Okay, up front: I don’t like passive protagonists. I’m enthralled by characters that take action. I like reading about people who have goals worth fighting for. People who engage with the world around them, challenge power structures, and fix problems. I would put some examples here of main characters who fail to do any of that, but nothing makes me forget a book faster than a boring hero.

And yet, one of my WIPs deliberately features a passive protagonist. What gives? Let me try to explain myself instead of donning the ‘hypocrite’ label and getting on with my day.

I’ve been finally putting words to an outline I wrote in 2018. The project is called Proverbs for Rejected Kids. I’m sitting at ~46,000 words, which puts me at a little over half finished. I estimate about ten more chapters to wrap the book up. My first twelve chapters have been positively received by beta readers, because I’m a crazy person who revises as I write. (This is not an efficient process. I don’t recommend it to anyone. But I’m very happy. I keep the brain fatigue away by swapping between projects, which, again, I don’t necessarily recommend.)

It helps that I create meticulous outlines before I start a project. I’ve known exactly what will happen in this story for three years. Chiefly, I know that the story arc I wanted for my protagonist was for him to develop agency by refining his sense of injustice.

This is a queer, contemporary YA story. In many ways, it’s a very typical coming-of-age plot. Micah Parks faces hardship, makes friends, turns fifteen, and charts a new course in life.

Doesn’t that sound like a phenomenally boring premise? Let me put it this way:

In a conservative Texan family, Micah Parks was the good child: quiet, academic, respectful. But the fragile niche he carved out for himself crumbles when his parents learn that he kissed their pastor’s son. He’s shipped across state lines to atone at a reform camp for delinquent teens and is plunged into a hell that he can’t be convinced he deserves. At the eleventh hour, his rebellious older sister, the black sheep of the family, comes to his rescue. But how can he rebuild a relationship with her when he’s just coming around to the idea that he’s allowed to rebuild himself? And where can they go, if their parents don’t want them back?

I think, if this book is for you, that pitch will get your attention. Personally, I don’t know anybody who ended up at a reform camp– But it’s one of the boogeymen you worry about when you’re a gay kid in a conservative community.

At the same time, this book isn’t really about being persecuted for being gay. I feel like we’ve had enough stories in that vein. It’s about a kid with parents who have stifled his development at every turn. Here are things that Micah is: judgmental, responsible, caring, obedient. It’s the last one that gets him in trouble, considering that his parents can’t be pleased. Here’s what they want him to be: perfectly respectful at all times, even as their expectations for ‘respectful behavior’ shift like sand.

But the book’s not about them either. It opens with Micah’s father leaving him in hell. Micah faces six weeks in reform camp with the mindset that, if he’s just ‘good enough’, he can control how other people treat him. So he doesn’t take action even as he witnesses other boys, who are less determined to fly under the radar, be abused.

This story is told in the first-person; we witness the reform camp’s idea of discipline through Micah’s eyes, and yet he’s determined to not get involved in any of it. And that’s why he works as a protagonist. He has things that he desperately wants–recognition of his personhood, acceptance and respect, or even just companionship from someone who will listen to him–and he does what he thinks it will take to get them. In the early chapters, that might mean ‘he does nothing’. According to my beta readers, the story’s working so far, since the internal reconciliation of Micah’s expectations with his experiences is an engaging conflict in itself.

Obviously, a protagonist who only wants the plot to stop happening is a tedious construction. If I wrote this story to be about Micah wanting to not stay at the reform camp and made his victory leaving the reform camp, then I think readers would simply question why it takes him so long to just hop the freaking fence. That conflict would feel artificially prolonged unless he had a really good excuse, like being under the thumb of authority figures every second of the day. Not something I think anyone wants to read, since abuse is depressing.

So, what Micah wants is to have his efforts recognized by the same people who would never, ever give him that validation. It’s not attainable. We’re along for the journey it will take him to reach this understanding.

And that’s the first half of the book. More to follow.