The Eldritch Post

There are a lot of different opinions on the subject of how and when to introduce the protagonist, antagonist and the story Problem, but it seems that many of the darts cluster around the same spot no matter which source you consult.

In the 3-act structure of a play or screenplay, the first act serves to show the audience what the protagonist’s normal life is like and to identify his/her goal (which the rest of the story will try to keep him/her from achieving).

The plot point at the end of Act 1 is that moment or event that spins the protagonist’s head around and sends him/her off on a whole new tangent. It is the “inciting incident,” or the first “disaster” in the first scene.

But how soon do you have to get to that head-spinning point? How soon do you have to introduce your protagonist, antagonist and The Problem?

Many action stories open smack in the middle of a disaster, seemingly bypassing the whole first act. But even in those, you’ll typically find that the opening disaster IS the character’s normal life, where he/she is in the business of fighting crime, fires, disease or facing other challenges on a regular basis. The inciting incident, then, has to be something even more disastrous, more personal, an event that has the power to spin even Mr./Ms. Macho’s head around and set them off on a new course.

Bob Mayer, a terrific presenter and published author of dozens of books under a number of names, suggests that the reader must meet the protagonist and antagonist and discover the Story Problem by the end of the second chapter or second scene. That seems reasonable to me.

However, in my newest novel, the antagonist won’t appear onstage until the last third of the book. So how do I introduce him/it within the first two scenes? The answer, Mayer says, is to use surrogates. 

Here’s how it works: Your story has a force that is opposing your protagonist in his/her quest. (By the way, the antagonist doesn’t have to be evil, it only has to have goals that oppose the protagonist’s goals, and it needs a passion to reach those goals that is equal to the protagonist’s own passion.) The antagonist’s job is to throw “rocks” at the protagonist to thwart his/her efforts. So the surrogate can be some other person/entity that throws rocks at the protagonist until the antagonist arrives onstage.

It’s important that the surrogate presents obstacles along a path that’s relevant to the antagonist’s goals. You could have somebody throwing rocks at the protagonist for reasons completely unrelated to the antagonist and his/her goals, but that’s not a surrogate for your antagonist, it’s just another element of conflict.

In the case of my new book (still in the planning stages), the bad guys will be called terrorists for lack of a clearer identity. But in the first third of the book, the protagonist doesn’t even know who her foes are, only that there may be a plot afoot that will cause a great disaster virtually in her back yard.

Her first surrogate antagonist, then, is the man who predicts this disaster and sets her off to look for clues that his prediction might be valid.

But the main surrogate is the plant manager who prevents her from continuing her unofficial investigation to uncover the plot and revealing the antagonists that might cause this predicted disaster. The plant manager, in fact, serves as the antagonist-surrogate for most of the book. Only in the last third, possibly even later, will the protagonist find out who the real antagonists are and what their goal is. By then she will have already begun to develop a plan to stop the disaster without knowing precisely who the attackers are.

So it would seem that Mayer’s rule can actually work for a book like mine.  Maybe you can use the technique as well.

For more information on Bob Mayer and his books and workshops for writers, go to www.bobmayer.org.