Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "main-characters"

I enjoy character-based stories and the sort of active and personable characters involved in those. They tend to drive the plot with their desires, aspirations, and dreams - and even when they don't, even when they're bound to the winds of fate, they're sufficiently three-dimensional and developed, with feelings and relationships and woes, for you to feel for them and hope things'll get better for them.

So when I found myself writing a story with a main character that had none of these traits, a blank slate simply content to go along where the plot told her to go, with no friends or personal connections whatsoever... my first instinct was to of course correct all this. I wanted to flesh her out, give her some backstory and people to care for. But this instinct passed quickly, as I got another idea: what if I left her a blank slate? What if I didn't develop her at all?

It felt like a weird thing to do, but the more I thought about it, the more fun I had with it. In a world - by a writer - full of fleshed-out characters, her blandness could actually be a characteristic in itself. It's not like such stories hadn't been written before. More to the point, it would give me practice.

Of course then I would have to make sure the setting - the world around her - was interesting enough to maintain the reader's attention, and I might also need to think about the plot more than I usually do. I can think of two famous examples with relatively underdeveloped main characters - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Alice in Wonderland - and both of them made sure their worlds were weird. I can't match them, for sure, but I can give it an honest try.