ACTIVATE YOUR PROTAGONIST

Your protagonist needs to be the driving force of your story.

They can’t be a bystander. They can’t be reactive. They can’t have low stakes in the outcome. Yet all too often we find protagonists that exist in the story, even get quite a bit of screen time, but don’t carry the movie.

How can you activate your Protagonist?

1. Goals

It’s vital that you give your protagonist a strong, specific goal. Depending on genre that can be anything from “get the guy” to “rescue the kid” to “land the promotion” to “build the structure” to “save the world.” It’s very important that the goal is specific. It can’t devolve into “I want this but maybe not” or “I want that but then I also want that and that and that”–unless that in and of itself is the character’s fatal flaw (and then the goal is, for example, for them to grow up).

2. Stakes

The protagonist should have sky-high personal stakes in achieving the goal. Yes, life and death stakes. No, it doesn’t have to be literal life and death. Depending on genre, of course it can be. But the life and death stakes can also be emotional or spiritual. “If I don’t find the cure, my child will die.” “If I don’t diffuse the bomb, my hometown will be destroyed.” “If I don’t get the job, I’ll have to move back in with my parents who already think I’m a failure.” “If I can’t get over my fatal flaw, I’ll lose the love of my life.”

If your protagonist could keep on living the way they do now if they don’t achieve their goal, or just return to their “known world” unscathed, then you don’t have strong stakes. Not achieving their goal must have dire ramifications for the protagonist. (Again, depending in genre, we’re not talking necessarily about a literal end of the world.)

3. Steps

This is the part where many screenwriters will run into a problem. They know their protagonist needs a goal with high stakes. So they give their character speeches about the importance of their goal. However, their character still doesn’t take (escalating) action in order to achieve that goal. In other words, we sometimes have what we call “show don’t tell violations.”

What we need from the protagonist is to take action in furtherance of their goal. What that action looks like, again, depends on the genre. If the protagonist is desperate for a promotion, do they pull out all of the stops to land an important client? Do they sabotage a colleague? Do they try to get in good with the boss by pretending to be someone else? If the protagonist is desperate to impress a potential significant other, do they feign interest in their hobbies? Join a gym? Stalk them? Surreptitiously befriend their friends? If they physically need to rescue a loved one, do they beef up on their martial arts? Steal a nuclear warhead? Scale a mountain?

Again, what are the concrete steps the protagonist takes to achieve their all-important goal?

4. Obstacles

An escalating story depends on the antagonistic forces that put obstacles in our protagonist’s way. The harder the obstacle, the better. The more obstacles, the more our protagonist has to work.

Depending on the genre, those obstacles don’t necessarily have to be physical, outward obstacles. They can be internal–for example, the protagonist’s own neurosis. They don’t have to be a person–they can be a natural disaster or a disease. The important takeaway here is that we need strong antagonistic forces that prevent our protagonist from achieving their goal.

This is also where the above-mentioned squeaky-clean protagonist is problematic. Sometimes writers have a tendency to create the perfect, square-jawed, morally blameless, completely ethical, secure, self-confident, super-skilled main character in an effort to get the audience to really like this person. Well, it has the opposite effect. We don’t care about these types of characters. They’re boring. Worst of all, they don’t help your story, they hinder it. If our protagonist has nothing to learn and nothing to conquer, we don’t have a story.

Here is an exercise: think about the goal of the movie. What type of person would be the least likely candidate to achieve this goal? What would their personality traits be? Make a list. The longer, the better. Then pick out some of those personality flaws and give them to your protagonist. You may be surprised how many storytelling avenues suddenly open up.

Now go get ’em.