Lajos Egri descends from the mountain with ample tips n tricks
He doesn’t say it how we’d say it. He doesn’t say protagonist. At first. He says pivotal character.
The pivotal character, as Lajos Egri puts it, is “one who takes the lead in any movement or cause…A pivotal character must not merely desire something. [They] must want it so badly that [they] will destroy or be destroyed in the effort to attain [their] goal.” Parentheses mine.
The practical part of this is that when the protagonist gets what they want (or not) then that’s how you know the story is over. They can’t walk away without decisively getting or being denied what they want.
Furthermore, “when your play starts the pivotal character is already suspicious or planning to kill.” By this, he doesn’t necessarily mean that your protagonist has to be a murderer, he means that your protagonist should already have reached a decision before the play starts, and they just need the inciting incident to set them off. When a character has lived through enough experiences to be at this point, he calls this Point of Attack.
“A good point of attack is where something vital is at stake at the very beginning of a play”
At the beginning of Breaking Bad, Walter White is at the perfect point of attack. He is a skilled chemist who left his own company after getting booted out of a love triangle, who suffers the indignity of high schoolers every day. He is in a dire financial situation. And then he finds out that he has inoperable cancer. At first, he uses his chemistry skills to make meth, to make money, but soon after the series starts, his old colleague offers him all the money he could ever need, and yet he refuses.
If money isn’t the motivator, then what is?
Walt begins the series full of pride, needing to break out of his ossified life. Cancer is exactly what he wanted, really.
By skilfully revealing the social, professional and romantic connections that Walt has, we reach his true core.
"I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And, I was really...I was alive.”
Walt only ever wanted to be a cowboy. The big man who throws his weight around. He just couldn’t admit it until the last episode.
Protagonists don’t change. They just reveal who they really are.
As always, these are just my own studies. You may completely disagree. But I’m on a journey to become a great writer and I hope you can join me along the way.
Thank you for reading. If you want to reach me elsewhere, I review 2000AD each week on ComicBuzz. The most recent review can be found here
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