As such, I would argue that the age of a protagonist is less important than the conflict of the story/struggles of the protagonist connecting with something the reader can identify with.
Hi! I want to hang on to this for what I am going to expose next:
Personally, I think that in a story the most important thing is the story itself; the characters in this are just the resources that one as a writer uses to tell that story. Therefore, I think it is a mistake to plan a story based on the characters, and above all to circumscribe it to a certain reading public, that of YA, would already be a second mistake.
Because where does the impulse to write a story come from? Sometimes our imaginations make us visualize scenes from other worlds like a movie, right? We see characters doing things, obviously we imagine their conversations, or in our minds we see an action scene. But what we are seeing is a situation, something where things are happening; then our mind does NOT tell us what a certain character is like, it shows him acting, right?
This basically, and broadly speaking, is like playing with dolls, or like the puppet theater. You are already realizing that each time those dolls or those puppets were always the same, right? Because I don't know of a child who has changed toys every time. Well, I guess there must be some.
But what I'm mean to is that in each of those games, in each of those occasions, what actually changed was the situation. And only after a while do we begin to take a particular affection for one of those toys; it was usual for us to give it a name, right?
So, only there, I would say that we were in a first manifestation about what a character is. Because being children and all we transformed an object, a toy, into an entity full of meaning, we even assigned it its own personality.
But, before we got to that discovery, what were we doing all the time?
We were telling stories, right? Most of the time to ourselves when we played alone. In an unconscious way, of course, we imagined situations, adventures. Which is the other way of naming what in Literature is called
Conflict.
Plot.
Then, that evolution, already with what we have learned about all the aspects of a story (and it is very good that you are internalizing about them), as first thing it should lead us to a premise, a basic idea. In a short story, the premise is usually only one; on the other hand, in a novel, and even more so in a saga (
The Lord of the Rings, for example), there is enough time and length to develop several premises or parallel plots. For the short story at heart equates to a one-round fight and must be won by knockout. The knockout is for the reader, obviously, because the short story should be shocking, like a photo, a hundred-meter race, the hit or single from the album. The novel, on the other hand, is like a movie; equates to a heavyweights bout in ten round. The novel is the background fight, the marathon, the complete album.
Now, let's get back to this matter of the premise. The premise is when someone asks you what your novel is about. Therefore, it is an idea that should be summarized in a few lines. In fact, almost all the premises are already written; what changes is the approach, the way in which these premises are addressed.
For example, when they ask me: "What is your saga about?", I answer: "Can evil defend good? Is something like this possible?"
Returning to the example of
The Lord of the Rings, its central idea is the eternal fight of good against evil. Also in the case of
Star Wars, which, obviously, Lucas changed into a Space Opera environment because, one, he loved that saga and, two, also a little because of the technical limitations of the 70's, which made it impossible at that time to have of all the immense rendering power that Peter Jackson was able to make widely available but many, many years later. In fact, Spielberg only made the miracle possible only from
Jurassic World, and from there appeared
Toy Story,
Monsters Inc. and everything else.
But I am getting out of thread. Going back to
The Lord of the Rings, what Tolkien did was extrapolate the conflict from the world wars to a fantasy setting. But looking at the villains in that story it's easy to see who he was really referring to. In fact, in
Star Wars the allusions are much more obvious, the example is crystal clear.
However, since it seems to me to warn that the story you want to do points to a novel, I want to insist that you must be clear about the difference between the premise or base idea and the argument; the first is the concept behind the story; the argument, instead, is the approach, the situation through which that idea develops.
Because it will have already happened to you, I imagine, that sometimes you ask someone what the story he is writing is about, and then he starts talking with great enthusiasm that he has a character A, and he describes the character at length, and that certain things happens to him, and then he describes all that to you, also at length, such that suddenly you just say to him: “Hey, I just want to know what your story is about; not that you tell it me”.
In this regard, a more excusable case is when that same person tells you the plot of their story. In the case of
The Lord of the Rings, it is obviously Frodo's journey (and there is another premise: that, no matter how small you are, you may be destined for great things), which in the background reproduces the journey of the hero, something Luke Skywalker also does in
SW, Ismael in
Moby Dick, and obviously Katniss in
The Hunger Games. But the hero's journey is one of the classic structures for storytelling, in fact, and as such it has its characteristics, the initial world of the hero, the call to adventure, the appearance of a mentor, the maturity that the same hero experiences along his path, fellow travelers, etc.
I think that
Harry Potter in a way is also an argument that obeys that approach.
However, at this point I want to make an important clarification:
This premise should not be sought (recommended), since it arises alone, and in fact knowing it beforehand, going back to the example of unearthing a fossil, would be equivalent to making a complete scan or X-ray of that fossil; that is, to know what that fossil is like before you even start digging.
This is bad. Because it may be very useful to paleontologists, but not to writers. Personally I think that the work of writing should always be more intuitive than rational. Also, what's wrong to use this hero's journey approach in all the stories you write? And furthermore, I suppose that the two main structures have also been taught to you in school about telling a story:
mimesis and
diegesis. Let us remember that the first is linear and follows the traditional order of presentation, development and outcome, while the
diegesis alters the order: sometimes it even begins at the end or in the middle, so to explain the beginning, use is made of what we call flashback, retrospective or
racconto.
There is also what some call the
Pyramid of Freytag, which roughly identifies six types of structures:
Chronological: similar to mimesis.
In media res: the story begins in the middle.
Starting from the knot or climax: it is the most used in police and mystery stories, it usually starts with the murder of the victim.
The diegesis or alteration of the chronological order.
Reverse or from the end: for example in Le Pacte des Loups, where the narrator recalls the whole story as a great flashback.
No ending or open ending: the conclusion is up to the reader.
Now, all these approaches or structures should only be known in a general way, identify them when reading a story; not when you're writing it. Because at most they will be able to serve you in a later process of reviewing and writing the second draft. In fact, over the years you will see which methods serve you more than others according to the nature of each story.
But where you can mark a turning point is in the plot, in the way you tell a story.
This, in fact, should be the product of very deep meditation. Such that when you see a movie or read a book ask yourself how you would do it, what things you did not like, what would you change. Because if one happen to be a writer, I think one should at least see things with a critical eye, one should have a position on it. And beware that I am not talking about formulas, but rather that this creative concern should be present in every writer. Only then could we be talking about a position or an approach that is original to some extent.
But, as I told you in the previous post, it's one thing for you to have a clear idea about you want to write, and at most it will only serve you to propose it as an intention, an objective. Because something very different is what you write from all that. Pretending to control everything, in fact, is the easiest way to spoil everything from the beginning, because there is no true freedom to create, and here we first need to create stories; in due course we will learn how to tell those stories.
