Up until now, we’ve talked about how to create your story, everything from your main character, the goal, the conflict, and whether they succeed or fail. For today and going forward, though, we’re going to talk about how to improve your stories.
The first thing that we can do to improve your story is work on characters. Now, of the characters in the story, we have a main character and we have an opposing character. We call the main character our protagonist. The reason we call the main character the protagonist is that the protagonist is pro. They are pro something. They are for something. They are for achieving their goal.
The force, the person, the animal, whatever it is, their internal fears, whatever it is that’s opposing the protagonist from getting them, is the antagonist. They are anti the protagonist from achieving the goal. They are against it.
So we have a protagonist who’s for achieving the goal. We have an antagonist who’s against the protagonist from achieving that goal. Usually we want the protagonist to achieve the goal. That’s who we’re rooting for. An example would be a bear. A bear wants honey, the bear is for honey. The Bears are protagonist. Against the bear getting the honey as the bees; the bees are anti the bear. They are against the bear, they are the antagonists. So we have a conflict between bear for the goal of achieving. The honey and we have bees that are antagonists. They are against the bear achieving it.
Not all the time are the protagonist and antagonist fighting each other. They’re always against each other, but they don’t have to necessarily hate each other. They could be best friends. We talked about a girl who’s a track racer. She wants to win the race. She is working very hard to win the race. She is the protagonist of the story. Her goal is to win the race. She has someone else on the race that wants to also achieve the goal, but there can only be 1 winner. So the other girl is the antagonist. She is against the protagonist winning the goal because she wants to achieve the goal herself. Since there can only be one winner of the race, there is a conflict.
Outside of the race, the two girls could be best friends. In fact, after the race is over, they may go out for ice cream and one is congratulating the other on winning. The antagonist and protagonist. All that really matters is that the protagonist has a goal, and the antagonist, for whatever reason, is trying to stop the protagonist from achieving that goal.
We usually write the stories as the antagonist is has a much more evil, or at least of something against the protagonist for a bad reason, but not always. We can have really crazy stories going on where we don’t actually want the protagonist to win.
Suppose the protagonist is a space alien and the space alien has as a goal to wipe out the earth, wants to blow up the earth. We have a protagonist who has a goal. The space alien wants to come and destroy the earth
We have an antagonist, and the antagonist is someone who wants to stop the space alien. The antagonist is an astronaut, someone who wants to take their spaceship and stop the space alien from destroying the earth. We’re rooting for the antagonist.
We can write the story any way that we want. All that really matters for the terms we’re using is that the protagonist has the goal. That’s who we’re looking for in the story to try to achieve a goal.
Say we write a story about Legacy Enrichment and in the story we have the protagonist as a thief. The thief wants to steal everybody’s lunches. We can write this really funny story about every time the thief, who’s goal is stealing the lunches, something goes wrong. The lunches get moved. The thief can’t find the lunches, he gets caught, and then he must make up some excuses to why he’s in there with all the lunches instead of being in class. That could be a very funny story and a lot of stories are written just that way.
You can create funny stories by aving someone as the protagonist who is a clutz or can’t get anything done, or something’s always wrong, the plans always fail. Eventually the protagonist gets caught and sent to jail. It’s one of those times where it’s a sad story ending ending for the protagonist, but we’re actually happy because we won our lunches.
I know I use food as an example quite a bit. When you’re writing your story, the most important thing that you can do is make your characters interesting. You want your protagonist and your antagonist to be interesting characters. If they’re not interesting, they’re boring.
Let’s say we have a rich boy and he’s very handsome and everybody loves him.
Ah.
That sounds like such a boring story. Who cares? Not only is the story boring, but it’s so superficial and we don’t all write superficial. We want to write stories about people we care about. Stories about someone who is rich and good looking and popular and all that aren’t just uninteresting, but all of those traits are so very superficial. That’s not an interesting character unless we give the character something difficult to overcome.
Let’s modify our hero protagonist to make him more interesting. Let’s take that rich boy who’s very handsome, who everybody loves, and a star on the football team as our protagonist. After football practice one day, a thunderstorm comes up out of nowhere. As the football players are trying to get back off the practice field and back in to the locker room, lightning hits the boy. And he is paralyzed for the rest of his life. He cannot walk. His life is completely changed. He had his whole life set up and he had all these plans and dreams and all of that stopped because he’s never going to play football again.
Now he’s an interesting character. It doesn’t matter that he’s rich. It doesn’t matter if he’s popular. His dreams have now been shattered, and he’s got to make adjustments. He has to change now. He’s an interesting character.
By the way, I didn’t just pick that example out of nowhere. That is a true story of someone that I knew in high school. And he was an interesting person to be around. He was more interesting after being hit by lightning than he was before. Reality was mimicking fiction.
To make our stories interesting, make our characters interesting. One of the ways that you can do it is give your characters some flaws. Just make them something that goes wrong. It’s like Superman. Oh, and Superman’s like, super. I mean, everything about him is super, except he has kryptonite. The writers realized he’d be pretty boring if all if he didn’t have anything that would stop him. So they invented kryptonite. Now whenever kryptonite is around, he becomes so weak he can’t do anything. So now Superman becomes an interesting character. He’s not so interesting in being Superman as he is in the fact that kryptonite can cripple him, can stop him from doing everything. He is an interesting character.
Let’s look at Agatha Christie, who wrote detective stories. She is the most famous fiction writer there is. She has sold more books than anybody else, and it’s not even close. She has sold over 2 billion copies of her book all over the world. One of her detectives is named Poirot. Now, Poirot is really smart. He makes all kinds of deductions and he figures out things. The stories would be somewhat interesting just based on how he figures out who done it. For the stories to be really interesting, though, he needs to be much more interesting himself; he needs some flaws.
What Agatha Christie did was to make him very conceited. He’s always looking for people to acknowledge him. He’s always telling people how smart he is. Then she made him be very proper in the way that he dresses. In fact, he annoys people because everything about his appearance has to be perfect. His mustache has to be just perfect. What he wears has to be perfect. He doesn’t really ever get anything dirty. Now he now has some significant flaws about him. As great of a detective as he is, he still drives everyone crazy. There are a lot of great problem-solving detectives out there, but Poirot has stood the test of time because he has flaws, he’s not perfect, and he’s therefore interesting.
The children in Narnia, if you’ve read CS Lewis’ Narnia tales, all come in with problems. They’re not perfect. Each one has different flaws within them. Those flaws have to be changed for them to succeed. They have to overcome those flaws before they can become kings and Queens in Narnia.
In the Princess Diaries movies, we see the same approach of adding flaws to make the character more interesting. Mia is the protagonist of the movies and she is a Princess. She’s supposed to be this perfect, elegant, regal Princess, but in fact, she’s really clumsy. She is afraid to speak in front of people. She has all sorts of things about her that are definitely not Princess traits. That’s what makes her an interesting character.
We can see interesting characters in Bilbo and Frodo in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. They’re not dashing heroes. They’re hobbits; they’re little. They have big furry feet. All they want to do is stay at home and tend their gardens. They’re not the ones to go out to do the superhero quest. They would never want to do that. And yet that’s where they’re put into place. That’s the key; they are the ones that are chosen to defeat the Dragon, to defeat Sauron and the ring. It’s the contrast between what we expect from them knowing and looking at them and who they are inside. The stories are interesting because the characters are extremely interesting. We’re interested in them because when you look at them, you see them in one way, but when you get to know them, you see them in an entirely different way.
To make your stories more interesting, concentrate on your characters. Don’t make them perfect. Make them have flaws, even really big flaws. The bigger the flaw, the harder it is for them to overcome their conflict and achieve the goal. Your stories are going to be a lot better if you can take your characters, especially your protagonist and your antagonist, and make them complex. Make your characters interesting, make them give them some flaws, some things that they have to overcome, some things that that you don’t even have to, like the aspects of them.
Consider making them kind of unlikable in some ways. That gets us interested because in life. People aren’t perfect. We know that we know people aren’t perfect. We look at them and we think they look perfect. But and we get down to it, you know, there’s no perfect people out there. Fiction should be like that. We want to have people that are interesting and who are more realistic. They’re more flawed, they’re not as perfect as they may outwardly seem. They may have some great attributes, but they’re going have some things that aren’t so great about. Put that into your story and your readers are going to love it. They’re going to be much more interested in finding out what happens. How do they overcome this? How are they going to work through their own flaws, their own inabilities, their own problems? That’s the one of the ways that you can really make your story stand out.
I encourage you to think through your protagonist and your antagonist. You could even consider all your characters, but think through at least those two. Give them some personality. Give them some realistic things. Make them more interesting and your story will be much more engaging for your readers.