Fiction Writers' er!

ino"o#$
In fiction writing, the meaning of the terms that creative writing
coaches use often gets blurred. And sometimes, being human, we
just misspeak. We sometimes say hero when we mean protagonist.
And to further com-pound this babble, different experts often
define the terms differently because there is no widespread
agreement on what structural literary terms mean. ne book you
read may define viewpoint, say, as !where the camera is! and
another as !the attitude of the character! "it#s both, actu-ally$. What
I call a premise, others call theme or central idea or control-ling
emotion. What I call germinal idea, others call premise. It#s no
wonder students of the craft get confused.
%o before we begin plotting, it#s best that we get the terms
straight so that you and I are in synch.
&et#s start with the terms hero and protagonist and villain and
antago-nist.
A hew is a character, any character, who self-sacrifices for
others. It is a moral term. 'ut not every character who acts
heroically is the hero. (he hero of a story is a hero and the central
character. In The Adventures of Robin Hood, the characters of
&ittle )ohn, *riar (uck, Will %carlett, +aid +arian, and a host of
+erry +en all act heroically from time to time, but ,obin -ood is
the central character, so we call him the hero.
Villain is also a moral term. It refers to a character who takes
villainous actions. that is, he has a baseness of mind or character/
-e#s vicious, treacherous, evil. Any character who takes villainous
actions is a villain, but not the villain. The villain is the chief
villain.
(he term protagonist is not a moral term. it#s a literary structural
term and refers to a character who !takes the lead in a cause or
action.! 0sually, the hero is the protagonist of your story. 'ut you
could have, as an example, a villain as the protagonist in a story.
+acbeth, in %hakespeare#s Macbeth "play 1232, film 1456$, is a
villain and the pro-tagonist.
kay7 -ere#s a short recap/
A hero is any character who is self-sacrificing for others. The
hero is the chief hero, usually the central character in the book or
film.
A villain is any character who acts villainously. The villain is the
chief villain, who opposes the hero.
A protagonist is any character who takes the lead in a cause or
action. The protagonist is the central character of a story, be he a
hero or a villain.
An antagonist is any character who opposes a protagonist.
pivotal characters. A pivotal character is one who at any given
time in the story is !pushing the action.! 8arious characters may be
pivotal in a story at different times
9
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The Gripping
The Seven Pillars of a Damn Good Thriller
(o create a damn good thriller, construct it on the following seven
pil-lars. &eave any one out and you may fail. %o beware.
1. HIGH STAKES. In your thriller, there should be lives at stake,
sometimes even all of humanity. ccasionally, the stakes may be
other than life or death/ %anity or the fate of an immortal soul are
high stakes in-deed, as an example.
:. UNITY O OPPOSITES. When you have a unity of
opposites, the hero cannot run away from the challenge. (he
hero is !in the cauldron,! as dramatists call it. this is the term I
used for this dramatic principle in How to Write a amn !ood
"ovel. Egri, in The Art of Dramatic Writing, called it the unit#
of opposites. Without it, the audience thinks, Why doesn#t the
hero just get the hell out of there7 When you have it, the
audience understands that the heroes are bound to keep up the
fight by some strong motive;say, loyalty, patriotism, love, duty
;or, as in the case of ,obin -ood and other cultural heroes,
they yield to the heroic impulse for self-sacrifice. (hink of the
unity of opposites as the glue that keeps the hero stuck in the
plot.
!. SEE"ING#Y I"POSSI$#E ODDS. (he situation of the
story should be such that it will seem impossible for the heroes
to defeat the villains, even though they almost always do.
4. MORAL STRUGGLE. <our thriller should embody the
moral nature of the struggle the audience will witness. In other
words, there#s right and wrong in the thriller world, and your hero
is on the side of right. (he heroes will be locked in a desperate life-
and-death struggle with manifest evil. (his evil includes natural
evils, such as virus, fires, volcanoes, earth=uakes, floods, and so
on.
%. TI&KING &#O&K. <ou should create some kind of deadline
that the he-roes must beat to defeat the villains. (his gives your
thriller urgency, and a sense of urgency is a very good thing/ It
keeps the reader turn-ing pages or the audience cemented to their
seats. >et the ticking clock started as soon as you can.
'. "ENA&E. ?ot only should you have high stakes, but the
heroes and other sympathetic characters should be in danger
throughout much of the story.
(. TH)I##E)*TYPE &HA)A&TE)S. Apart from being
determined and larger-than-life theatrical characters that you#d
find in any damn good dramatic work, thriller characters, both
heroes and villains, must be clever and resourceful. @itting a
clever and resourceful villain against a clever and resourceful
hero is at the heart of a damn good thriller.