I’ve said before that “why” is one of the most useful, and therefore important, questions a writer can ask. Most of the time, this is because figuring out why your characters need to do something is the first step in figuring out what your characters need to do next.
One of the earlies “why” questions is “Why do these people have to solve this problem?” There are a bunch of general answers that work:
- It’s their job to solve this sort of problem. Detectives and police investigate crimes; soldiers fight wars; spies (national or industrial) steal critical information or prevent it from being stolen. Alternatively, the character has some specific talent, knowledge, or skill that is applicable to the solution, which makes them the one people ask for help. There aren’t a lot of brilliant violinists who can substitute when the top-ranked soloist is stricken with appendicitis hours before a major performance.
- It’s their personal problem. The survivors of a plane crash in a remote area have a problem that nobody else does, and they have to solve it themselves or die. Alternatively, they have a compelling personal reason for solving this particular problem: the high school football star who is desperate for a college scholarship has more reason to try to win the big game than just “it’s his job;” ditto the medical researcher who is working on a cure for the disease that killed a family member. And of course if they are a murder suspect, they have plenty of reason to try to make sure the police get the right culprit (assuming they aren’t the murderer).
- The problem is their responsibility. This can be because they created the problem directly through some mistake of their own, or because they are the general, king, CEO, or other person sitting at the desk where the buck stops (which could be considered a variation on #2, it’s their job).
- They are caught in a crisis situation. They are on site when the initial emergency occurs and there is no time to get hold of the people who are supposed to handle this sort of thing.
- They have been mistaken for someone else, who is expected to handle this sort of problem. This covers both the bewildered protagonist who is mistaken for a super-spy, arch-wizard, prince or other highly skilled/powerful person, and who is therefore relentlessly chased, kidnapped, and generally hounded by the villains who simply don’t believe that they’re someone else, and also the con artist who is pretending to be a brilliant surgeon, genius painter, skilled trouble-shooter, etc. and who is therefore suddenly expected to actually do the thing they’re pretending to be good at when something relevant goes wrong.
- They decide that the problem is theirs to solve, or at least that they want to be deeply involved in solving it. This can be because they have a personal interest, as in #2 above, or it can be because they have decided that what is happening is wrong, and conceived a passionate desire to fix this thing. Theoretically, they don’t have to solve the problem, but if you try to stop them, they’ll punch you.
- If all else fails, there’s a prophecy that says your characters are the ones fated to Do This Thing.
In a lot of cases, the author’s real problem is getting their protagonist involved in the first place; once they are thoroughly mixed up in the situation, they usually have little choice but to struggle on. Even if the character’s only desire at that point is to get out of this mess and go home, the author can usually get Murphy to arrange for their every attempt to drag them deeper into the morass.
Choosing one’s protagonist carefully can eliminate the need for a lot of “Why me?” angst on the part of the protagonist. This is why so many murder mysteries have a protagonist who is with the police, or who is an established detective, journalist, bodyguard, or in some other occupation where it wouldn’t be surprising for them to get involved with a murder. It’s their job.
The other part is, of course, choosing the problem carefully. If your protagonist is a violinist, it is easily plausible that their problem has to do with performing – getting the audition (and then the chair in the orchestra), mastering a piece, raising funds for a faltering orchestra. It’s not much more difficult to make them a suspect/detective in a murder that involves a missing Stradivarius. But it starts to strain credibility if the problem has to do with international art forgery, and it gets very difficult indeed to get the violinist involved in discovering the cure for the new plague, or preventing the nuclear reactor at the power plant from melting down.
Most of the time, writers start off with a reasonably clear idea of one thing or the other – either they have some idea of who they want to write about (a violinist, a detective, a doctor) or they have some idea of what they want to write about (a romance, a murder, preventing or recovering from a disaster, etc.) – which makes it possible to choose the other piece more carefully. And there are stories that can fit nearly any protagonist; family drama, for instance, can happen to anyone who has relatives, at any time and place where the relatives run into each other.
