Hold Out for a Hero

Nanowriter series, post #3

In a previous post in this series, I state that the best way to organize your writing idea into a plot for nanowriting is to consider it as a Quest. Your main character is out to obtain some treasure--- the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon--- or perhaps the love of a good man or the capture of the real killer.

Who should the main character of your Quest be? For easiest nanowriting, I'd suggest holding out for a Hero. By 'Hero' I don't mean that your Hero has to be a muscular warrior type like Conan the Barbarian or Hercules of the Legendary Journeys. You have to have just the right kind of Hero for the Quest at hand. Conan may be a tough guy, but Scarlett O'Hara has a much better skill set for winning the love of Ashley Wilkes.

What does your fictional Hero need? Strength, for one thing. It need not be physical strength if the Quest does not require it. Miss Jane Marple doesn't wrestle alligators as a hobby, but she has the right kind of strength--- inner strength--- for the Quest she is on.

Heroes can have varying levels of physical strength, but they must have enough for the Quest at hand. Imagine a sword-and-sorcery tale in which the Hero is a weakling
who must entirely rely on hired swordsmen and mages to fend off physical and magical attack. Such a Hero would not be strong enough. Imagine Scarlett O'Hara of Gone With The Wind as so physically fragile she most usually spends her day on a fainting couch in a darkened room. We might feel sorry for her, but would we follow her through the many pages of the novel to see if she what happened? No, because she would have been entirely passive.

Mental strength is also something a Hero needs. Imagine a large, muscle-bound swordsman who believed everything he was told--- even the things that the Villain's agents told him. Would he be a good Quest Hero? No--- by page 15 he'd be in the Villain's pocket, or dead.

Moral strength is something else your Hero will need in some degree. Imagine if Frodo in Lord of the Rings happily sent off all his loyal friends into deadly peril in order to protect his own precious life. Imagine if Scarlett O'Hara at the start of Gone with the Wind responded to the news of Ashley's engagement to Melanie by purchasing some arsenic-based rat poison. Would you have been willing to root for a character like that?

What about a character like Dexter Morgan in the Dexter series of novels? He is a serial killer. But the author makes it clear that he was condemned to be  some  kind of killer by his early childhood trauma, and the fact that Dexter only kills other serial killers gives him the minimum level of moral strength needed to be accepted as a fictional Hero. Therefore the reader doesn't have an uncomfortable moment visualizing Dexter killing their own spouse, parent or child.


A Hero must be strong, but not too strong. Imagine if Scarlett O'Hara was such a raving beauty that she had only to say the word and Ashley Wilkes would break it off with Melanie, and Rhett Butler would find he was indeed a marrying man after all. Every challenge Scarlett met with, as least the ones involving human males, would have been conquered far too easily.

A too-strong Hero kills a story as surely as a too-weak one does. In the Superman comics, they quickly saw they had to make their invulnerable Hero vulnerable sometimes, and so they invented kryptonite. A Hero should be just strong enough to complete the Quest, with great effort.\par
What about replacing the Hero with an anti-hero? That doesn't make much difference. An anti-hero is just a Hero made out of antimatter. If he touches a Hero the universe might explode, but other than that....

Seriously, an anti-hero is just name for a Hero that lacks a high level of moral strength. He must have a touch of moral strength--- he might be a hit man, but he can't spend his spare time robbing widows, taking the insulin from diabetics, and cutting the arms off babies. His Quest, likewise, ought not be wholly evil--- not in fiction for the mass audience, anyway. There is no real market for novels about the Quest of a death camp technician to find ways to kill innocents more efficiently.

For nanowriting, a more traditional hero is easier to pull off than one that dips too far into anti-hero territory. In fact, a good Hero is at least a wee bit larger than life, at least by the end of the Quest. Think Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings--- he has been transformed from a humble hobbit into something larger and grander by his experiences, so much so that he has to leave Middle Earth along with the elves.

Exercise: think of the main characters of three novels you have recently read and enjoyed. In what way does the main character have physical, mental and/or moral strength that might be seen as Hero-like? What weaknesses does he have that prevent his Quest from being all too easy?