When your MC isn't your MC

Grand_Maester said:

My technical MC is there... to stop the villain. His goal... is to get through life. His motivation... is (at first) money, and later, because the villain is a bastard. His problem to overcome... is the villain. Most of the secondary characters have better characterization that this guy.

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I have to wonder why this guy is your hero if he's such a milquetoast. Seriously.

Your problem isn't that your villain is overdeveloped. It's that your hero isn't developed, not even enough to be cardboard.

Take another look at your story idea and start pulling out things that personify what "Good" is in your world and see how they can combine into traits, goals, motivations, anything for your hero. It's really really easy to get into the "Evil" side of the world sometimes, but for the story to have good balance, you need the side the reader is suppose to root for presented as well.

I'm discovering that my novel is really much more about the villain, and the last act of his life. It has nothing to do with the MC, except that he is the best POV to view the villain over the course of the story.

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Just for discussion's sake: Is it possible that you're now seeing this story in this way so you don't have to do the work of creating a worth-while heroic character? Or because you're feeling overwhelmed or uninspired when you try?

Again, go back to the initial idea for the story, the thing that geeked you enough to write in the first place. I often find all that all my answers to these kinds of questions are right there and I've just gotten myself confused along the way.

Good luck.

Your POV character does not have to be your MC. It's pretty hard to pull this off though, because you'll find your POV character just happening to be present whenever something interesting happens (like Zelig or Forrest Gump), or constantly hearing stories as told by someone else, and villains tend to get "James Bond Syndrome," which is a compulsion to explain their motivation to someone just before they try and kill him.

You can always use an omniscient POV, even if the person doing the telling is a particular person (like a historian) with his own take on the story and limited information. Or you can use multiple narrators.

My advice would be to write out all your plot points that you feel you need to tell the story, and write out all the people you feel could have been there, and then all the people they would have talked to afterward. Then do the same with scenes--there's always more than one scene that can convey a plot point. Experiment with what you get; for example, think about not telling the audience something until later because a particular narrator wouldn't have known about it.

My feeling is that if you do this long enough you will probably "find" an Ishmael character, or at least narrow it down to a small number of possible characters.

Your protag is usually the character with the most interesting problems.

It sounds like you MC doesn't have enough going on, and unless your antagonist/villain has enough likability to be a truly compelling anti-hero, he'll ultimately fall flat if you try to reverse engineer your story and make him the MC.

Like DeleyanLee said--your MC needs a little love and attention.

Make the villain the MC and the "technical" MC the villain.



Seriously, try it.

If not, you've got to give your MC desires, wants, motivations, etc. beside trying to stop the villain. Why does he/she even care? What's at stake for the MC?

Does the story work as it's written?

Seriously, are you having second thoughts because you think you've broken rules, or because the story is flat? Just because your MC is essentially a defenseman rather than a forward doesn't necessarily make him a bad character. It sounds like he could use some fleshing out, but that's not that hard to do. Give him a passion or two, preferably ones that could get tangled up in the story. Who does he love? Any hobbies? Causes that are near and dear for whatever reason? Throw elements like that into the mix, and you might find you don't need to rework the story from the ground up.

Of course, if the story itself is flat and unsatisfying as written, that's an entirely different ballgame. But fleshing out your MC probably wouldn't hurt even so.

I have this problem! My villain is starting to become more interesting than the protagonist. By the way,when I address you as 'you', I'm talking to me too.

First of all, you need to at least equalise the characters. Even if the villain becomes the MC, you'll still need a guy stopping him, and that guy has to be at least equal to him for us to really get involved in the conflict.

Then you've got to look for the story. Forget the motivations and backstory for a moment. Who has the best story? Then see whose motivation enhances the story, and whose doesn't.

Then decide which one will be the MC. Remember, the MC does not have to be the one that talks the most. In 'Julius Caesar', Caesar gets killed about halfway through and he doesn't have the most lines, but the story revolves around him- him being killed as the narrative, and how he is perceived as the emotional story.

If you choose to do a book like this, where the MC doesn't talk the most, it's best to do it with an unreliable narrator. In 'Lolita', our perceptions of her and the event are skewed by the narration.

If the villain's very complex and intriguing, leave a bit of mystery. Force your readers to wonder what happened to him, how he became like that. For example (I will use another Shakespeare play, sorry) in 'Measure for Measure' the story is basically that a novice nun goes to the deputy of Vienna to plead for her brother's pardon (he has been condemned to death for getting an unmarried girl pregnant). The deputy says that he will only do this if the sister agrees to sleep with him.
Not a lot of love for the deputy then, but through his soliloquy you see his dilemma- he has to condemn the brother under the law but he is also guilty of lust. He tells her he cannot bend the law but he wants to for his own sake. 'We would and we would not' as the deputy observes.

Lack of urgency, perhaps. Lack of passion, perhaps. My current WIP was languishing. It was too early to introduce the next major plot point I had planned. I needed drama, I needed to get the lovebirds together (and to make it clear what they saw in each other beyond the standard young hormones), I needed certain societal tensions to be ramped up... So I thought for a while, and came up with something that satisfied all that. The antagonist got to put her passion into action, the lovebirds got to discover theirs, everybody found themselves with a major mess on their hands, and the next few chapters basically wrote themselves. I found their passions and they couldn't wait to tell me all about it.

So find your characters' passions. The antagonist, the protagonist. Give them something to care deeply about, even if it's something nasty, get them moving on it, and make the passions collide. Great fun.

Epic quests always bore me (sorry). You either spend 500 pages knowing that X will probably get the magical sword and defeat Wibedeedoo or at the end of 500 pages he doesn't and you just get fed up. The lack of urgency does have something to do with it- also there is no promise that the story will get any better.

Especially if the villain's interesting, it highlights how boring the hero is.

Is there anything in it for the MC in obtaining X? Or is it just a basic story?

EDIT: Agree with Judg- it's especially a problem in romance. You have the climx (no pun intended) but then you feel you have to kill time or just skip ahead so you can get to the 'good bit'.

Your plot points are anything that has to happen directly, or be talked about, before something else can happen or be understood by the reader. If the only purpose of the attack is that it is what made Osiris famous, it could just be mentioned by another character in passing, or maybe someone could duck into a monument to get out of the rain. But if details have to be given in the book, then each detail can be a plot point.

The obvious way to handle this would be to narrate the event directly, but you could also have someone reminiscing, or visiting a museum, or just drop snippets about it at various points until the reader can piece the important parts together.

If you have any doubts about how specific a point should be, just make it two or more specific points--you can always clump them together once you decide how you are going to be expounding that part of the story.

I see four points.

Four Drae attack Excelcis.
Four Drae kill most of the government officials.
Osiris steps in and fends them off.
Osiris gets famous because of Drae attack.

If you have made up your mind that you are going to show this sequence of events directly, you could make it all one point. But it sounds like you might be considering parceling this information out in pieces. Anyhow, you don't have to make up your mind, you can always combine or divide while you're working the final structure out.

Why does this weak MC have to be there? Is the story told through 1st POV and he's telling it? Or are you writing in third and the story is more interesting when you are in the villain's head? Try some writing exercises - like switch up the POV. For instance write several scenes in 1st POV from the MC that you are grappling with. Or like you said you have a more interesting character make them the MC and tell the story from their POV.
my .02

The MC doesn't have to be vastly more interesting than the other characters. I think it's a cop-out to just switch because the current MC bores you- you'll still need a antagonist even if you make the villain the MC.

Grand_Maester said:

I'm discovering that my novel is really much more about the villain, and the last act of his life. It has nothing to do with the MC, except that he is the best POV to view the villain over the course of the story.

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Good villains should be more interesting than the hero. Who's more interesting:
What makes characters interesting is their internal conflicts, and good villains generally have more inner conflicts than the heroes who combat them.

What you need is for your hero to be sufficiently interesting. How? Same way: give your hero internal conflict.

My suggestion: now that you have a great villain, go back and redo your main character until you want to write about him.

You mentioned a potential POV character who spends the first half of the plot with the villain, and the last with the hero. This sounds quite interesting to me and I would urge you to consider it before you settle on your decision. You mentioned that you would like to write it from your villains POV but this would reveal too much, and would get messy towards the end. But if this other character is associated with the villain then we learn as much as you want us to about the villain before this character runs off to join the good guys. You may even find that this character makes more sense as a protag because they have a connection to the villain and have chosen to rebel against him. Just a thought anyway.

Sounds interesting I'd be interested to read that.

I've contemplated for a long time the "Villain Protag" idea, but I don't think thats a good fit when your villain is magnificent bastard with streaks of chessmaster. Focusing on him would reveal too many things that would screw up the plot and ruin suspense for the reader.

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This is why Arthur Conan Doyle has Watson has the POV character for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries. With Holmes as the POV character, he knows everything. With Watson, there's still a mystery since he's along for the ride like the reader.

Another thought occurred to me... what if my POV character is neither my hero nor my villain. Suppose I keep the current MC as the POV character, but change his role in the story, and take one of my secondary characters with many more heroic qualities (as well as an actual motivation to stop the villain), and make him more of the hero. If I did this, it could make the villain the hero almost interchangeably MCs (since the POV character spends the first half of the book with the villain, and the second half with the hero, so focus could be brought on both of them).
I would probably have to introduce this hero earlier then as well.

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Sounds like you are on to something if you have better fitting hero in a guy with proper motivation. But keep in mind your POV character still needs to exist within the realm of the story. He has thoughts and opinions, too, which will color the readers' perception of your other two characters. What about his life and purpose in the story makes him the best fit to present your characters to the readers? Think again why the Holmes stories need be narrated by Watson, or Gatsby by Nick Carroway. You don't have to answer in the thread, of course, but something to think about.

katiemac said:

This is why Arthur Conan Doyle has Watson has the POV character for his Sherlock Holmes mysteries. With Holmes as the POV character, he knows everything. With Watson, there's still a mystery since he's along for the ride like the reader.

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And Holmes is maudlin, arrogant, dismissive and fairly unpleasant to spend a lot of time with. Watson by comparison is jocund and agreeable, so lends sympathy to Holmes.

Ruv Draba said:

And Holmes is maudlin, arrogant, dismissive and fairly unpleasant to spend a lot of time with. Watson by comparison is jocund and agreeable, so lends sympathy to Holmes.

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Exactly. Holmes is not a person most people would like. But we like Watson, and Watson likes Holmes, and so by extension we can see the good qualities in Holmes. The same can be said for The Great Gatsby.

So if your POV character is not your MC, especially if your MC is a disagreeable type (villain), then you should be aware how that POV character feels about the other characters. If your POV character likes your "villain" and dislikes the "hero," then that will paint your story differently if he is rooting for the hero and despises the villain. If he likes them both, your story may feel a bit disconnected.

Does your MC have someone that they care about that the villian can threaten? There should be someone or something more important to the hero than himself in order for him to be a hero. So find out what it is, and have the villian try to destroy him/her/it. That should drive all kinds of feelings in the MC. What happens if the villan wins? Does that mean the MC's child dies? His wife/gf? Or on a grander scale, the fate of a city/country/world? How will he feel if he fails? There should be some motivator other than the villian is just a bad guy.

I don't think you have a weak protagonist, you just haven't figured out a way to boast about his talents and achievements. If you're telling the story from his POV, he can't do the bragging, so you need to SHOW how great he is. You need to include scenes that reflect all the best qualities of your MC. That way, he becomes the hero and doesn't have to boast about it.