#multiple protagonists

Edition reviewed: Wolitzer, M. (2014). Sleepwalking. New York: Riverhead Books. 

Original publication: Wolitzer, M. (1982). Sleepwalking. New York: Random House. 

Sleepwalking takes place two years after the death of the fictional poet Lucy Ascher, who killed herself after many years of depression defining her life and her poetry. It follows Claire Danziger, a first year university student with severe depression and an adoration of Ascher and her poetry. She meets two other girls who, like her, devoutly love a poet – Naomi, with Sylvia Plath, and Laura, with Anne Sexton. They are called the Death Girls. They meet each night, light candles, and talk about their poets and their deaths.

Claire begins a relationship with Julian, a boy unfamiliar with poetry and death, and she begins to feel unfulfilled in her relationship with Ascher’s poetry and the way it defines her life. Taking the advice of the other Death Girls, she finds the home of Lucy Ascher and offers her services as an au pair to Lucy’s parents, Ray and Helen. The plot diverges, Lucy’s childhood through to adulthood and death and the lives of her parents from the beginning of their relationship through to the ways her suicide both violently and insidiously changed their lives unveiling alongside Claire’s childhood and family history, while in the current day, Claire shares a home with the Aschers and the other Death Girls and Julian try to get her back.

Sleepwalking is a beautiful and winding expose on grief, human connection, and the way that writing and poetry can change and meld and save lives.

Aesthetics: 8/10 

Perspective: First person Tense: Past tense Focalising characters: Four (Claire, Helen, Ray, Lucy) Style: Ruminative poetic prose, slightly varying with each focalising character. The influence of the poets on each Death Girl is clear in their speech. Characters: Very real and immensely sympathetic. World-building: Vivid, detailed, and just as Claire observes of Lucy’s poetry, Wolitzer ‘did the most incredible thing – she made death a landscape’ (17), but made it something liberating, rather than suffocating. Pacing and structure: Two parts in fourteen chapters; slow – the events of the novel in the current day span little more than a month, but could have been months.

Ethics: 7/10 

Sleepwalking is unlike any other book I’ve read which focuses on mental illness and/or suicide, particularly in the context of books about artists, authors, or poets. It is very explicit in representation of self-harm and suicide, but it doesn’t romanticise them. The Death Girls do so in the beginning, but it changes over time. The book makes mental illness real and horrible in the characters’ own headspaces, and while the writing is poetic and beautiful, it doesn’t cast the themes in the same light. It makes beautiful the small, day to day and mundane things, and it also makes beautiful recovery and moving on, which is so rare, particularly in YA and NA books. The Death Girls stay loving their poets, but they stop self-destructing in the name of that love.

The portrayal of drug use and underage sex is somewhat detached – it preaches nothing.

It’s horrific for a stranger to come into the home of a celebrity’s parents under false pretences, and while it has a good result, it’s never quite acknowledged how invasive Claire was in coming to the Aschers.

The cast of characters is quite small and focused tightly on families; it’s not particularly diverse. The Danziger family is Jewish and it’s integrated through the text naturally, which is lovely. The portrayal of people of different ages was something I really appreciated – developing from childhood through to middle age, they all seemed real and dynamic, and the middle aged characters weren’t written with derision as they sometimes are in books centred on young adults. Their suffering and recovery are treated just as seriously as Lucy’s and as Claire’s.

Rhetoric: 8/10 

I read this book in less than twenty-four hours, much of that reading time being between midnight and six a.m., which is a big deal. It was an experience of ‘can’t put it down’.

The Aschers so willingly taking Claire into their home seems, in hindsight, almost absurd, but midst the depth of their grief and the disruption of their lives of the years since their Lucy’s death, I didn’t even question it. However, they questioned it and themselves, and reflect on how it was a bizarre choice to make. Their self-awareness made it seem real.

Fun fact: Wolitzer says that the book ‘predates the Brat Pack era that would follow it in a couple of years; this book does not feature a college world ... of careless debauchery, but instead one of bookish, brooding self-consciousness’ (xiv). Funnily enough considering her scorn, Wolitzer has been considered part of the literary Brat Pack for decades, alongside those such as Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis. She is right, though – while still a part of the Brat Pack, as a campus novel it is far different from The Secret History or Rules of Attraction.

Would recommend: Yes, with the caveat that it could be triggering for some, and probably with a reading age of eighteen and up, with a limit of perhaps fifteen. If you don’t like ‘slow’ books it’s probably not for you.

1. Start small. Two, three at most. 

Go with five, seven, nine, or more on your first outing, and it’s gonna get away from you fast. You’re going to end up throwing out half your plans and setting for one of the so-called protagonists getting an arc that consists of deciding whether to get the baked beans or the refried beans. It’s just way too much, unless you know you’ve got the room to write 500K words (and an audience that will stick with you that long). 

So, let’s say three protagonists.

2. Give them a shared goal but different motivations. 

So, Alice, Bernice, and Candice all want to kill the dragon. That’s their ‘what’ -- it’s their ‘why’ that differs. Alice wants to avenge her brother, Bernice wants the bounty to pay her college tuition, and Candice's family will disown her if she’s not a brave warrior.

By giving them differing reasons -- and, one hopes, differing ideas on how best to achieve the end -- you get a good conflict. It’s not just three people arguing about which route to take; instead, they’ll argue over whether to take the trolley or walk or skateboard. 

An alternate way -- and much harder -- is to give them the same basic motivation (ie “avenge our family”) but different goals. The risk is the story may quickly spiral out of control unless you let one of the protagonists be more-right -- balancing all three requires epic-sized texts or a really good sense of parallel conflicts. 

If you haven’t done multiple protagonists before, this alternate approach means chances are good you’ll end up with one protagonist and two supporting secondary protagonists. 

3. Figure out how they complement each other. 

If Alice is the extrovert who can charm anyone into telling their secrets, then make her someone who tells her own secrets too easily, as well. Then Bernice becomes the pragmatic one, who can reel Alice in before she starts telling everyone their super-secret plan. But Bernice has major trust issues, so she won’t welcome potential allies without a very good reason. That means Candice becomes the thoughtful one, who can provide rational reasons so Bernice is comfortable with risk. Except Candice is, hmm, horribly shy, and Alice is the only one who can distract/ease Candice enough to get her to talk. 

4. Figure out how they clash, too. 

They won’t start being able to balance each other, after all. Remember: when characters interact, their conflicts result in choices, and the progress of their choices towards their end is, in effect, their arc. In the first half of the story, when things are going wrong and they’re scrambling to catch up with (or reacting to) the antagonist, use each of them against each other. 

5. Tie them together, thematically, but give each a motif.

Let’s say the underlying theme is that one person can make big changes if they work together with others. So when the protagonists can cooperate or compromise, they have some measure of success. That’s your guideline for each scene, to reflect that thematic throughline. 

For each individual character, you then find a variation on that, and a way to represent that, which becomes your motif. It can be pretty abstract. Say, Alice’s motif is water -- from a mountain creek when she talks too much, to a rushing brook, to a gentle mighty river that draws from multiple sources. Bernice’s motif could be blades, so her POV might use metaphors related to sharpness of an edge, or gradually recognizing the need for a shield to balance the offensive strikes. And Candice’s motif could be weaving; from simple threads to colorful blankets to intricate tapestries, reflecting the growing complexity of her plans.

6. Keep them together as long as possible.

No, seriously. The “three people in three places each journey to one place to meet” doesn’t just make for confused (even annoyed) readers. It’s also damn hard work, ‘cause you’re basically doing three first-chapters in a row. Still, as long as you can make clear how each fits in, you can possibly ride through that. 

Frex: if we meet Alice first and learn she’s off to kill a dragon, then we meet Bernice on her own roadtrip and we find out right away she’s also going to kill the dragon, we can see these two will probably meet up. Add Candice, with her own comments about killing a dragon, and the readers will know where you’re going. 

What is definitely god-tier is keeping the protagonists on completely separate journeys, never meeting until the end. That’s hard, and I don’t recommend that without a crapload of stories under your belt and possibly some serious rethinking. And maybe some internal prep for the reality that some readers will choose a favorite character and simply skip the other two POVs. 

7. Get comfortable with writing ignorant narrators.

One thing about multiple protagonist POVs is that a conflict (scene) should get a reaction (sequel) where we get the same character’s POV for their decision and new goal. If that argument was important enough to the character that they got POV, then they should get the reaction beat, too. 

However, if that conflict was with another protagonist, then you need to weave in the other characters’ reactions, too. This is where it helps to learn how to give clues on another characters’ true emotional state while keeping the POV character suitably distracted and/or unaware. I won’t go into the ways, here, but studying up on unreliable narrators is probably the easiest approach. 

I tend to give the non-POV character body language that conveys an emotion, but I don’t let the POV character stop to interpret, or even react. It just goes right on past them, and it’s there for the reader to read between the lines. I don’t know if that’s really the best way, but the feedback I’ve gotten is that it works, so there you go. 

8. Write the first draft, then check the word count per POV.

Sometimes the story really is a single-protagonist with two (or more) secondary characters. The quickest way to discover that is really just to write the story, and then go back and count up who gets how many words in their POV. I have a WiP where I went into the first draft thinking it was four equal protagonists, only to discover half the POV goes to one character, and the remainder is split equally between the 2nd and 3rd, with only a fraction left for the 4th. Looks like that story does have a main protagonist, after all. 

If you’re determined to balance all three, an old (but quite workable) trick is to alternate chapters. One POV for each, regardless of scenes. The problem is that sometimes, a character will be at a part of their arc where they don’t have the biggest stakes in the chapter’s events. That’s where outliners have something over pantsers, to be able to plan ahead for the conflicts+outcomes that will shape the event, to make sure the right character holds POV. 

Even then, still check the word count. If you find Alice’s chapters are all 8K monstrosities and Bernice’s chapters are all 2K dual-scene chapters, then you’re probably heading towards protagonist+secondaries, again. 

9. Make sure the story’s big enough to support that many protagonists.

This is possibly the hardest (at least for me, I guess) because it means you need an antagonist (or more than one) who provide enough of a threat that the story requires all three to achieve any victory. If you get to the end and Alice does all the work killing the dragon, you need more than just the dragon. 

It means you need to create antagonists who parallel the protagonists, and each antagonist must -- while also being allied with each other, or tied to each other, in some way -- have a goal that stands in direct opposition to a protagonist’s goal. 

That means, say, a local lord who has no intention of paying out the bounty, so he’s going to block the trio so Bernice can’t get the bounty. And maybe there are cousins who’ll inherit if Candice fails, so they’re supplying the dragon with extra firewater to make sure the dragon’s unbeatable. And, of course, the dragon, who might have it in for Alice personally as the lone family member of the guy who cut off the dragon’s foot. Etc, etc. 

Hopefully that gives you enough to think about, as you’re figuring out the story’s shape before you start writing. Or, just start writing and see where it goes -- and add in complications as you need them. Then go back, and figure out what needs more foreshadowing or earlier scenes to support the later complications (ie, mentioning ahead of time that the dragon’s awfully pissed off for having lost a foot, or that the local lord is a greedy bastard).