I think all writers wrestled with doubt, about themselves, their work, and their talent. Doubts like these plague me as fiercely as they do most authors. On one hand it sees silly and kind of strange. After all I have very rarely been bothered by rejections. I’d submit stories and novels only to get some form rejections and 99% percent of the time I’d simply turn the piece around and send it to a new market.

Despite this seemingly invulnerability to an aspect of the business that wounds so many other writers doubts still dogged by footsteps. Even as my writing improved the not silent inner voice would occasionally raise the charge that everything I produced was at best second rate, lacking style, imagination, or voice. Hell in the last few weeks that voice has tried to suggest that at any moment I’d going to get an email from my agency announcing that they are no longer m agency, having moved one to a more talent writer. That’s not happening, it is the irrational doubt that suggests that nothing from reality supports it.

So how do you handle that voice?

As far as I can tell there is only one way to deal with the doubt, write anyway. If you don’t write the doubt will be there still and strengthened by your inactivity. If you write the doubt will remain, but every time you put words in a row, every time you complete a piece, every time you submit you resist the voice, you defy the doubt, you win one more battle.

Note, winning is not publication. Winning is not payment. Those are things outside of your control and if you rely upon those as your victory conditions you are empowering the Demon of Doubt. Keep your goals and your victories within your controls. Write. Write often, those are your victories.

One of the things that has always bugged me in novels, short stories, and film set in a historical period is when those character of the past are so smart about things of the future.

I don’t mean time travelers and others who have knowledge of how things will unfold, I am speaking of characters that are supposed to be born, raised, and educated by their historical surroundings.

For example look at Rose and Cal in James Cameron’s Titanic. Rose is spot on in seeing that the ship has too few lifeboats, a clumsy bit of exposition in a film full of clumsy dialog, but the problem goes deeper than that for me. When she and Cal first get to their cabins one of the things we see is art work by Monet. Rose refers to it like being lost in a dream while Cal thinks its lousy but at least it was cheap.

Our ‘good’ character can see the master artist not yet recognized, she’s future-smart, while Cal is presented as exactly the opposite, future-stupid. He’s the villain of the piece and he is not allowed the be right with a single thing that comes out of his mouth. Even his love for her is false, making him hate the future art master simply solidifies his position.

You can see this effect over and over again in films set in the past. Often our ‘hero’ characters are more race aware than people of the era generally are, projecting our morality on the past peoples. This is bad writing and when done as heavy handed as in Titanic it is lazy writing too.

As a counter example look at the movie L.A. Confidential. While racism plays an important part of the story, no one gives two moments notice of the injustice being played against the African-American characters as they are being set up for robbery and murder. The injustice is plain to the audience without us having to endure a lecture. This is much stronger writing in a film that should have taken the Best Picture award that year.

Usually it looks straight forward as to who is the protagonist of a story, but that’s really something that can be a little slippery.

Many people, writers included, easily mistake a viewpoint character for the main character or protagonist. George R.R. Martin has said in interviews that he was inspired by the movie Alien, which kept the protagonist hidden in plain view, for his epic series  A Song of Fire and Ice. Who’s the main character in A Game of Thrones? We don’t know yet and that is because we have such a large number of point of view characters.

But even when there is a very limited number point of view characters identifying the protagonist may still be difficult.

In the film Ferris Buller’s Day Off there is no doubt that the viewpoint character is Ferris, aside from a few scenes here and there everything we see and hear is from Ferris’ viewpoint, but he’s not the main character. He’s just the person telling us the story.

To my way of thinking the main character is the person, or persons as it can be more than one who, over the course of the story, goes through the greatest change. I think ideally the character should take an action that would have simply not been possible for them before the events of the story, In Ferris Buller’s Day Off I think it is clear that Cameron is the main character. His actions over the car and what that represents in his relationship with his father are a dramatic change and growing for his character while Ferris leaves the story exactly the same as he entered it.

When you are looking at your story think about what the character can and cannot do. I do not mean physical powers or ability either, I mean what actions do their nature inhibit and look there for the real center of the story and for your protagonist.

A word of warning however. Do not be too slavish in the application. Rules in art are rarely unbroken. For example in most detective fiction the continuing characters rarely change. Holmes and Watson remain Holmes and Watson, at least for the most part in the original source material, and are not subject to a great deal of character change.