Twenty Questions (Part II)
Invitation to an Incitation
Welcome back to Shelf Life, where we are drinking iced coffee after 8 o’clock in the evening and running the air conditioner all night. It’s summertime: Everyone is on vacation. Kids are roaming the streets in packs at all hours of the day. There are no rules. I don’t know what day it is, nor even what planet I’m on.
Good thing I established a topic that keeps on giving for a few days while I figure it out. This sequel to Tuesday’s Part I covers the next four questions on my list, the answers to which will take that protagonist you’ve lovingly crafted and propel them headfirst into the story. These questions will define your protagonists’s motivations, goals, the arc of their development, and the inciting incident.
5. What Happens to Drag the Protagonist Into the Story?
Last Shelf Life left off after a discussion of the protagonist’s status quo—that is, what was situation under normal circumstances, before this story started happening around and to them? Once you’ve established that it’s time to answer the next question: What is the inciting incident? What happens to or around the protagonist that draws them into the action of the story?
Again, every plot starts with the protagonist’s life being disrupted. If you review the John Gardner section in The Plot’s the Thing, you’ll be reminded that there are two ways a story can start: (1) a person goes on a journey, or (2) a stranger comes to town. Those are the two things that disrupt life. To pull back and look at it in a more general way, consider:
A person leaves their normal circumstances; or
Something arrives and changes those normal circumstances.
Either the protagonist leaves what’s normal and familiar and that disrupts their status quo, or someone (or something) comes into their status quo and changes it. So: What happens in your story that draws the protagonist in?
Is it something that was always going to happen to the protagonist? Were they fated for this, or otherwise predetermined? Or were they just in the right place at the right time and got swept up in events? What calls your protagonist into action? And, do they go willingly? Enthusiastically? Reluctantly? Kicking and screaming?
6. Why Can’t the Protagonist Pack It Up and Go Home?
Question six dovetails with question five: They have to be answered together, or at least in succession. There has to be a reason why the protagonist must answer the call to adventure—must respond to the inciting incident—instead of simply going back to their normal life. There must be a reason why there can be no return to the status quo—whatever happened in the inciting incident has made that impossible. You can’t go home again, et cetera.
It’s a standard part of the hero’s journey to refuse the call to adventure the first time it comes knocking. Think of Frodo refusing to take the Ring from Gandalf, or Luke declining to go to Alderan with Obi-Wan, or Spiderman standing back and allowing a thief to get away. In each case, fate has other plans for these guys—the consequences of refusing the call are too great. Frodo can’t convince Gandalf to take the Ring away and finds himself holding the hot potato when bad guys show up to take it; Luke tries to return to his status quo but finds it quite literally destroyed, his home ransacked and family killed; and Spiderman’s inaction causes the death of his beloved uncle.
Not every protagonist is a hero in the heroic journey sense. Sometimes the protagonist is just a young woman looking to make a favorable love match (all of Jane Austen?) or a plucky young man trying to make his way in the world (all of Dickens). But these protagonists also receive a call to action and try to refuse it—just, perhaps, not in such larger-than-life terms.
Side note: I could not bring Dickens’s name to mind at all and I also couldn’t remember the title of A Tale of Two Cities to look him up, so I had to Google “famous dead English writer” and pick him out of a lineup so I am definitely getting my English degree revoked and also I might have dementia.
Even if the protagonist is gung-ho and ready to dive headfirst into the plot, there should be a compelling reason why they can’t hang up their hero hat and go running back home when things get tough. That they can’t return to the old normal, even if they want to, is part of elevating the stakes.
7. What Does the Protagonist Want?
Everybody wants something. Protagonists want two things.
A solution to their external conflict and
A solution to their internal conflict.
The protagonist you start out with isn’t the same person as the protagonist you end up with. They will grow and develop throughout the story and become the person they were always meant to be. For that to happen, they have to conquer their inner conflict. And then, for the plot to resolve the protagonist also has to conquer the outer conflict. That is how you bring the plot arc to a close and the character arc to a close. You can’t close just one. There’s two arches. Like a McDonalds.
Maybe you have a protagonist on a journey to save the world from an evil bad guy, but they’re not sure they have the ability to do it. This protagonist needs to conquer the evil bad guy (outer conflict) and also conquer whatever is inhibiting their belief in themself (inner conflict). Neither one of these can be resolved without the other. The hero has to conquer the villain to learn to believe in themself; and without developing that self-belief they can’t defeat the villain.
Likewise, Elizabeth Bennet has to grow out of her cynicism (internal conflict) in order to fall in with Mr Darcy and secure that favorable match, and also his help in un-disgracing her youngest sister (external conflicts).
Now here’s the catch: Whatever your protagonist will want or need to resolve their internal and external conflicts, that is probably not what they want at the beginning of the story. Their initial goal, or want, will reflect who they are at the outset of the story and not the person they’re going to become. Proceeding from numbers 5 and 6 above, many heroes—at the start of the story—just want to go home and for everything to go back to normal. Frodo’s goal at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring is just to get that Ring out of the Shire and give it to literally anyone else to deal with, so he can go home and get back to whatever it is you do in the Shire. Smoking and watching fireworks, I think. It’s only later, when Frodo realizes that he is somewhat uniquely immune to the Ring’s manipulation, that he realizes he must be the one to carry it on to its destruction. His goal changes.
It’s not enough to know what your protagonist will ultimately want, or what they want as of page 1—you have to know what they want, what’s motivating them, all the way through the story.
8. What Stands Between the Protagonist and What They Want?
If the protagonist could just reach out and grab the thing they want, we would not have much of a story. Like imagine you are Ellen Ripley at the beginning of Aliens and you’re like: “Listen I just got here from this moon that’s infested with crazy dangerous alien monsters, but the good news is they have no way to get off the planet as long as we don’t send any spacecraft there.” And then all the people in authority are like: “Oh good call, let’s quarantine that moon so the dangerous aliens there don’t get loose and kill everyone.” Then there’s literally no movie. She got what she wanted at the start, which was to never see an alien ever again. The end.
Obviously things can never be that simple. There have to be obstacles to the protagonist getting what they want. The protagonist has to surmount those obstacles and new ones have to rise in their place. That’s a plot.
This is different than the answer to number 6 (why can’t they just give up and go home?). At this point, the protagonist has accepted that they cannot go home or otherwise return to their status quo. Things have been disrupted in a permanent kind of way. They have to move forward; they can no longer retreat. Their goal has changed to reflect this understanding. Now something is in the way of that goal. What is it?
This is Luke Skywalker saying, “Okay, well, since Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen are dead the the moisture farm is destroyed, I might as well go save that princess.” And then there’s a whole bunch of obstacles between him and actually saving the princess. This leads to a couple more questions in kind of a branching way. First, to understand your antagonist, you have to figure out who stands between your protagonist and their ultimate goal—who is behind the main obstacle to what it is the protagonist wants. Second, you have to determine what series of graduated obstacles (each more challenging than the one before) make up the grand obstacle course (the plot).
But we’ll get to all that some other day.
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