The Tierno Times– Issue 7: What Makes A Hero

Every good story has its heroes, but what defines a hero?  How are some heroes greater than others and what can you as a writer do to see that the Reader views him as heroic?  The answers are not all that hard but are worth enumerating.

First off, the obvious.  A hero has to have some heroic qualities.  Or at least some positive qualities.  He can be flawed, even have some negative traits, but in the end there has to be a reason why we would root for him in the first place.  Or even Care about him.

Then there is the subject of what he faces.  Basic rule:  The more bad stuff the hero faces, the worse the villain, the more the Reader will applaud when the hero finally overcomes.  A mediocre Villain will result in a mediocre Hero.  The Hero's steel must be tempered by the fires of his villain.

Bend but do not break.  You can keep shoveling the oppression and troubles onto the hero's back until he nearly breaks from the strain, but do not break him completely or you will have written yourself into a hole.  No matter how bad the villain makes things for him, the Hero must still have at least a single shred of resistance left, something upon which he can build for his comeback.

The Hero's final comeback should be dramatic, and when he faces his villain such a confrontation is best done one-on-one.  This is where you can pull out all the stops and have your Hero give the Villain his comeuppance.  If you've done it right, then your Readers should be jumping up out of their seats cheering at the result.

A good example is a character out of my Cyberdawn series. Black Jack Hannigan spends most of the five books getting chases, set up for murder, hunted by unspeakable supernatural creatures, cursed by a witch, unwittingly made to betray his friends and their common cause, and goes insane as a result of a number of things. But his comeback? Well, that's a couple of chapters not to be missed. Ever see someone use their own insanity as a weapon?

In my Maldene series the hero in this case might be considered as being the collective of characters struggling against the villainous Miro for some baker's dozen books. Every imaginable bit of connivery, misery, and torture that Miro can put everyone through in his quest to own the very stars themselves, even to his actually winning and killing off a good chunk of the galaxy's population in the process. The heroic comeback? yeah, it's dramatic alright, and a number of Maldene's heroes have a part in it, though one in particular that gets the honor of bloodying Miro's nose.

Definitely a seat-jumping cheering moment.