Driven vs. Reluctant Heroes

There’s an adage about plot, probably originating in something John Gardner once said, to the effect that there are only two plots: either someone leaves on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.

I think the more useful way of looking at this part of the plot question is: either the protagonist goes looking for trouble, or trouble comes looking for the protagonist.

“Looking for trouble” is not as literal as it sounds at first hearing. To me, it sums up the active protagonist, the one who sets off with a goal in mind (or who acquires a compelling objective early in the story), and who naturally encounters obstacles along the way.

This is the questing hero who sets out to slay the dragon or save the kingdom. But it’s also the detective, who chooses to take on the goal of solving the murder. It’s the underdog sports team determined to win the championship, the performer determined to get their big break, and the student striving to get into medical school or land their dream job/internship.

The active protagonist’s choices and actions are driven by their internal desire to make something different. They want to fix something, earn something, discover something, save something. They may have wanted whatever-it-is for a long time, or the story may open with the incident that sparks this new desire in them. The young hero may set out in search of adventure without really knowing what that means, or he may watch a dragon eat the town sheep and head off out of grim necessity to slay the dragon before it graduates from eating sheep to eating people.

On the other hand, “trouble comes looking” is the protagonist who is content with the life they have, and doesn’t particularly want to change it until circumstances force the issue. They generally begin as an ordinary character who has to rise to an unexpected (and often unwanted) occasion, whether that’s proving their own innocence when they’re the chief suspect in a murder, escaping the bad guys after accidentally overhearing their plot to steal the Hope diamond, or being the sole survivor of a shipwreck or plane crash and having to get themselves back home.

This is the reluctant hero, who would really rather hire an army to take down the dragon than try to do it him/herself, or hand the murder investigation off to the cops because it’s their job. It’s the protagonist who needs redemption, but who doesn’t seek it (like Ebenezer Scrooge). At times, it’s also the person whose life has just been upended by circumstances – a partner who died in a car crash, a nasty divorce, an unexpected lottery win, a collapsed business – and who has to cope with the consequences, whether they want to or not.

When the active hero is presented with an early opportunity for change, they’ll usually take it, especially if it looks as if the opportunity will get them closer to their ultimate goal (often, this turns out to be a mistake or a trap, but that’s a different problem). The content or reluctant hero, on the other hand, likes things the way they are. Presented early on with an opportunity for change, they often resist. Scrooge initially rejects his nephew’s invitation to Christmas dinner and tells Marley’s ghost he doesn’t believe in him. It doesn’t matter; the three Christmas spirits show up regardless.

Similarly, an active hero is determined to get somewhere. Faced with obstacles, their first reaction is to find some way over, under, around, or through. They don’t really care whether it’s a life-threatening obstacle or one that’s merely annoying, and they certainly don’t care how much work it’ll to take to overcome it.

The content hero, on the other hand, doesn’t start off trying to get to some far-off goal. Their first reaction to trouble that is not immediately serious and life-threatening is often to ignore it, deny it, or hand it off to someone else. The writer has to force them to get moving.

Choosing a survival-based central story problem is usually enough to get a reluctant hero moving, simply because their only other choice is to give up and die. Shipwrecks, natural disasters, and the zombie apocalypse fall in this category. Physically removing the character from their normal life, so that they have to struggle to get back to it, usually also works (being carried off by a tornado or a bunch of ghosts, kidnapped by terrorists, etc. )

If the inciting event for the content hero looks initially like a one-time event (rescuing someone from muggers – they do it, it’s over, everybody goes home…) then the author has to provide consequences and/or a string of additional events that keep dragging the reluctant hero back into the central story problem until he/she is so enmeshed that the only way out is through (… and the muggers, who work for a crime boss, track the reluctant hero home and trash their house; when the reluctant hero reports it to the cops [trying to get someone else to solve the problem], the crime boss escalates things again, and again, until the reluctant hero has no choice [or is too angry] to let go of the matter).

Driven, active heroes are often easier to work with, especially if one is writing action-adventure, but reluctant heroes can be more fun or more of a challenge, depending how one looks at it.