O Protagonist, why should I love thee?

Recently my dad and I were musing about why you can look forward to a new TV show but it just doesn't grab you from the start, and agreed that one problem is when you don't care about the protagonist right away. But what makes you care?

In the first episode of The West Wing we're introduced to characters (the White House staff) who are witty and passionate, likable, but two of them have also just gotten themselves in trouble: One finds out the woman he just slept with is a call girl, another is in trouble for a gaffe he made on TV, and the President has just crashed his bike into a tree. They're not intimidating or worldly--they're imperfect and therefore likable.

I recently started Susan Elizabeth Phillips' Match Me If You Can and liked the character immediately because she walked out of the house to go to The Most Important Interview of Her Life only to find a bum passed out under her car. The details of the slow ruination of her carefully put together First Impression Outfit, as she races towards the interview on a hot summer's day, immediately made me sympathetic.


The first scene of Jane (the Jane Eyre update) is similar--a protagonist at a job interview which she desperately needs. She actually needs it more than the Phillips' character does, and we're told she's desperate, and we're told why. But I guess I didn't feel the desperation, didn't see it acted out as in the Phillips' book. And she gets the first job she tries for, no struggle, no obstacles. I got a quarter into the book without seeing an obstacle.

Not trying to pick on first time novelist Lindner, just having some Thinks.

On topic song of le day: This is one of my favorite opening lines to a song --> "High school she was that girl that made me do the hula hoop around the gym--just to get a peek again, she's a ten!" It's a song about the sex trade, but poignantly starts with this sweet image of the cute high school girl, and the boy with the crush.

Acoustic version


Original version