Post
by Sommer Leigh » May 1st, 2012, 5:49 pm
I have two protagonists in my current WIP - although technically one is a "hero" type and one is a "villain" type, their stories are completely entrenched in each other's. They both have two completely different motivations and conflicts, different voices, different obstacles to face, even if most of the book they are facing down the same antagonistic forces, regardless of their reasons.
I've found that when I read and writing multiple main characters, one usually takes a more central position. I think part of it happens because the author prefers one over the other, or maybe the story is just better told from one than the other. Often, though, it's becuase one is fleshed out better than the other, and the dual protagonists are more of a smokescreen for allowing the author to show certain aspects of the story through another character's eyes, not actually so they can develop a second character fully. This is a problem that you should be aware of going in. The characters should split the screen time 50/50, or very close to, and they need a completely realized character development of their own.
I have found that in the first quarter of my WIP, one of the characters has a very slight word count advantage on the other. Not by a lot, but it just happened that a series of events allowed her to have two back to back chapters when I'd been pretty good about every other one. In the middle, so far, they've been dead even for screen time. I think he might overtake her in screen time very slightly in the second half of the middle section, but the difference will be negligible.
This is just how I set it up. You can have one protagonist for one section of the story, another protag for the next, and so on. Just keep in mind the pitfalls. 1) The author almost ALWAYS shows a preference for one protag or another. Accept this and figure out which one you love more, then make sure you fully realize the other one, even if it's a little harder for you. 2) The readers will almost ALWAYS have a preference for one protag or another. You have no control over this. Which is why you need to make sure both of them are incredibly well developed and they both have motivations and flaws and goals and missteps. Keep this in mind, too, that the people who love one protag and don't much care for the other are going to grow quickly bored through long sections with a protag they aren't interested in. It's a potential pitfall and the only way to minimize this is to always think about it when you're structuring your story. 3) Nothing annoys readers more than to discover one of the protags is really only there to give us a play-by-play of what the other protag is doing. This crops up from time to time where there's a very strong romance subplot, and the dual protags are there to allow us to see inside the mind of the lover of the real hero. These are incredibly boring to read.
The book The Mysts of Avelon does this where there are different sections narrated by different hero POVs. While I enjoyed the book, I did get sort of anxious about getting back to the stories of people I liked better. I found myself skimming the parts I was less interested in. And I hated the way The Wheel of Time series was structured. Horror. As a reader, I hate being forced to read about people I'm not interested in just so I can get back to the hero I love to read about. That series is particularly weird because there are whole sections and whole heroes whose stories have nothing to do with what is going on with another hero's section of the book. It's like smooshing seven books in one when you kind of only wanted to read one or two of the seven.
Ok Here is my ? 
