The bones · 1 of 10
Protagonist
The master question
Would my audience want to be this person for the length of the story?
There’s a scene at the very beginning of Killing Eve that can teach you everything you need to know about writing great protagonists. A glamorous woman sits in a café, watching a little girl work her way through an ice-cream sundae. She smiles at the girl. The girl smiles back. What a nice lady, we think. Then the woman stands, walks over, and calmly tips the ice cream into the child’s lap.
We should hate her instantly. Instead, something strange happens. We lean in.
Thirty seconds ago Villanelle was a stranger, and now we’d follow her anywhere.
Every story that works belongs to somebody, and it belongs to the person the audience cares about most. Simple enough. But the word ‘care’ is a trap, because almost everyone translates it to ‘like’. Make them nice, we assume. Give them good manners and a rescue dog. But niceness is a lethal trait in a protagonist. Nice characters have nothing wrong with them, nothing to offend us, and so nothing to hold our attention either.
The confusion comes from treating two very different words as the same thing.
Sympathy
Feeling sorry for someone. It’s warm, it’s decent, and it keeps you exactly where you are: on the outside, observing.
Empathy
Something else entirely. It’s deeper, more invasive, and it transports you from the outside in.
Empathy is being them.
The neuroscientist Christian Keysers has shown that watching someone take a punch activates the same regions of the brain as taking the punch yourself. When the laser creeps up the table towards James Bond, his heart races, and so does ours. Stories put protagonist and audience, quite literally, on the same wavelength.
Which is why the question underneath every decision you make about your protagonist isn’t what everyone assumes. If your audience is going to live inside this character, wear their skin, feel their fear…
That’s what a protagonist does when it’s working. They don’t just hold your attention for two hours. They become a part of who you are.
Why are so many fictional detectives mavericks who ignore their bosses, break the rules and go behind everyone’s backs? Our favourite characters embody what we secretly want for ourselves. The good, the bad, and the ugly too.
Tap each one for the want underneath
When Charlie Chaplin became the most famous person on earth, it wasn’t because audiences liked him. It was because, for millions of poor and spat-upon people at the bottom of a brutal new century, he was them: their poverty, their resilience, their dignity, projected on the big screen, and finally winning.
I am you. You are me. And together, we can defeat what’s standing in our way.
For your brand
In brand storytelling the protagonist can’t simply appeal to your customer. At some level, the protagonist has to be your customer: an idealised version of them, fighting the exact enemies they believe are standing in their way.
The war reporter Sebastian Junger claims a tribe in peril needs their leader to have two things: a cause bigger than themselves, and a willingness to suffer the same consequences as everyone else. If you are the protagonist of your brand, your audience isn’t just weighing your message. They’re auditioning you as their avatar. They need to see you share their dreams, and they need to watch you fight for them with real skin in the game.
What audiences are looking for, in the end, is surprisingly consistent.
A guide
to a better future.
A custodian
of the values they’re scared of losing.
A crusader
for a new way of life that keeps the best bits of the old.
Give them a protagonist like that, someone they’d genuinely choose to be, and they’ll follow you anywhere.
Before you write a single line, ask
Would my audience want to be this person for the length of the story?
The goal is to give your protagonist as many of these traits as possible.
The checklist
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