Sometimes your protagonist does need to be likable.

I have been really struggling with Act 1 on my new project. It's an assignment. I don't think I would have written this as a spec for the very reasons this Act 1 has been so challenging.

I have written about this many times:

More challenging projects need to have corresponding higher payoffs. I want the risk-reward to fit.

That is, if it's going to be very hard to write and pull off well, I want either the payday for myself to be larger, or the emotional payoff for the audience to be worth the effort.

There is simply no need to make choices that are going to make a difficult job unnecessarily more difficult.

But, what if a certain amount of that financial payoff is guaranteed? As it is in an assignment? Well, that changes the equation.

And it's how you end up writing a project that you would not have written on your own initiative because of its inherent flaws.

And why is this project so challenging?

Because it's based on a true story. And the protagonist isn't all that likable.

Of course, as screenwriters, we like to point out:

Not every protagonist needs to be likable.

This can get especially frustrating when we get the classic studio note, "Make the character more likable!"

"But… But… Not every character…!"

And this is true in the general, big picture sense. There are plenty of awful characters that we can't take our eyes off.

What we are rooting for matters.

Every quarter, I personally help 16 writers in The Writers Lab of ​Story and Plot Pro​ develop their screenplay. We start with story ideas, narrow them down, break the story, outline, and then write them.

I guide them through every step.

And one of the primary things we talk about is controlling what the audience is rooting for.

It's a bit of a magic trick. The audience thinks they choose what they're rooting for, but we dictate it to them from the very first frame.

We do this for dramatic momentum, to generate tension and to give them the most emotionally satisfying ending.

But when it doesn't work, it's glaring and uncomfortable.

When the movie WANTS the audience to root for one thing and the audience doesn't, there is an absolute breakdown in the relationship. They rebel.

They're insulted and their experience is soured.

This is where the note, "We need to make them more likable," comes from.

It's trying to fix the disconnect between what the movie wants the audience to root for, and what they're actually rooting for.

That a character need not be likable does not mean that likability doesn't matter.

If you hear the note, "Make the character more likable," do not assume the problem is with the person giving the note.

We writers have a bad habit of doing this.

Of course, it may be a bad note! Sure. There are plenty of bad notes out there.

But someone says, "You should do this," and we have a way of hearing, "Every story has to do this," and we push back. We resist.

But these are not the same thing.

Examine the note first.

The question is not, does every character need to be "likable?" They don't.

The question is, does this character need to be more likable?

Because there are times when a protagonist absolutely does.

For the story I am writing, our dude is a rich tech-bro going through a midlife crisis.

Now, neither one of these aspects is damning on its own, but the combination of the two is.

It doesn't matter that he's funny and charming; no one wants to watch a rich dude wonder what's important to him and if he made the right choices through his life.

Maybe as a comeuppance, sure, but not as a "poor me" character.

Suck it up. Appreciate what you got. No one cares about your vision quest!

But if this character needs to be more likable, and other characters in other stories don't, how do we tell the difference?

Pair the character's want with the audience's want.

Mixing and matching these two things is what influences just how much discretion we have with how likable and unlikable the character can be.

As storytellers, it's important to understand the difference between:

• Rooting for a character's goal.
• Following a character vicariously.
• Rooting "for" a character.

While a protagonist needs to be compelling in all three, it's only when we are rooting "for" a character that the character needs to be someone worth rooting for.

This is when a character needs to be likable.

Rooting for a character's goal.

When the stakes are higher, and other people pay the price of failure, a likable character is less necessary.

If someone is saving the world, we don't need them to be as "likable." They can be, sure. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that at all.

But we don't need it. What we really just need them to be is exciting to watch.

The stakes are doing the work to invest us in the outcome.

One of my favorite characters is Snake Plissken. A wonderfully nihilistic anti-hero. But I wouldn't want to sit next to him on a flight across the Atlantic.

Bruce Willis in ARMAGEDDON opens the movie chasing his daughter's boyfriend around with a shotgun. We take it in stride because it's Bruce Willis, but let's face it, the guy is a jerk.

But we're still rooting for him when he's trying to save the world.

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA is a small character piece, but the principle is still the same with someone else bearing the weight of failure. The protagonist, Lee Chandler, is pretty awful. We're kind of stuck watching him. But the stakes character is his nephew who's just been orphaned. We want this to work out because of him.

We are halfway through the movie before we learn Lee's story and realize what he has been through.

Following a character vicariously.

This is another time when we don't need the character to be likable. Again, it's fine if they are! It's just not mandatory.

We need these characters to make interesting choices, show us fascinating worlds and, often, do the things we wouldn't be willing to do ourselves.

That's what makes them fun to watch.

Tony Montana in SCARFACE, Michael Corleone, Richard III.

We may find ourselves rooting for these characters within scenes, but we are not emotionally attached to them getting what they want.

In fact, we usually don't want them to! Or at least we realize they shouldn't get it.

Sometimes a bad character is fighting a good fight.

Maybe the stakes aren't high, but the principle is. I am specifically thinking of PAYBACK here with Mel Gibson. The man was wronged. He doesn't want anything other than to right what's wrong.

The lengths he goes to seem totally disproportionate to what happened.

I would include JOHN WICK, a known mass murderer, in this category as well.

You will notice that casting charismatic movie stars does a lot of heavy lifting to get us to root for these characters as well.

Rooting "for" a character.

This is when the story asks the audience to root for a character to succeed because the character deserves the success.

This is when we actually do need a character to be "likable."

Why?

Because the character's personal want is supposed to directly match the audience's want and there is no other reason for the audience to want it other than that the character does.

We need to want it for them.

So we really need to like them.

This is true of most underdog stories. ROCKY and THE KARATE KID come to mind.

And this includes stories where the protagonist may even learn that what they think they want isn't what they really want — such as BARBIE, who thinks she wants her perfection back only to learn she wants imperfection instead. Or the guys in SUPERBAD, who really just want to accept themselves more than they want to be accepted by others.

This is almost always true in romantic comedies.

When a character is pursuing something that only matters to them, and the stakes don't matter to anyone else, there will be more pressure for the protagonist to be a character worth rooting for.

This is true for my new story.

This character goes on an adventure that only matters to him. Whether he succeeds or not only matters to him.

Now, it's fun and enjoyable, but it's not life or death. It's a personal adventure and a catharsis. And it ends.

If I am going to ask the audience (and the first audience is always the reader) to care about the outcome, I need them to care about him.

And a guy that seems to have no problem in his life other than he's got the sads is a tough place to start.

Here's the thing. The guy is likable enough. He is smart, funny, and he cares about other people.

Petting the dog isn't an issue here.

The problem is that the stakes are all internal. If he fails, he just goes back to his cushy life.

A life that is cushier than most of ours.

So the first thing I need to do is give him some damn problems.

Now, of course, there are infinite choices of what kind of problems we can give him, but there are certain things like family relationships, occupation, and season of life that need to be what they are.

I considered having a close loved one die, something that jolts him out of his existence. This would generate empathy, and maybe pull us into his emotional life, but I'm not sure that's the tone I am looking for.

Ultimately, I decided to attack the very thing that makes him feel separate from us in the first place: his success.

We root for victims.

We are just hardwired this way. And if I could take his professional life out of the success category and put it more in the "just got his ass kicked" column, it would do a lot to get us on his side.

So, that's what I am going to do.

He is going to discover something unethical at his company and he is going to quit.

He could just as easily be fired, but I like the idea of him choosing to do the right thing, too. He chooses to walk away, and it costs him a fortune.

And this is what spirals him into the sads, wondering what kind of business he has committed his life to and what does it all mean.

The hope is that because of this, the audience will see him for who he really is rather than putting up their own wall of why they don't need to care about him.

I'll let you know how it works!

Know what you want the audience rooting for.

This is one of your most important jobs.

It influences and even dictates one decision after another throughout your structure.

You choose this. You control it.

It's impossible to create tension unless you know what it is.

Without it, you're just tossing darts in the third act.

It is absolutely vital that the character and their want work well with it.

If we are rooting for their mission, we don't necessarily need to be rooting for the protagonist.

If we are rooting for unethical things, it's okay if our protagonist is unethical, too.

But if we really want a character to get what they want, for no other reason than it would be satisfying to see them get it…

That character better be worth rooting for because of who they are.