{"id":2094,"date":"2011-04-10T22:07:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-11T02:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=2094"},"modified":"2011-04-10T22:10:16","modified_gmt":"2011-04-11T02:10:16","slug":"the-protag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=2094","title":{"rendered":"the protag"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I've described recently, I'm following some blogs by writers on wordpress.com, and some of them are reading books or taking courses about How to Write a Novel. I took writing courses when I was in college but nothing since, and I've never read a book about the subject, so it came a somewhat of a surprise to me that a lot of the instructions seem to revolve around what the \"protagonist\" is supposed to be doing and experiencing.<\/p>\n

I don't think I've ever written anything that had a \"protagonist.\"<\/p>\n

Who is the protagonist in A Sane Woman<\/I><\/A>? In the first part, it seems to be Sam, and then in Chapter Three it switches to Nicky's point of view (though Sam is still there), and then there are Chapters Nine through Eleven, which take place twenty years earlier, and then after that the focus changes yet again.<\/p>\n

In U-town<\/I><\/A>, the focus moves between several characters. There isn't a \"main character\" as far as I can tell. The same is true of the new novel, though it is less sprawling than U-town<\/I>.<\/p>\n

And mystery stories, by definition, don't really have a protagonist because the detective character is at the center of a detective story, but in most cases the detective is an observer, not connected with the victims and suspects. I read somewhere that the central character in a story is the character who changes, and detective characters are not usually much changed by solving the mystery.<\/p>\n

Well, some of Pynchon's novels don't have clear protagonists either, and in fact he played with this expectation a few times, since Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop, and Zoyd Wheeler all seem to be at the center of their respective books, and all three are, to a greater or lesser extent, abandoned by their creator as he moves on to other, more interesting, things.<\/p>\n

Hitchcock played with this expectation, too, most famously in Psycho<\/I> but also in Family Plot<\/I>, as I talked about here<\/A>. Plus, there are also the moments in Chelsea Girls<\/I> when the camera wanders away from the characters, as they continue to talk, in order to examine the walls or the ceiling.<\/p>\n

And I remember that Monty Python had a sketch which portrayed the distress of the abandoned characters as they realized that the story was moving on without them.<\/p>\n

Oh, and there's another new post below this one, plus there's now an \"About\" page listed up top there.<\/p>\n

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As I’ve described recently, I’m following some blogs by writers on wordpress.com, and some of them are reading books or taking courses about How to Write a Novel. I took writing courses when I was in college but nothing since, and I’ve never read a book about the subject, so it came a somewhat of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2094"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2097,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2094\/revisions\/2097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}