Writing an Engaging Protagonist by Dana Mack

As a graduate student in European History, many years ago, I ran across several accounts of disastrous late nineteenth-century marriages between wealthy, politically enlightened German-Jewish women and impoverished, conservative landed noblemen. I was young and romantically disposed. And as an avid reader of classic fiction, I thought at the time that a story about a handsome Prussian officer pursuing a sexually innocent Jewish girl for the sake of her fortune would make rich plot material for a novel -- especially if the girl in question were attractive, spirited, and intelligent.

Early on in my mental play, I had the idea of making my heroine, whom I  named “Lisi,” a gifted pianist with career ambitions.  The reason for this was that music had a preeminent place in Germany's social and intellectual life. Moreover, I had been trained as a musician and knew something about the rewards, discipline, and inevitable frustrations of musical ambition.

Distracted by a long career in the think tank world and journalism, it was three and a half decades before I sat down to write the book I had imagined in my student days. In that time, my main character had metamorphosed from a romantic heroine into a modern-day anti-heroine. That is, she had gone through many subconscious iterations. Indeed, when I sat down to write her, Lisi surprised me at every turn of plot I attempted to take. Her sexual and reproductive life, it turned out, were shockingly unconventional – at least for the literary standards of her period. She was quick to develop a serious case of anorexia. And her political attitudes were more cynical and informed by irony than liberal and idealistic.

In fact, she was so misbehaved that there were times I wanted to delete her from my documents file. But in the end, I realized that every decision she made was, if not morally or even logically justifiable, understandable given her historical setting and social milieu. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether he or she finds Lisi's story satisfying as entertainment. I will only say that for the four and a half years I engaged with her – reading, researching, writing, and revising – I wasn't bored for a minute.

For me, nothing in my professional life has compared to the fun of writing fiction, and there has been nothing so gratifying as writing a female character.

*** Win a copy of Dana’s new release, All Things That Deserve to Perish, by telling us in the comments below who is your favourite female protagonist and why. ***

This giveaway open to Australian residents only and will close at 6pm Wednesday 25th August, 2021.

Run by Writes4Women in conjunction with Dana Mack