The Five C’s Of Creating A Likeable Protagonist
Posted on | March 30, 2011 | 4 Comments
Think of your favorite book.
Chances are one of the reasons you love it so much is that the main character (s) are people you like and want to spend time with. There are exceptions to this rule, I’d still read a book starring Darth Vader even though I wouldn’t want to have coffee with him*, but for the most part the story’s we love come parceled with characters we love.
So how do you make it work for you?
Behold, the five C’s of likeable characters:
Courageous:
We all admire great courage, whether it’s standing up to a bully, leaping in front of a train to save someone or intervening in a mugging, seeing someone defying their own fear is always inspiring.
Fear is the key word, no one cares about a character confronting epic dangers if that character is utterly invincible and knows they can’t fail.
If your protagonist is just an ordinary person, then courage might just mean refusing to be belittled by someone they know…for a special ops soldier the conditions under which they show true courage will be different (although it wouldn’t necessarily have to be combat).
Compassionate:
The vast majority of us appreciate seeing compassion or kindness of some kind in a main character. If there is a cat to be saved, we want the hero to save the cat. While it’s not a trait of all main characters (especially true anti heroes) a touch of compassion can swing a reader’s opinion on a character to the positive even if they’re not (yet) showing any of the other things I mention here.
Of course you can have the compassion come back and bite that character, and that can add to the conflict in your story (more conflict = good) as your character struggles between their natural instinct towards compassion vs the hard lessons they’ve had to learn.
Competent:
Despite the fact that sometime we resent people who are awesome at the things we want to be awesome at, there is always some admiration for people who are stunningly good at what they do.
Sherlock Holmes is a good example of a character who is often extremely unlikable, he’s rude, uncaring and a raging drug addict but he’s saved by the fact that he is just so damn good at deduction.
Also look at Batman, if you boil down his character you get a near psychopathic billionaire who dresses up in tights to battle criminals because of childhood trauma…but that doesn’t matter because he’s freaking Batman and he’s so good at…everything…we can’t help but admire him.
Just be careful to balance the character out, the awesome they are the more problems/hang ups/powerful enemies they need to have to oppose them.
Comical:
If your character can make your readers laugh, they’re already halfway to loving them. I don’t necessarily mean the character just tells jokes in the traditional sense, although that can be true too, anything form of humor can work.
This is particularly useful for characters who are otherwise a little shady, incompetent, or selfish, if the humor is there we’ll stick with the character while they grow into the other traits.
Conflict:
Your character has to fighting for something. It can be a literal fight for their lives or just a fight with an overbearing school teacher and anything in between. It can even be a fight with their own thoughts and feelings; internal conflict has provided some of the most memorable works of fiction the world has ever seen.
We grow through hardship, and it goes double for fictional characters. The more they’re put through, the more the readers will empathize with the character. Even though no reader has ever had to battle a demon from another reality* we’ve all been terrified of things that are out of our control or beyond our understanding and thus when the hero is desperately trying to pull of the impossible we empathize with the feelings they’re having.
Conclusion (once you start writing things beginning with C it’s hard to stop)
You don’t need to have all of these traits, but try to include at least one in your character to begin with and allow them to gain more of them as the story goes on (or, if your story need to take a darker turn; have them lose one).
In fact that may be the most important C thing of all: CHANGE.
I want your characters to change of the course of your novel, I want them to learn from their mistakes and their hardships and be affected by whatever it is they have to go through.
What do you think makes a character likeable? Let me know in the comments.
* I could be wrong about this.
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4 Responses to “The Five C’s Of Creating A Likeable Protagonist”
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March 31st, 2011 @ 10:25 am
Great post! Thanks.
March 31st, 2011 @ 12:52 pm
I agree with everything you say here, but let me add two comments.
First,though it’s not essential, I think many great protagonists in children’s literature are also underdogs. I’m thinking of characters like Harry Potter or Frodo Baggins, both of whom seem much weaker than their antagonists.
Also, some protagonists don’t change but succeed by staying true to themselves despite temptation. Frodo gives up the ring. Harry is self-sacrificing all through the series.
March 31st, 2011 @ 1:47 pm
Good points, although in the end Gollum bit off Frodo’s finger to get the ring because Frodo had turned… and then Gollum fell into the fires of Mount Doom.
April 1st, 2011 @ 5:33 am
Excellent list. To stick with the “C” theme, I would add comely. But that maybe sounds a little too sexual. Even a single trait of physical attractiveness never hurts.