Writing A Proactive Protagonist...

[KateESal]

...especially in children's books.
This blog post has some nosh for noddles (or noodles for noddles..?)
Writing a Proactive Protagonist | Kidlit
I figured it would be a good one for Writing Wiki ultimately, but thought I would post it in the Café first.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

What gets your protagonist up and running is an interesting area of writing. In many stories, it's the antagonist that jolts the protagonist into doing something...they react rather than act in a proactive way.

This is certainly true in my Cornish Detective stories, for it's not as if my hero detective goes around preventing crimes in a Minority Report way. Instead, he's actually dependent on criminals to give him something to do, which is an aspect of his job that he finds depressing. Even when immersed in an investigation, gathering clues, he's still waiting for another crime to happen. It's partly this reactive aspect of being a sleuth that forces crime writers into giving their protagonists a personal life—so they can be seen to be doing something.