THE STORY SPOT

Identifying your hero’s tragic flaw is likely to be the most powerful first step you can take when creating or rewriting a story. Why? Let The Unknown Screenwriter (UNK, to y’all) fill you in:

A Protagonist’s tragic flaw is actually more like his or her ego defense mechanism. In the beginning of the story and through approximately the third quarter of a story, the Protagonist continually relies on this tragic flaw to get as far as he or she has gotten. Up to this point however, whether they are aware of the flaw or not, they think they need it to get through the day. Consciously or unconsciously…

Read the rest at The Unknown Screenwriter…

Find the fatal flaw early and you’re likely to have an easier time creating the world and events of your story as everything must, in some real way, thread back to your character’s turn away from her starting point. It’s another useful tidbit from UNK for those of you who already know everything there is to know about story as well as for those of you who don’t (um, that would be me).

Related posts here:
Hamartia and the Self by Meldenius
Is Your Hero Sympathetic, and What the Heck Does That Mean?
Focus on the Protagonist

As important to creating compelling stories as it is to focus on the protagonist, it’s equally (possibly even more important) to create formidable conflict for the hero. Without challenges to overcome–challenges worthy of our heroine’s mettle–an audience may quickly become disinterested. I mean, wouldn’t you?

After all, stories represent pivotal points in people’s lives, times of great personal change and/or accomplishment. Our attention tends to breeze by the moments of our lives spent washing dishes or putting gas in the car and, instead, we remember our first day at school or the day we stood up for ourselves when it really mattered. Why is this so? It’s likely because in those moments, when we faced great internal or external conflict, we were challenged to reach beyond ourselves or risk failure and came out on top.

In storytelling, the source of this type of life-changing conflict will often come from one person — one person who is an equal to the hero and who possesses a drive as strong as the protagonist’s only theirs is a goal that is at direct cross-purposes with the hero’s.

That person is the antagonist.
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Before we dig into this one, let’s brush up on a couple of concepts that are essential to great storytelling:

1. Sympathy: sharing the feelings or interests of another (“I feel the same!”)
2. Empathy: vicariously experiencing the feelings or thoughts of another (“I understand how you feel.”)

These two sides of the same coin are what enables storytellers to create and recreate stories that resonate with their audiences. These are what allows our work to transcend the state of being a series of events laid out on a page and, instead, reach another person on a meaningful level. These are also, as you are doubtlessly aware, the same two little words that can make writing one of the most difficult and daunting ways to spend one’s life.

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Lisa Klink over at What It’s Like posts about the perils of over-explaining your villain’s motivations.

Generally, attempts to explain why a bad guy went bad turn out to be oversimplified and unsatisfying.

My general advice here is that if you’re creating an extreme villain (like Hannibal, the Joker or Anton Chigurh), don’t feel obliged to explain their psychosis – it may backfire on you. Let them be like the shark – a force of nature no one can truly understand.

She’s right on the money when she says this is an appropriate stance for an über-villain but might not be the way to go for a more “moderate bad guy”.

Read Lisa’s full post here: “More on Villains”

And keep in mind, kids, that villains are often antagonists but antagonists are not always villains. Why? Because the antagonist is the person who is actively working to keep the protagonist from getting what she wants. That may be the sweet old lady down the street who’s keeping little Jimmy from roving the night fueling his twice-rehabed crack habit. She may be firmly standing in his way by locking him in his room yet she’s not a knife-wielding psychopath bent on taking over the civilized world. Viva la difference!

Check out Lisa’s blog at What It’s Like and her personal website at www.lisaklink.com.

What It’s Like posts are featured in THE STORY SPOT’s “Good Reads” widget in the sidebar. Find her under the menu with other great writers’ sites.

When stories stray from the protagonist and the events of her journey to serve up “interesting” secondary characters’ lives and/or large, intangible world events, the result is often a fuzzy narrative that doesn’t captivate its audience.

The elemental principle here: Focus on the Protagonist.

Holding focus on a single person throughout a narrative satisfies our unconscious, innate need to relate to a single life outside of our own as a means to finding deeper truths within ourselves. Stories mirror us. It’s one of the reasons we’ve gathered around campfires for millennia and it’s why our most resonant stories follow a single hero as they struggle to break through their obstacles.

A recent screening of Love and Other Disasters (written and directed by Alek Keshishian) offers a good example of narrative fuzzy focus. This film’s logline:

A hyperactive and high-fashion American transplant living in London and working for Vogue magazine does her best to enhance the lives of those around her while remaining blissfully unaware of the man who longs to profess his true love to her.

So that puts our focus on the girl as protagonist. The film, however, plays out around her roommate’s search for true love as embodied in a chance encounter with one man. And truly, his storyline was the most compelling. Why? For one, he was the one with the problem and with something to lose. He was the one for whom some life-changing external event forced change in his life. He was the one around whom friends rallied support and, lastly, he was the one who learned a life lesson (before she) in the end. Sounds like the making of a hero, no?

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