating progagonists who are difficult for readers to empathize with. Protagonists in literary novels can be downright unappealing. Not always, of course. But it happens because the relationship between reader and writers in literary fiction is different from that operating in popular fiction. In literary fiction it's the reader's job to understand what may be a difficult piece of writing requiring a lot of effort on the part of the writer. Writers of popular fiction don't have this luxury. Usually if the reader of a mystery or other genre novel doesn't care about the protagonist he or she doesn't care about the story and loses interest. On the other hand, there is nothing so boring as a protagonist who is wonderful in every way. Generally people don't really want to read about wonderful human beings. They want to read about troubled, conflicted, complicated human beings. So, where to start? I suggest starting by creating a human being like that. Next post, thoughts on how to approach the problem.
