Writing Protagonists

I'd like to share a simple concept. If your protagonist sucks, your story will suck.

The engine that drives every story has three parts: a protagonist, something the protagonist wants, and an antagonist (human, environmental, psychological, etc.) who obstructs the protagonist's attainment of that goal. When you relate what the protagonist does to overcome the obstacles in his way, you are telling a story. Since so much rides on the protagonist, he'd better be interesting.

Here are a few tips for writing protagonists who engage and interest readers.

Goals: as I and writers far better than myself have said before, a protagonist must be properly motivated. There must be some goal that drives him through to the end of the story. Passive characters that events just happen to are dull.

Pseudorealism: note that I didn't say realism. That's because I write genre fiction. Fully realistic characters are preferred for interpretive fiction or nonfiction. For sci-fi and fantasy the idea is to give your characters (especially the protagonist) enough believable personality traits to balance the crazy make-believe elements.

Luke Skywalker is a space shaman prophesied to destroy an intergalactic empire. If someone approached you today and made the same claim, you'd rightly doubt his sanity. However, we suspend our disbelief in Luke's case because we also see that he's a working guy lamenting his frustrated dreams. That brings me to...

Relatability: a protagonist's mindset and motivations should be intelligible for the most part. This doesn't mean that you have to spell everything out. In fact, an touch of mystery is good for sci-fi stories. However, if your main character is inaccessible to common human experience, readers will have trouble vicariously inserting themselves into the tale through him. That in turn leads us to...

Sympathy; not Pity: the key to engaging readers is to ease their acceptance of the protagonist as a vehicle for their own vicarious experience. They must live the story through the main character. There is a spectrum of audience reaction to certain characters that runs from empathy to sympathy to pity.

Empathy means actually feeling what someone else feels. If your characters reach this stage (which I doubt is possible for fictional sub-creations), you've missed your exit and should turn back. If on the other hand the reader feels sorry for the protagonist with an undercurrent of contempt, you've engendered pity; not sympathy.

It's easier to describe what sympathetic characters are not instead of what they are. They don't have to be perfect. Protagonists can even have genuinely rotten flaws such as flagrant bigotry and past murder convictions. As long as the character has at least one redeeming virtue and expresses at least tacit remorse for past wrongdoing, he can earn our sympathy.

These are just a few qualities of effective protagonists. Can anybody think of more?