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Craft & Technique 

THE UNSYMPATHETIC PROTAGONIST

[From page 46, the first page of the article]

Nearly every writer has heard about this character. From other writers, from editors, from agents. We know that editors and agents will reject a manuscript with an unsympathetic protagonist. They won't want to read the novel; they believe, rightly so, that readers won't like the protagonist, won't want to spend 400 pages in close association with that character.

So who is this mysterious character that invades our prose? Who is this masked entity, this unsympathetic protagonist? What is meant by this term and how can we, as writers, avoid this pitfall and create characters that are, instead, sympathetic? The answer is: By unmasking these characters, by peeling away the layers, by making them real.

"Unsympathetic" defined

First, let's unmask what is meant by "unsympathetic protagonist." Let's peel away the layers. In a novel or movie, we like and identify with the protagonist in some way--in their search for justice, for love, for escape, for growth--including their desire and efforts to reach their goals, their dreams, despite their imperfections and the odds against them. We root for them when obstacles stand in their way. Conversely, the unsympathetic protagonist is not someone we like or someone we can identify with--we can't sympathize with this character, with their motivations, goals and dreams. They have qualities we don't like or admire, and they don't have enough positive qualities that would balance out what we don't like. Further, they may also have done something we don't like or that we find reprehensible--their actions are disquieting. We can't connect with the character, and we can't empathize with them or their pursuit of goals and dreams, so we can't root for them.

Thus, if we don't like them or care about the character and we don't like or care about their goals, that means we don't care about the plot, we don't care about the novel. There is nothing to keep us in the story, nothing to keep us turning those pages.

There are basically three kinds of characters who may be defined as unsympathetic: (1) the characters who we simply don't like or can't identify with, but who are not really "terrible" people; (2) the characters whose traits might seem to define them as villains or almost as villains but who escape this definition by the way they are portrayed and who actually become the protagonists of the novel; and finally (3) the actual villains. For our purposes, we will cover the first two of these.

On the spectrum of moral and likable traits, this unsympathetic protagonist lies somewhere...

___________end of first page._________

The article goes on to define unsympathetic & sympathetic, addresses three things that the author must do to create good protagonists, highlights 9 techniques to make your characters more sympathetic, and then offers an example of all the techniques applied.

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