Warning: Make This Mistake and Readers Will Hate Your “Good” Protagonist

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http://www.kmweiland.com

Historical and speculative novelist K.M. Weiland offers tips and essays about the writing life to help other writers understand the ins and outs of the craft and the psychology behind the inspiration.
This week’s video offers tips and an example to help you avoid the pitfall of alienating readers from your protagonist by taking it for granted they’ll always think he’s in the right.

Video Transcript:
We’re going to start off today with some dialogue, but pretend it’s not just dialogue. Put yourself in the shoes—or the mouth, as it may be—of the first speaker, who says, “I don’t like strangers sneaking around my house and sticking their noses where they don’t belong.” To which, the second speaker replies, “Then you have something to hide!” To which that first speaker—you—replies again, “That’s none of your business!”

Now, this conversation is straight out of the very old whodunit TV show Mr. and Mrs. North, about a nosy housewife and her mystery-writer husband who always end up stumbling over murders. This was my first viewing of this show, and I had to laugh at the above dialogue because it had exactly the opposite effect it was supposed to. Naturally, it’s the heroic, white-knight hero Mr. North who insists that Speaker #1 has something to hide—and therefore that Mr. North and his wife have every right to be snooping around in this man’s house uninvited.

The problem is that the show’s writers wrote this dialogue on the presupposition that the audience will automatically accept that the protagonists are in the right and the obviously creepy other guy is in the wrong. But this is never something we as authors should take for granted. If you consider the situation objectively, it’s kinda hard to disagree with the other guy’s insistence that the nosy Norths have no business snooping around his house uninvited. Never let yourself fall into the trap of believing readers will give your protagonist a hall pass just because he is your lovable, righteous protagonist. There are no pass-go-and-collect-two-hundred-dollars cards in fiction. Just as in real life, your protagonist has to prove himself to your readers every step of the way—or they’ll end up disdaining him far more than they will the antagonist.