When I started writing fiction, and thought of my potential audience, I knew who I wanted to appeal to:
Everyone.
Well, okay, that’s impossible, but I had this idea there was a sort of mass of “normal” people out there who were dominant. I should write for them, the normals. The people who paid for movies and toothpaste ads. The white middle-class person whose job is something vague at a desk, who wears suits, who eats at lunch counters and drives a beige sedan.
Here’s the thing… this normal person doesn’t exist. There are only people who know they aren’t “normal” but imagine that the normal guy is out there, somewhere.
Beige-car-suit-wearing-office-worker guy is probably a medieval reenactor on weekends, or really into roller derby, or in a punk band, or suffering severe depression while trying to balance his triad relationship and the custody dispute with his adopted daughter’s transgender son.
The only way someone looks “normal” is if you don’t look close at them. And this is why “normal” “everyman” characters in fiction suck the life out of a story.
I see a lot of these characters in the slushpile. They feel flat, lifeless. They don’t engage the reader.
If at this point you are calling up a list of Famous Stories With Everyman Main Characters, chill. A story can sell itself on plot, on structure, on theme, on setting and local color. So yeah, you can get by without an engaging character… but it’s also true that in today’s publishing, character is king, and most editors I’ve talked to agree that they look for character first.
I’m pretty sure the newbie writers sending the story of the white middle-class office worker with a home in the suburbs and a stay-at-home wife and two adorable children do not have that life themselves. A protagonist more like them, personally, might intrigue me as a reader, but they’ve robbed me of that story because they are so sure I wouldn’t be interested in THEM.
Or let’s say that this writer IS a white middle class middle aged office worker with 2.5 kids. That’s still not their life, not entirely. This is what their life would be like if you ignored the divorce, their side-hustle selling Mary Kay, the clog dancing group that takes up much of their free time and of course their obsession with vaseline.
Editing the weird out of your life is so common, so ubiquitous, sometimes we don’t even know we’re doing it. In casual conversations, at work, in personal ads, there are things we want people to know about us and things we don’t want them to know.
You know what makes good fiction? Those things you don’t want people to know. Readers are shameless gossips peering through holes in fences! So give them the dirt! I’m not talking about scandals. (Okay, not JUST scandals.) The dirt can be how you fixed the grout with toothpaste and okay that’s not good but it’s holding so long as you never wash that area of tile!
Quirks. Details. Weirdness. Gimmie.
