For a writer or blogger of short stories, post-card fiction, very short stories, flash fiction stories and novels there are two main elements in the building of a round hero or heroine. The character must want something and the character must have an internal conflict of some kind. Batman comes to mind.
I was sitting in Armand’s in Bloomfield one night having a beer and waiting for my bus back to Oakland in Pittsburgh. I had done some writing and blogging earlier in the day so I was relaxing. On the television above the bar was “Batman Begins.” I was hypnotized. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Batman character. Why?
Of all the superheroes, Batman must be one of the most conflicted. The man has issues. He’s a vigilante. He fights crime out of revenge because his parents were killed by a criminal when he was a small boy. He was at the killing. He built his entire crime fighting persona upon fear: his fear of bats and the fear of the unknown in the criminals mind. Batman did not pick the color black as his signature on a whim. It is the color of night, of fear, of the unknowable.
What a great protagonist: a very flawed hero fighting crime and trying to do good.
This is how you build a protagonist for your fiction: there is the internal struggle against personal demons and the external struggle against an antagonist.
I ended up having to catch a later bus.
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Writing: The World According To Flash Fiction
Cover of Death Wish
The world is so vast and a flash fiction story is so small. Still, the flash fiction writer can capture the entire world in his or her fiction. The writer just has to do it 1,000 words at a time.
As I write this there is civil war in Libya, an earth quake and tsunami in Japan and unions for public workers in the United States are under attack. All these events can form the backdrop for the lives of the characters of flash fiction just like they are the backdrop for the life of the flash fiction writer.
Flash fiction is the world.
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I’m watching retro tv in Pittsburgh. A movie with Charles Bronson is on. I did not see the opening credits of the movie but it must be one of the movies in the Death Wish series. Charles Bronson is the protagonist. His housekeeper and daughter were raped and killed by a gang of street thugs. He is a good man; but has become a vigilante and spends the movie hunting down and killing the thugs.
The character Bronson plays is a perfect example of a very flawed protagonist, a flawed protagonist whose actions may be legally wrong but whose actions are understandable.
Years ago, the Death Wish serious was very, very popular.
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“A Porn Star Is Born” is at the top of the page.
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There is some bad in the best of us and some good in the worst of us.
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