Does my protagonist *have* to succeed?

The first thing your question brings to mind is Stan Lee saying he wrote Spider-Man to be the first superhero “who’d lose out as often as he’d win—in fact, more often.” So the story structure of having terrible luck and losing until he wins at the end of each installment works, and can sell a lot of books. But he always wins in the end.

You don’t want your story structure to get too formulaic or predictable. You also don’t want your heroes to look so inept or helpless that the audience doesn’t buy that they could win and thinks you cheated at the end, or for the story to get too unremittingly, repetitively bleak. It’s a good idea to let them accomplish something and have some happy moments along the way.

posted over 6 years ago

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Davislor‭

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No, your character does not have to succeed.

Along the same lines as Mark's answer, in which competence and proactivity are concerned, you can also add to your mix the idea of sympathy. Each of these three attributes can be seen on a scale of low to high. For any character in your work, you can adjust how competent they are, how proactive they are, and how sympathetic they are. Here's a website and activity to play with these attributes.

We like to read about characters that grow and change, usually in a positive direction, although becoming darker is interesting too. So, that growth and change may occur in the three areas: competence, proactivity, sympathy. It sounds like your heroes start low on competence but will grow in competence. It sounds like they start off high on the proactivity scale. I don't know if they are sympathetic or not.

Example: A character who is low in all three areas (competence, proactivity, sympathy) will be hard to read about for long, but if the character grows then perhaps the character will become more engaging to read about. A character high in all three areas (think Superman) may also be hard to spend time with ... is flat ... and has little room to grow.

Villains are often highly competent, highly proactive, and unlikeable. (But, arguably so is Sherlock Holmes.) Secondary characters are often likable enough, but not very proactive (they are the side kick). You can move the sliders on your characters to change how they feel.

Note that in the area of competence, a character can have differential competence. You can offset your protagonists' failings with them being wildly competent in some other area of their lives. Maybe they are a whiz in the stock market. Which really helps, because they keep blowing their money in their failed attempt to foil the villain

Personal experience: In a recent revision I made my MC more competent at a sport that has next to nothing to do with his story arc and ultimate dilemma. (He had been reading as too incompetent, and too young, and I needed to change him up a bit.) The athletic change immediately made him seem a little older and also made him more charismatic. It was a weird thing to see, the character I had built, given an athletic ability unrelated to the story (just shown in a few scenes), suddenly being far more likable.

posted over 6 years ago

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DPT‭

660 reputation 40 73 114 0

It really doesn't matter IMO. It depends on how you feel with your story. It sounds to me like you have it planned well. Do you know what it will be called?

posted over 6 years ago

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System‭

3226 reputation 147 215 553 0

No, your protagonist does not have to succeed. Your protagonist has to arrive at some difficult choice and make a choice that the reader finds emotionally or morally satisfying. That does not mean that they have to win the fight with the antagonist, either immediately or in the future. Sometimes the fight with the antagonist is simply the catalyst that forces the protagonist into making their climactic choice. The protagonist then dies, but dies having chosen well.

This sort of ending is not going to be satisfactory to everyone, of course. But then a story in which a protagonist goes on to an inevitable eventual victory without every facing any defining moral choice of their own is not going to be satisfactory to everyone either.

You have to ask yourself, what kind of story am I telling? What is the emotion and moral payoff in this story for the reader? There are approximately 8 billion holiday romance movies in which small town girl with career in the big city comes home for Christmas and meets soulful hometown hunk. Does she give up her high power career to marry rural and dreamy, or does she go back to the city and become president of General Motors at 35? There is an audience for both endings. The writer needs to choose which audience they will serve.

posted over 6 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

4371 reputation 12 1104 744 58

There are several risks you run with a character who mostly fails.

Your character may feel incompetent.

A protagonist usually needs to gain our sympathy and our respect. If the chain of failures is absolute, if they have no victories or notable accomplishments, that doesn't necessarily mean we don't love 'em. But, it does mean we don't love them for their heroism or their brilliance -- because they haven't managed to achieve any.

So, you probably want to spend serious effort making sure the protagonist is likable despite their failures -- or, find Moments of Awesomeness to give them, so we continue to see them as capable, worthwhile people, who are just up against something really really tough.

Your plotting may feel forced.

As an author, one of your jobs is to stack the deck against your protagonist; keep the conflict rolling; give them something epic to overcome.

But if you tip your hand too much, if you're too blatant about how the protagonist can't get a break, the reader can begin to find the story boring -- because all the tension has seeped out of it. If you know that the protagonist can't succeed at anything meaningful, then it's not a lot of fun to watch them try. If they always get there Just A Minute Too Late, then watching them race loses its edge. Sooner or later the reader is going to cotton on to the pattern, and then their reaction might just be a kind of,

The kind of pattern you describe -- of the protagonist failing again and again and again, and only being "allowed" to win at the very end, is... kind of an uninteresting one.

The moment the reader feels it's the author holding the protagonist back, rather than the actual plot and circumstances, the story loses a lot of the reader's investment.

This isn't a necessary consequence. Some stories manage to manage stakes masterfully; always offering a light at the end of the tunnel, even if the readers' hopes are consistently dashed. In others, the constant failure is the point, and the reader feels that the failures are, themselves meaningful.

Another way to deal with this is to allow personal victories, partial victories, or temporary victories. Enough for the story not to be predictable and monotonous; enough to feel that things are dynamic and important things are happening in the middle of the story, too.

(George R.R. Martin, in A Song of Ice and Fire, might be said to be relevant here, on all these counts. But do bear in mind, after basing a whole series on dashed hopes, he seems to be having a lot of trouble bringing the series to an actual close...)

Your book may feel hopeless.

It's possible that your protagonist's constant loses just make the book feel... hopeless. If it makes sense within the world for the protagonist to lose again and again, you might wind up giving the sense that the entire struggle is pointless, lost before they even started. The reader might get the sense that the hero can't win, and have trouble getting excited about yet-another desperate shot.

This is a very particular problem (and, in some books, a feature rather than a bug). You probably won't do this by accident, but it's worth keeping an eye out for, and reminding yourself of what the reader is hoping for, invested in.

A great example of this, both in strength and in weakness, is A Series of Unfortunate Events. In this series, a sense of despair and futility are very much at the core of the books. Even so, the first books fall into a very repetitive cycle, where the children are thrust into a horrible situation, and only barely escape it, while the villain remains at large -- which makes for a discouraging read, simply because it grows to feel formulaic. But around Book 5, the series sets off in a new direction, with a larger plot and moving further and further from the simple initial formula. The series remains morbid, and the characters do fail continuously,but you want to read on and see how.

This is all heavily dependent on execution.

These are considerations, not well-quantified rules. Advice can give you things to think about, but you're not doing anything wrong, and certainly not anything irreversible. So, don't let this block you too much when you've only just planned out your book. Write, because it's only from a finished draft (and, later, reader feedback) that you'll be able to tell if the failure is "too much," or just awesome and exciting. Keep the risks in mind, be ready for the possibility of needing to add some Moments of Awesome in when you revise, and you'll be fine.

All the best!

posted over 6 years ago

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Standback‭

680 reputation 38 269 122 1

Your hero does not have to achieve their goal, but (IMO) for a YA novel, they must achieve something of note. Luke Skywalker did not kill Vader (in the first movie) but destroyed the Death Star and defeated Vader's plan, this was a major setback and victory for the rebels.

Killing one antagonist in a vast government conspiracy does not seem to me a satisfying ending.

I also do not think (again, just my opinion) you should plan on a trilogy with this strategy, unless you are going to write all three books before you try to get published.

Publisher's won't commit to a book with a poor ending, with nothing but a hope you will write the sequels in a few years, so your poor first attempt will finally sell something.

If you are a new author, every book must sell on its own as a complete story. The publisher hopes you can take advantage of your fanbase (and expand it) with each new sequel for a decade. That is built-in cheap marketing and cheap profits for them.

I buy books on a whim all the time, probably thirty a year, and I'll try a new author if the first page reads well. I'd buy a trilogy. But I would not buy the first book of a trilogy from a new author, unless all three books were published.

I think something significant and life-changing must be accomplished by the hero, or I don't like the book, and wouldn't buy a sequel. If they do not win the war, they must win the battle at hand and kick the villain(s) in the metaphorical face. You didn't stop the mob like you wanted to, but you sure made an epic kill of the kingpin in your town. You didn't reform corruption in government, but Nixon was forced to resign in shame.

And your hero survives and their battle continues. That is the epilogue to the first book, and allows the next book, which your publisher will be happy to pick up if the first one sells.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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