On being personal
I have had a continuing problem writing. While I read a range of genres, I am most attracted to the protagonist being on an adventure with obstacles galore. For example, in no particular order: Clive Cussler, the Dirk Pitt novels; Andy McDermott, the Nina Wilde series; Dale Brown, including the Patrick McLanahan series beginning with The Flight of the Old Dog; Lincoln Child (solo and with his writing partner Douglas Preston; Matthew Reilly, the Shane Scofield series; and James Rollins (a slew of action/adventure novels, including the Sigma Force series).Yes, I know I’m leaving out a slew of novelists from Tom Clancy to Robert Louis Stevenson. I read every adventure story in both the children’s and adult’s section in my small town’s library, including Heinlein, Clarke, Norton, Ellison, Clement, Hammett, Gardner, Doyle, Christie, and Chandler. As a child, I loved the Tom Swift jr. series and even wrote an homage in my Pitch Black story.
But, despite writing adventures from time travel to paranormal, something was clearly missing from my unpublished stories. Apparently, it’s the reader’s emotional connection to the protagonists. Sure, my characters are trapped in the 14th century or are ghosts trying to avoid a final soul-ending death, but other than the thriller aspect itself, how can a reader identify with the protagonists?
I concocted environments as realistic and rich as I could—the methodology of traveling though time; the rules of being a ghost—and I gave my characters deep backstories—unrequited love; lost opportunities—but I suspect my characters were too superficial (or maybe too two-dimensional), lacking a direct connection to the readers.
I followed the basic rules, like avoiding data dumps, but even my writer groups missed the lack of emotional connections. For example, why is my time traveling protagonist Keith Emmons so fixated on his colleague and formal paramour? Why has he been in love with his female colleague for half his life? What emotional hold does she have on him?
Why is my already-dead protagonist, Margaret McAuley, so involved with determining how another ghostly character has died? If she understands that dying as a ghost means a permanent end to the (dead) person’s soul, why is willing to end one character’s existence to save the (ghostly) life of another?I’m sure the reason for caring about fictional characters is the reason for my wandering Barnes & Noble (or Amazon) looking for the next novel about Jim Chee or Gray Pierce. As unlikely as it might seem, I remain invested not only with Tom Swift (and his son) as well as Mesklinite Barlennan sailing on Mesklin’s methane sea.
Literary agent Donald Maass wrote about The Emotional Craft of Fiction in 2016. Becca Puglisi wrote about the Connection between Character Emotion and Reader Empathy in a 2019 article on the livewritethrive.com blog. Mary Balogh wrote about The Emotional Bond Between Character and Reader in her blog (marybalogh.com) shortly afterward, and Dr. Niveditha Preeth wrote a Medium.com article entitled The Intimate Relationship between Reader and Characters in 2024. I could go on, but you can Google the emotional connection between a protagonist and reader for yourself.
How I adapted that information to my own writing in the next post.
