#10: Judging All Characters and Triage the Protagonist

The steps I am about to propose are not written in stone. Their order can be changed, as long as the principle is maintained: major matters are attended to first.
Stein on Writing page 278

We want to start with a hardcopy of the story you’re editing. It’s easier to work from paper, and after you’ve made major changes, you can reprint and look at a fresh copy. What are major changes? Anything that changes the bulk of the work; fixing characters, plot, setting, style. Grammar and spelling mistakes are easy.

The point of breaking things up is so that you don’t burn yourself out reading and rereading. It is easy to do, especially after you find you have to delete the first five now-grammatically-perfect pages to correct a motivation problem on page seven. Heaps of frustration.

You are going to have to go through the manuscript multiple times, but with a wider focus. I’m going to follow Sol Stein’s outline, but feel free to modify it as you see fit. I will.

Who Are We Judging?

What fuels a successful action-adventure fantasy? Fine stories have been written about man versus nature, but the majority of fanfics are going to have the good guys versus the bad guys. So this story should have an equally matched protagonist and antagonist set against a fantastical universe. (No sending me the list of all the inept villains out there; we're striving to do better than them.)

The Hyrueliana is a second generation fanfic. The primary bad guy Ganon was defeated in Destiny. The primary good guys have retired, and now their kids face new adversaries. The fantastical universe is covered with placing the action in Hyrule and with some magical time travel.

The protagonist is Zoe, oldest daughter of Queen Zelda and Prince Link. She is roughly nineteen-years-old, and has already had adventures on other worlds and given up the throne. Relations with her mother are often strained.

The antagonist is Agmaraa, a half-Gensiarian who had no desire to become a Guardian like Lissa and Lyle. She was told of a prophecy that a Halfling, a crossbreed, would destroy her. So as she is forced to different dimensions, she kills all she runs across.

Minor characters are everyone else in the story of varying degrees of importance. The other players in the Hyrueliana:

• Orden Larksphere – Zoe’s true love from Dragonsworld. A dragon slayer and accomplished fighter, he’s not very knowledgable about magic.
• Prince Holias – future king of Hyrule if he survives his temper.
• Lady Zeldra – Lord Saria’s bargaining chip daughter has her own thoughts on the matter of her marriage.
• Lont – one of Lord Saria’s knights and Zeldra’s best friend with no knowledge of what waits for him in the Underworld.
• Meletas – when loving a human equals death, this elf girl is in love.
• Scphores – a witch underling of Agmaraa
• Lyle – a Guardian mucking around with time, who is Zoe’s cousin also.
• Characters from stories in the previous series make various appearances.

Now that we know who is who, we need to examine how strong they are as characters. Do you find yourself thinking about them in situations that are not in your story? If yes, that’s great, the characters are alive in your mind and should come alive for your readers.

Can’t picture your protagonist away from the story? You probably need more work. Answer these questions from Stein to decide if your protagonist needs more work.

• What is it about your character that you like especially? Does that happen to be also a trait of yours? If it is, that may be a symptom of the autobiography trap, creating a character that is too like your-self, which hurts the distance that every author needs from his creations. One way to ameliorate the problem is to give the character a distinctive trait—positive or negative—that you are absolutely sure you don’t have.
• If you were about to take your only vacation of the year, how would you feel if your character were going along? You would probably be seeing your character at mealtime and in between, day in and day out for a week or two. Honestly now, would you look forward to that? You are asking your reader to spend a good number of hours with that character. You may need to add some sparkle to your character, some interesting eccentricity, perhaps a personality characteristic that will make his company more enjoyable.
• How well do you understand your character? One way to find out is to imagine that you have just won a lottery jackpot of two mil-lion dollars. Your character doesn’t know you’ve been playing Lotto, but he is likely to hear about it on the news. People have mixed feelings about the sudden success of friends. Would it be better for you to tell your character the news yourself? How is your character likely to take the news about your new wealth? Would any of his reactions be useful in making him more interesting?

Does your main character change during the course of the novel? I’m not writing a novel, does the main character still need to change? Yes, he or she does, though in a short story you only have enough space to show that the change has happened not how the character turns out. A novel gives you more time to see the consequences of the change.

Protagonist

Now that we have looked at what we’re supposed to put the characters through, we’ll start with examining Zoe. Just how well does she work as a protagonist?

Do you find yourself thinking about them in situations that are not in your story?

This is the fifth story Zoe has appeared in. Her first appearance was in Destiny. That was followed by the trilogy To Be a Hero (unpublished), and now Hyrueliana. Also there will be a sequel story, Times of War.

Is that the same as seeing them in situations outside of the current story? I’m using it as a starting place. I also daydreamed about a couple of scenarios where somehow Limburger is threatening Hyrule and Zack introduces them to the Biker Mice. I think that’s extreme La-la land even for me, and have to much in both series to write. Besides, it never sounded believable even too me.

What is it about your character that you like especially?

She’s tough, but underneath it all she craves approval from her mother. She was her father’s favorite, and Zelda was a more distant figure with ruling the kingdom. And Zelda was extremely over-protective, where Link’s method was to train the kids to handle monsters. Zoe hates dressing up and staying pretty. When she’d be forced to dress up, it always made her self-conscious how she isn’t the beauty her mother was at her age. The awkwardness would further exasperate Zelda, who couldn’t figure out how to reach her oldest daughter. The martial activities Zoe did thrive under Zelda disapproved for a Princess. (Very hypocritical of Zelda given how much fighting she has done, but parents often try to train a child the way they think they should have been.)

Does that happen to be a trait of yours? When I was younger, I didn’t know how to please my mother. Our relationship has finally grown past that, and I can’t compensate my klutz with brilliant swordsmanship. I’m a klutz no matter what I do.

If you were about to take your only vacation of the year, how would you feel if your character were going along?

I think I can see where this is going. Zoe is too angsty to spend a great amount of time with. She’s not, once you get her away from the Palace. Zelda came to terms with her daughter not wanting the throne at the end of To Be a Hero. Now the issue is why Zoe won’t marry her nice young man and be respectable. Since that’s what her mother wants her to do, it’s the last thing Zoe wants to do.

She is straight forward, and jokes from another world tend to go right over her head. She does have a sense of humor; she teases those she feels close enough to tease. Zoe’s eccentricity is she was born and raised a Princess, and would rather live the life of an Adventurer. Her weapon of choice—besides her inherited sword—is a moblin pole axe. Moblins were Ganon’s cannon fodder.

How would the character react to your winning the lottery?

Zoe’s never experienced poverty. She wouldn’t understand how suddenly having a whole lot of money means. If I was thrilled about it, she’d be happy for me.

Does the main character change?

This needs some work. Zoe needs to agree to marry Orden because she’s realized just how short life is to put off public affirmation of their commitment, and less because she’s gotten pregnant. So that means some rewriting Zoe and Orden interactions and the ending.

Now before we start rewriting, we need to examine all the characters. Next one is the antagonist.