I just finished John Gardner's THE ART OF FICTION, and I discovered one of the problems with my story telling---my main character wasn't proactive, he was a victim. Let me quote from Gardner:

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No fiction can have real interest if the central character is not an agent struggling for his or her own goals but a victim, subject to the will of others. (Failure to recognize that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners.)

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Gardner states emphatically that "victim fiction" never works because, as the quote indicates--and as Gardner says elsewhere--the essence of fiction, the essence of plot, is that a person has a goal that he or she attains or looses.

But as I was reading Gardner, I couldn't help but thinking about ENDER'S GAME. That novel--at least on the surface--seems to be "victim fiction." Ender is the helpless victim whose life--indeed, whose very existence--is determined by those around him. On the other end of the spectrum is Stephen King's IT--all of the children, once they realize they are being terrorized by this monster, take an active position to stop the creature and save the town of Dairy. After reading Gardner, I understand why I liked IT, but I'm not sure why I liked ENDER'S GAME. On some level, Ender has to be an actor in the story and not merely a victim. And his proactivity can't be confined to two or three scenes--it has to be something that permeates the whole novel.

I think this is an important question because, if Ender is an actor and not merely a victim, it means that a character's proactivity can be very, very subtle.

And I'd love to get Kathleen's acumen on this if she has the time!

Aristotle also talks about how the protagonist must be the agent of the change.

My opinion is that the protagonist should be the agent of change because the reader, and people for that matter, must come to believe that their lives have purpose. That they are doing something important and unique, not just a lump of flesh moved about by social mechinations.

So your character's life has to matter. Your character has to do something, good or ill, that affects the shape of history: stand up for an ideal, strike out against injustice, or help out another. Or at least be concerned with and have knowledge of these virtues. You don't have to save the world or anything, most worthy lives happen on a small scale.

If the protagonist is not the agent of change, the reader will care about the Life and trials of the person in the story no more than I care about today's obituaries.

This is what made waiting for Godot excruciating hard and depressing to watch, and its genius. This is also what made The Life of David Gale the most underappreciated movie of 2003.

TTFN & lol

But my new insight has given me something else--not only must the character change (I already knew that) but the character must be a mover in the story. As Gardner says, he must be an actor and not merely acted upon.

That's my question about ENDER'S GAME. On the surface level, it certainly seems that Ender is merely acted upon. Perhaps Cosmi's right: perhaps the essence of Ender's proactivity is his desire to define himself, and the ultimate tragedy in that story is that he can't--at least not until the very end of the story when the buggers motivation is revealed and he chooses to become the Speaker for the Dead, when he chooses to save his soul.

Hmm . . . comments?

When it comes to obstacles, they can be personal or world shaking obstacles depending on the focus of your story.

I certainly had that problem with my novel. I realized that my main character was being constantly manipulated by other characters without putting up nearly enough fight, or being given the things she wanted too easily. The painful result was that I was bored with what the story was doing, and I was bored with her. Neither the writer or the reader in me was happy.

There are so many questions I can think of in relation to the subject of a main character being a victim or a proactive master of his/her own fate.

As I understand it, the proactive character has his/her own goals which he/she actively struggles or works to attain.

Is a character proactive if his/her only goal -for the moment- is simply to survive the situation he/she has been placed in? Even if survival means temporarily giving in to the will of another person/persons?

Is a character only allowed one goal per story or can there be many? Can a character abandon a goal that is obviously unattainable?

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The price the struggle has extracted from the character is going to create the value of the outcome.

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Great insight, GZ. I just started reading a book called UNDERSTANDING FICTION by Brooks and Warren (its a collection of short stories followed by an interpretation/discussion highlighting what makes the story work and what doesn't -- very insightful), and they define plot as character in action, and the unity of the plot isn't the unity of event-A with event-B, but character motivation between these events. Thus, the unity of a story is what the character does and why, and how those choices effect the rest of the story. You're right, if Ender doesn't exert his own individuality in the face of determinism--if he doesn't push back--then he wouldn't become the Speaker for the Dead. Rather, once he learns that he has unwittingly annihilated the buggers, what would he become if he hadn't been seeking his own identity from the beginning?

This leads idea reminds me of Ben Bova's emotion vs. emotion -- each character must have an inner conflict that impacts the story. For Ender, it was self-identity vs. subordination to the group (or something like that. As far as I can remember, Ender wanted both -- he wanted to be himself and he wanted to be accepted by everyone else. But he couldn't have both.

This thought leads me to another one -- not directly related to the topic at hand, but who cares? -- and that's the three levels of conflict needed for a (genera) story to work:

1. The Cosmic Conflict -- i.e., the Earth vs. the Buggers.
2. The Inter-personal Conflict -- i.e., Ender vs. Peter, Ender vs. his classmates, Ender vs. the authorities.
3. The Intra-personal Conflict -- i.e., does Ender assert his own identity or does he submit himself to the group?

And come to think of it, it's from the "intra-personal conflict" that the proactivity of the character arises. If Ender doesn't want to be himself, why would he push Peter's buttons or push his classmates? And what's most important is that the intra-personal as well as the inter-personal conflicts tie in and affect the outcome of the cosmic conflict.

Okay, I'm really off subject . . . but thanks for letting me think out loud.

*chuckles* It's just showcasing the virtue of showing up. "What a great story, I liked it when the character showed up. And in the fight scene, when he sat in the corner, or how about when they went in for the rescue and the hero was an apathetic look out. That was great! My hero."

http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/lessons/lesson08.shtml

My interpretation:

I believe the gist of the lesson is that the reader cares for Ender more than Ender cares for himself. The reader can think of Ender as a victim, but Ender doesn't think of himself as a victim. He doesn't spend the story whining about his difficult life. Instead he spends the story performing the best he can in Battle School. This leads to "the maguffin" of the story: a goal that's very important to the character but not so important to the reader. As long as the hero is struggling to achieve his or her magiffin he or she is not a victim.

In the end of the novel version Ender does triumph over both the Buggers and the insensetive Human society that created and manipulated him. I believe it's a perfect example.

Balthasar, you summed up for me why I HATED Thomas Covenant. I hated the story, and I hated him as a character. (I did read the first three books, hoping to find I was glad in the end. I wasn't)

I kept waiting for him to stop whining and act. He never really did. And that is definitely why he didn't work for me as a character.

Now as far as "victim fiction" in general goes, I've found I've reached something of an impasse in my own writing. It's very difficult to empathize with my characters to such a degree where I want to see them achieve what they want as much as they want to achieve it. It reminds me of soemthing I read by OSC in which he uses an example of writing from the POV of a homosexual. Since I'm not gay, how can I possibly write about a man being attracted to another man? I don't--I write about my being attracted to a beautiful woman but using different pronouns and slightly modified body parts. Isn't this the same as writing about a character's wants and desires and goals I don't necessarily think are good or valuable?

It's scary being a writer, because you have to tap into the deep, secret, and often dark part of you in order to develop convincing characters.

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It's scary being a writer, because you have to tap into the deep, secret, and often dark part of you in order to develop convincing characters.

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