Photo by Cody Black on Unsplash

Today’s guest post is by book coach Erin Radniecki.

War. Job promotion. Illness. Engagement. Divorce. Birth.

Which of these events are positive, and which are negative?

The answer is: it depends on your perspective. And when we’re talking about fiction, it depends on the perspective of your protagonist. Nothing in your story has meaning until your protagonist gives it meaning.

That may be a strong statement, but without context, any element of a story has the potential to be positive or negative, helpful or harmful. Your reader needs a frame of reference—a lens through which they interpret the story—to fully understand what’s happening, and that lens is provided by your protagonist.

What is context versus perspective?

Let’s lay out some definitions before we continue.

Context is the circumstances, specific to a character, that give meaning to an object, an event, or a person. It is the accumulation of experiences that informs the way they think, the choices they make, and the prejudices they have. No two people have the same context, and that includes characters in your fiction.

Closely related to context is perspective. Perspective is a mental view, a way of seeing a situation, and it is largely determined by context. I say “largely determined” because elements of perspective can also be inherited from our family or cultural experience.

For example, if someone grows up in a family that believes a particular occupation is honorable, that is likely to affect their perspective. Similarly, if someone grows up in the shadow of a past war, the trauma of their fellow citizens can trickle down to them, even if the event itself occurred before they were born.

This matters because your reader also has inherited perspective, and keeping that in mind helps you write in a way that directs their understanding of the protagonist’s experience.

What does this mean for your protagonist?

Just because society at large (which includes your reader) generally associates certain words, events, or milestones as positive or negative, it doesn’t mean that your main character will feel the same way. Readers need to understand where the protagonist is coming from.

• A divorce for someone who loved their spouse would be a tragedy, while for someone in an unhappy or unhealthy relationship, it could be a god send.
• A job promotion for a driven individual could feel like a reward, but it could be a punishment for someone who is unhappy and feels trapped in their career.

Understanding a character’s context might require being aware of their backstory, which can be conveyed to readers through various means, including flashbacks or dialogue. For example, author Kimberly Brubaker Bradley grabs the reader’s attention with the title of her Newberry Honor novel The War That Saved My Life. It seems incongruent because usually wars are viewed as negative. But the context provided by the protagonist, 10-year-old Ada Smith, demonstrates that the war, in her perspective, had the positive effect of saving her life, even as it caused hardship for everyone it touched, including her.

Why missing context is problematic

If you center commonly held assumptions of good and bad in your story, you might assume that your reader will glean the meaning and motivation of your main character based on societal norms. But it’s essential to let your reader know how your protagonist feels about events in your novel. If you don’t put that context on the page, the reader will fill the void from their own experience and may reach the wrong conclusion.

Additionally, it’s not uncommon for writers to unconsciously align their main character’s perspective with their own. When this happens protagonists react and make choices not because of the experiences they’ve had, but because that is how the writer would react.

That’s why it’s important to define your protagonist’s context and refer back to it throughout the writing process. Take care that your personal context doesn’t creep into your story and take away the main character’s own agency to make the choices that are right for them. Ask yourself: Given what I know about this character, would they react in this way?