Lovable Protagonists
I'm immersed in writing my YA fantasy novel and I'm totally loving my protagonist. She's much like I was at that age - shy, unpopular, morbidly witty, lousy home life. Except she can do magic. Hee hee. I'm writing a chapter in which she accidentally stops time. I used to dream I had powers like that.
There are actually many wonderful novels in which the protagonist is not likable at all. The narrator of Vladimir's Nabokov's Lolita, for example, is a pedophile. Yet, it's one of my favorite novels, containing moments of breathtaking lyrical beauty and devastating irony. There are some protagonists that other people like, but who leave me cold. Many people love Anita Blake from Laurell K. Hamilton's novels. I really enjoyed the earlier Anita Blake novels, but I've never warmed up to Anita herself. I love kick-ass heroines from Buffy to Rachel Morgan to Thorn St. Croix, but what I love about those characters is how they go through hell and fight back, yet still have a touching vulnerability. I don't get that from Anita Blake, although I acknowledge that Laurell K. Hamilton is an excellent writer.
There is no law that says that protagonists or narrators have to sympathetic, and sometimes unsympathetic narrators tell a fascinating story. But I find myself glad that my heroine is, indeed, to me at least, likable and sympathetic. She starts off the novel as an unhappy, neglected teenager, goes through hell and back and manages to pick herself up again and even prevail. That's the kind of story I've always loved to read and, indeed, mirrors my own life rather closely. So it's no surprise that I'm writing that story.
In my own personal fantasy's I am the storyteller of the neglected, picked on, and abused children of the world. But, then, I have delusions of grandeur.
Oh, well, back to the writing!
Julianne