How are other characters reacting to your protagonist?
And how those reactions help tell your story
“Sometimes it’s hard to make friends,” said her dad. “Especially if you eat them.”
~We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins
What does my current science fiction read have in common with my four-year-old’s favorite book of the week? More than you’d think!
Both are spec fiction, have hungry protagonists, and explore the theme of loneliness. But there’s one more similarity, and that’s the one fascinating me: both stories are absolute masterclasses in depicting how other characters react to a protagonist.
When handled skillfully, the way other characters react to your protagonist can be key to telling your story. Here’s how.
Hungry dinosaurs
Once beloved by my oldest when he was a kindergartener, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates by Ryan T. Higgins is now delighting our youngest. The protagonist of the picture book is Penelope, a young T. rex embarking on her first day at kindergarten. Naturally, Penelope expected to attend a school of fellow dinos. Instead, she lumbers into a classroom of human children—aka delicious snacks. Her hungry tummy prompts her to chow down on her fellow classmates, but Penelope soon learns that ingesting her school friends is detrimental to her social life.
Along her journey, Penelope’s emotions are beautifully depicted through Higgins’ words and pictures. Penelope’s character is brightly colored and her story is told through the main narrative text. In this way Higgins cues readers to invest in how Penelope is feeling, whether that’s glee, surprise, shock, shame…
“Mrs. Noodleman, Penelope ate William Omoto again!”
… or loneliness.
By contrast, Penelope’s human teacher and classmates are drawn in a muted color palette, and they express themselves in dialog bubbles outside the main narrative text. Their reactions are usually depicted in facial expressions (terrified, glowering, annoyed) and body language (angrily raised fists). I especially love the drawings of the children after Penelope spits them out. They’re comical disarray: long strings of drool dripping from disheveled hair, missing shoes, says it all. They’re fed up with being fed upon.
Hungry Astronauts
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir has been such a fun science fiction read. Not only is the breakfast-burrito-loving protagonist, Ryland Grace, on a critical mission to save the world, but the unique structure of the book makes it a real page-turner. When Ryland wakes up in outer space, all alone, with no memory of who he is or how he got there, the stage is set to follow him on two parallel adventures: one to save Earth, the other to discover who he is.
Like We Don’t Eat Our Classmates, Project Hail Mary strongly establishes the reader’s connection to its protagonist. Weir “paints” Grace more brightly for his readers by employing first person point of view. Moment-by-moment, readers know exactly what’s going on inside Grace’s head—his thoughts, feelings, fears, wishes and dreams—his cravings for scrambled eggs.
Everything we learn about the story is filtered through Grace’s perspective. This works out great, since not only is Grace a great science thinker, he’s a professional science teacher who’s happy to explain the mechanics of everything from gravity to evolution to readers in simple terms.
Yet, the story isn’t just about science, it’s about Grace. Everything we learn about him is also filtered through his point of view—including the way other characters react to him.
Grace is a keen observer who comes across as trustworthy in reporting the behavior of others. Whether he interprets, misinterprets, or ignores those reactions, he still details them. His scientist’s observations of those reacting to him create a beautiful reflective effect that skips outside the first person narrative to clue readers in to how others are perceiving him. It’s not a direct experience—it’s more akin to those muted color palate reactions we saw from Penelope’s classmates—and it’s just as effective in Hail Mary as it was in We Don’t Eat Our Classmates.
Changing reactions indicate a changing protagonist
Not only do secondary characters clue readers into protagonist personality traits, but their reactions also help tell Penelope’s and Grace’s stories.
After a heart-to-heart with her dad about how making friends is easier when she refrains from eating them, Penelope embarks on a campaign to make friends at school. Unfortunately, her craving for tasty human children keeps getting the better of her. It’s not until she gets a surprise lesson on empathy that she makes her personal breakthrough.
Since Penelope’s classmates are tired of being chewed on and spat out, Penelope decides to make friends with the class fish. She sticks her finger in the fishbowl and—
—Chomp!
Sure enough, Walter the goldfish has an appetite for T. Rex fingers that rivals Penelope’s cravings for human children. Penelope doesn’t much enjoy having her finger bitten. It hurts! She cries.
After Walter tries to eat her finger, Penelope understands how her classmates feel about being invited to sit on her tray at the lunch table. With her newfound empathy Penelope learns to refrain from eating her school friends and to make kind and thoughtful overtures of friendship. Her efforts turn the scowling faces of her slobbered-on classmates into the smiling faces of friends.
Penelope’s transformation is told in part by her offering brownies to kids on the playground, but it’s more than that. It’s about those smiling faces, the way the expressions and body language of the children change from defensive to engaged and accepting. Penelope makes some excellent prosocial moves, but it’s ultimately how her teachers and students react to those moves that tell the story of her personal growth.
Project Hail Mary also uses character reaction to depict character transformation. Part of the genius of the novel is that the reader learns right alongside the memory-addled protagonist the answer to the dramatic question: who is Ryland Grace and how did he end up on this mission? When Grace finally remembers his own story, his sense of self fundamentally changes. And guess what, as a reader, my feelings about him changed, too.
Those changes were both presaged and made real by the way characters were reacting to the protagonist. We never get inside anyone’s head but Grace’s, but just like the muted color palette and word bubbles gave us distant, but clear vision of how secondary characters were reacting to Penelope, the actions and dialog of secondary characters in Hail Mary eerily begin to reflect back the person Grace truly was before he lost his memory.
Transformation tells the story
When establishing a protagonist’s character, depicting how others respond to them is a core tool in the writer’s toolkit. Yet, the power of secondary character reactions doesn’t stop there.
If our stories have real legs, then our protagonists will change throughout the course of the story. In the picture book, clear cause-and-effect reactions show how character growth influences secondary character reactions. In books for grownups there’s much more room for nuance. The dynamics of dialog exchanges, descriptions of a subtle glance, the tension in a pause before someone responds. Reactions can foreshadow transformation and can help readers follow complex protagonist character changes.
Whether intended for children or adults, secondary character reactions function in the same way. They serve as prompts to help the reader understand how to feel about the protagonist. And that is one mighty technique for telling readers your protagonist’s story.