Why You Need to Play Therapist to Your Protagonist

Digging Deeper into Backstory for a Stronger Draft

Do you have a therapist? I’m a big believer that everyone benefits from therapy. Five decades into life, I’m rather well therapized. Yet despite having sat down with countless therapists throughout the years, when the therapist asks me that very first question, generally some form of, “How are you doing?,” I often respond with a very unhelpful, “I’m fine.” 

Sometimes I even go into the session thinking I have absolutely nothing to talk about that day, that things are pretty status quo and maybe I should have even cancelled. But inevitably the therapist pushes me a little more. They prompt me to expand on my “fine.” They ask specific questions about the things they know are happening in my life. And the next thing you know, words are pouring out of me…worries I didn’t know I had, resentments I’d been carrying, hurts and sadnesses I was harboring—sometimes for years—but I’d never actually connected to what was happening in my present. 

Despite fully recognizing the benefits of therapy, in practice I’m kind of a hesitant therapy-goer. And if my therapist accepted my initial lame “oh, I’m pretty good” at face value, I’d never get anything out of therapy.

In story, you as the writer are an awful lot like my therapist. Your protagonist (or main character/MC) might show up to the page claiming to be “just fine” or “pretty good,” but it’s your job to get to the bottom of their pain points and bring these to the surface. Why? First because it’s only really a story if the protagonist experiences a transformation, or in story speak, a narrative or transformational arc. In women’s fiction, in fact, it is the main character’s personal growth journey that drives the plot. There is simply no story if everything is perfect and the MC has no complicated issues to navigate. As readers, we just don’t find that interesting or believable. 

That brings us to a second point about believability…there is not an adult among us who hasn’t experienced pain, joy, confusion, misunderstanding, heartache, and a slew of other feelings that make up the spectrum of human emotions. That’s the human experience. A strong character should feel as multidimensional as a person with a fully lived life, and that means they have just as many issues as the rest of us. And those issues are usually where the story is. 

To bring your protagonist to life, you need to poke and prod into their back stories, their pain, their joys, their misunderstandings, and everything else to fully get their views onto the page. This is especially important when it comes to getting your protagonist’s emotional context onto the page because without it readers have no idea what the unfolding plot events really mean. (If you don’t know what I mean by emotional context, keep reading—we’ll get to that!)

Even though writers may understand this in theory, the execution can be so much more difficult. I see a lot of stories where the protagonist said some version of, “Who me? I’m fine.” And rather than digging a little further, the writer took the protagonist’s word for it and focused mostly on the external plot. Yet as editors and book coaches we see the same common manuscript mistakes over and over again, and at least few of these can be traced directly back to a lack of character development. 

Digging Deeply into Your Protagonist’s Past: What Exactly Are You Looking For? 

When I work with writers we focus on a number of key character development questions. These include world view, external wants and internal needs, external and internal conflicts (i.e., what’s standing in the way of getting those wants and needs met), and stakes (i.e., what they stand to lose). We also dig a little deeper into their world view to uncover any misguided beliefs—something that they misunderstand about the world at large—which will be pivotal to the character transformation.

It reminds me of the concept in therapy called core wounding that is essentially buried emotional pain that stems from something we experience at a young age that we then internalize as a belief, often on a subconscious level. (Please keep in mind, I may be well therapized but I’m no therapist! It’s best to explore the concept further for yourself.) We may “learn” things like “I’m only worthy of love if I am of service to other people” because our parents only showed us attention when we did things for them. Or we may “learn” that money is a bad thing because we heard our parents fighting over bills all the time. In story, the misguided belief operates in much the same way, which is why it’s as important to understand where that belief comes from. 

We also focus on who the MC is at the story opening, and who they will be at the story’s closing. We do exercises to flesh out this transformational arc in a sentence or two, and determine how the misguided belief and its origin, external want, and internal needs all align to deliver a story ending that will be emotionally satisfying to a reader.  

I know there are a lot of pantsers out there who balk at any notion of plotting story. And, while I believe story planning basics are key to a stronger first draft and smoother revision process, I also want to assure you that’s not even what I’m talking about here. All I’m saying is that if you don’t know your character’s particular backstory and idiosyncrasies, you’ll be hard pressed to know how to put them through the plot paces that will push them out of their comfort zone and along their personal growth journey. 

Sometimes I see writers who know they have to come up with a character backstory, but the backstory is all about what’s happened to the character with little consideration given to how the character made sense of that…how the character took that thing that happened and internalized it, and the impact it then made on them. If that’s the case, you need to sit your protagonist down on your figurative therapist’s couch and dig a little deeper. You need to know why those things mattered to your protagonist—especially how they may have impacted their external wants, internal needs and misguided belief—to know how those things have shaped the character they are today in story present, and how that impacts all the actions they take.

What About Those Character Question Lists?

There are countless lists out there for getting to know your character better: What’s their favorite food? How do they dress? Who was their first love? And while these lists can sometimes be helpful and it certainly doesn’t hurt to know these things about your characters, the answers only become interesting when you dig deeper. It’s the why behind these answers that show us more about the character…her favorite food is lasagna because her grandmother made it for her every Sunday, and those dinners were a respite from her parents’ constant fighting. She always wears a black t-shirt and dress pants because the successful person she idolized as a child did the same. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’re seeing how this character evolved in life. We’re seeing how they’ve arrived on the page in story present with all of their beliefs and quirks and foibles, just like any human. 

Getting Emotional Interiority onto the Page: What Exactly Do You Do with This Info? 

Emotional interiority is those moments where the reader can see how the protagonist is processing the unfolding events through thoughts, reactions, memories, and inner conflicts. It’s how we know that the pen she picks up to write with once belonged to her late grandfather. Or how we know that, while she just told her boss she’ll have the assignment to him by the end of the day, she actually hasn’t even begun it and is freaking out.

Sometimes a writer focuses mostly on the external plot, and we are missing the MC’s emotions, reactions or interiority on the page at key points. We’re missing the emotional context. In other words, Jane may have just been dumped by her boyfriend, but if we have no access to her thoughts, we don’t really understand what that break-up means. Is Jane blindsided? Did she see it coming but is devastated? Is Jane actually relieved because she’s been doing things to get him to break up with her since she didn’t have the courage to do it herself? Maybe it’s the latter because Jane struggles with confrontation after growing up in a house where her parents arguments were intense. Even in this simple example, you can see how the protagonist views the situation can shift its meaning entirely as well as how the protagonist uses their past experiences and beliefs to react to what’s happening in story present. (Again just like real people in real life!) 

In The Making of Story, author and Stanford writing professor Alice LaPlante discusses the importance of storytelling existing on two levels: “what happens in the world of the senses,” (i.e., the plot points or external events that are happening) and “the emotional and intellectual subtext” (i.e., how the MC is making meaning of the unfolding events). Lisa Cron also discusses this in great detail in Wired for Story, and both books can provide greater insight into this.

For a story to have meaning to a reader, we need to understand what the meaning is for the MC. We need to more fully understand how the protagonist makes sense of the events that unfold around them and how this external plot helps to guide their personal growth journey. If the reader isn’t privy to what’s happening inside the MC’s mind, we not only feel left out, but we also miss how they arrive at the end of the emotional journey, and we’re unlikely to find the story ending to be believable or emotionally satisfying.

If you’ve done your foundational character development work of understanding those key questions for your protagonist, you're now well positioned to weave that emotional interiority into the story. But this doesn’t mean info-dumping at the beginning of your story. Rather you dribble the information out bit by bit, just as your MC would be thinking about it themselves. 

Keep in mind that your protagonist essentially operates as the reader’s guide to the story, even when the story isn’t written in first person. A strong, well-developed protagonist is one of the primary ways a reader becomes engaged and invested in your story. And you will struggle to bring your main character to life on the page if you haven’t bothered to get to know them beyond a superficial level. So, dig past the surface-level stuff. Pry into their background. Use the old therapists’ trick of asking a question and silently waiting for your protagonist to answer before you let them go do any of the fun stuff on the page. As in therapy, even though it may be uncomfortable and a little difficult in the beginning, your character (and your story) will be all the better for it. 

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Heather Garbo is a certified book coach, editor and writer with a background in communications, book publishing, and nonprofit work. Heather specializes in working with women’s fiction writers who are discovering (or rediscovering) their writing voice in midlife. Find her at www.garbobookcoaching.com.

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