The Characters You Meet

“I feel like your story doesn’t have a defined main character.”

There’s only a small group of people I’ve talked about my book with.  One of those people is a close friend of mine that I’ll be calling Levi.  Levi has read parts of my book in no particular order.  He’s read the chapters like they were short stories.  Last week, in the car, he said that there doesn’t seem to be a definite main character, that it’s a book about the other characters.  For a moment, I thought about it in silence, and y’know, he’s kind of right.  My book doesn’t revolve around one central character, it revolves around the people he meets and how they change him.

If you’ve read A Walk To Remember, a Nicholas Sparks book, you would think that the main character is Landon.  It’s spoken from his point of view, so it must be him.  However, who’s the book really about?  Landon or Jamie?  Landon is the guy who meets Jamie.  He’s also the guy who asks her out.  He’s also the guy who gets sent into this world of love and triumph and all this gushy stuff.  But, in my opinion it’s more about Jamie.  What character is the book really about?  It’s about a girl who doesn’t have that long to live (spoiler alert) and how she changes the people around her.  Landon is just the reflection.  Landon is what happens when a character meets the story.  

We’d like to think that we’re all main characters in our story, and yes we are to a point.  But, without community, without people, we’re just stories that start with descriptions of the weather and, more than likely, end with descriptions of the weather.  Our stories are the stories of other people.  We grow in that way.  All superhero stories, are stories about villians.  Villians breed conflict.  Other people breed conflict.  Without conflict there’s no growth, there’s no development.  There’s no choices!  We need people to build conflict so we could grow.  Without them and without conflict, we can’t find who we really are.