Who's the protagonist?

The situation: I have a novel in which there is no perfectly clear-cut, obvious Main Character. There are a few (3) characters who are all equally important in the story. There's no problem with multiple viewpoints or whatnot; that is kept to an even mix, and no reader (even the psycho one who insisted that one secondary character was actually the protagonist because 'he followed orders and didn't rock the boat') ever said that they had difficulty keeping track of who was the POV for a given scene.

Loyal Reader made a passing suggestion (I don't know how serious he was) last week about trying to rewrite this novel in first person. I don't think it would work. For one thing, there's the matter of distance actually strengthening emotional impact sometimes, the old advice that 'Your reader won't cry if your character does it for them' - and I want to do more than make the reader cry, I want to make him/her bleed, metaphorically. Like Hannah Stonewell said, 'I want to write the kind of story that rips the reader's heart from their chest and flings it sunward, then catches it and hands it back to them, burning...' For another thing (and this is the drawback that LR saw immediately), writing the story in first person would require narrowing the POV characters to just one.

The usual criteria (who hurts the most/has the most at stake, who has the most motivation - and ability - to act, etc.) don't work, because they apply pretty much equally to all three major characters. The character without whom the story could not happen is not, for several chapters, in a position to influence events. The character who has the most ability to influence events also knows too much about what's really going on, and making him the single MC would ruin the suspense. And as for 'who hurts the most/has the most at stake'... That would depend on your definition. One character wouldn't die, but he would lose just about everything he holds dear. Another character would die - and die horribly - if things went wrong.

I'm not sure I'll try writing the story in first person, but I would like to have an answer if I'm ever asked who is the single main character. Any suggestions on how to figure that out?

 

Well, yes, I'm aware that it is possible - and permissible - to have more than one POV character. However, I am sometimes asked how I would narrow it down if I had to pick just one, and I don't know how to do that in this instance.

 

Yes. I have a few such novels in my collection. (The first that comes to mind is The Crystal Gryphon, by Andre Norton.) HOWEVER, that is again not what I'm asking with my original post.

IF I am to narrow down the number of "protagonists" in my novel to just one, HOW would I determine which of my three current major characters that should be?

(I'm sorry if the question was unclear before. I'm not offering this as an excuse, mind you, but I do have autism, and all the experts say that we're notoriously incapable of communicating with words.)

 

- Some publishers and agents want, in the synopsis paragraph of a query letter, that there be only one main character listed.

- When pitching a novel (that dreaded situation where the author has only about 30 seconds to describe the whole story), the author needs to be able to say 'the story is about THIS person.' Agents and publishers tend not to trust an author who cannot narrow it down, seeing (wrongly or not) the lack of such focus as amateurish.

To clarify, no, it's not Loyal Reader who's telling me to pare the number down. He likes the novel the way it is. It was simply his musings about attempting to tell the story in first person that made me think of this other issue, that of trying to determine which of my major characters would be THE main character, if I had to pick just one.

 

Those 'form submissions' are annoying - we all know that - but they are one of the (myriad) hoops that a writer is required to jump through in order to make it past the initial weeding-out stage before their work is even looked at by an agent or publisher.

I like my 'ensemble cast' (I like your use of screen/stage metaphor - I use that myself a lot, referring to very minor characters as 'walk-ons,' for example), and I'm not going to get rid of any characters just so I can simplify ('nerf'/flatten/make bland) the story. I like complexity, and I need multiple viewpoints to get that with the story I'm telling. My own inclination, if I were to pick an MC 'at random,' would be to go with the one who is important to the events in the story primarily as a catalyst, the one without whom the story would not happen... But that would give the wrong impression, and lead to disappointed expectations once the reader sees that, no, Jason Grey isn't IN a lot of scenes, and he's NOT the character with the most ability to control events...

I don't know. Maybe this is another case where I'm overthinking the problem. It's just that I've had so many problems with this story, so many beta readers (well, total strangers on peer-review sites) tell me that I'm 'doing it wrong' because they don't agree with me on who the important characters are. (Isn't this supposed to be one of those rare 'when in doubt, the author knows best' situations?)

I do thank you for the encouragement not to change my work because of someone else's expectations. That helps.

 

Good questions, Jared. They break down the usual ways of choosing MC into something that makes more sense to me - very helpful. If you had to choose one of those questions to be the most important for determining main character, which would it be? (My answers are not the same for all four.)

 

Well, that narrows the choice down to just two, at least. Now I'm going to have to do some serious thinking. Thanks for the advice.