The Spark of the Hero

Why should I care about my hero?

The spark is a sign of humanity.

I call it the spark. I need to see a hero display it. A spark is proof of the hero.

“Prove to me, Mr. Hero, that you’re worth my time and compassion and emotional energy. Why should I hang out with you for two hours or ten episodes or three hundred pages?

“What’s so big about you?

“Why do I care?”

These questions are like daggers in the heart of a writer. If you’re a writer, you feel actual pain when someone reads a passage you’ve written to introduce your hero and asks, “Why should I care?”

Ouchie. Right in the gut.

Yet it’s surprisingly easy to make someone care.

Show your hero helping someone else.

It’s simple. It’s almost silly. But it’s a first impression that sticks with people, even when they want to resist it.

In the first scene of the first episode of the new Amazon series Reacher, the main character, a big guy, walks toward a diner but hesitates when he sees a young man bullying a young woman. Reacher looms over this guy. Reacher stands there and says nothing. He looms. The bully tries to act tough. Then he tries to talk his way out without losing honor. Then the bully caves and promises not to mistreat his girlfriend. “It won’t happen again,” he says.

Reacher, the whole time, says absolutely nothing.

It’s a pretty great opener . . . so simple . . . and funny . . . and relevant to the story that is about to be told about Reacher. I had low expectations for the series, but the opening scene won me over. It also signaled to me that the writers knew what they were doing. They knew how to tell a story. And they had a sense of humor about stock hero scenes.

Helping someone proves your character’s worth to society. 

They are not a danger to us. They are a help to us. Let’s stick around and see what else this hero gets into.

Hurting someone proves your character’s threat to society. 

They are a danger to us. They are here to hurt us. Let’s hope this is the bad guy!

Is it more complicated than that? Nope.

You can find endless examples in the first chapters of novels and the first scenes of movies. Go check ’em out. Watch how the hero is introduced. 

Watch for the spark. 

Sometimes it’s there. Sometimes it’s not. Pay attention to how you feel about the hero. Do you want to keep reading? Do you want to keep watching? Can you put down the novel or stop the movie and feel nothing? That’s a bad sign. Do you feel an urge to return? That’s a good sign. 

Trust your feelings as a reader and a member of the audience, and remember those feelings when you, as a writer, introduce your hero. 

Think about how you want people to feel when you introduce them to your hero.

In The Incredibles, Mr. Incredible helps a half dozen people in trouble. In Roxanne, Steve Martin opens a can of tuna to lure a cat down from a tree. In Sea of Love, Al Pacino leaves a sting operation and sees a delinquent father with his innocent son walking toward it, so he flashes his badge to warn them away but also says, “Catch you later.” In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne endures prison, while pregnant, to protect her lover’s identity.

The hero helps.

It’s like a kindergarten lesson. You learn to share.

Later in the story, you can get into conflict. Later in the story, you can take your kindergartener and throw him into the soccer game and yell, “Get the ball! Take it! Knock ’em down! Don’t let ’em take it from you! Kill ’em!”

Or whatever.

I always imagine the shock of a young kid who’s been told all his life to be nice, and now that kid stands in the middle of the soccer field, totally confused and staring back at Mom and Dad on the sidelines, and saying, “But you said to share.”

When you show the spark of your hero, the spark of helping, that doesn’t mean your hero is an innocent, a goofball, a sap, a dullard, or a sentimental pushover. 

They don’t have to have a heart of gold and a spine of jelly. They don’t have to be a monk or a medical professional on a mission to save the world.

They can have whatever complicated traits you need them to have for your story. Your hero can be ornery and grumpy. They can make mistakes. They can be in a bad place.

The spark is about the first impression. The spark is not about defining the entirety of your hero’s character.

At heart, the hero should be a decent person. How do we know? How do you as a writer show the audience who your hero is? You cannot assume the reader or viewer will share your sympathy for the hero. 

Your hero is like your dog. You love your dog. You know your dog. But a stranger on the street has never met your dog. To them, your beloved pet is just another strange dog. 

And a strange dog can growl or bite as easily as sniff your palm and wag its tail.

So it is with your hero. 

You’ve spent months or even years with your hero, but the audience is meeting the hero for the first time. 

So you have to show us.

You have to prove the worth of your hero.

And writers prove things by showing characters in action.

Words aren’t enough. Your hero can blab all day in exposition and voiceover . . . backstory, backstory, backstory . . . charming one-liner . . . funny observation . . . sassy comeback. Who cares? 

Do something. Put up or shut up.

You don’t have to write the word help. “I helped her cross the street.” Ugh. Your hero doesn’t have to say, “I love to help! I’m a helper!” They don’t have to say anything. They have to act.

The writer shows us the hero bringing dinner to his sick parents, stopping the businessman from walking into traffic, or picking up another kid’s homework in the hallway and turning it in for them. The hero sticks up for someone, keeps someone’s secret, endures ridicule to protect another. The hero stands up for what’s right, however small in scale.

There are many, many ways a hero can help, and the particular way a hero helps can demonstrate a particular quality: self-respect, tolerance, forbearance, courage, wit, compassion, strength.

In fact, you should have the spark relate in some way to the larger story. 

The spark suggests an essence of your hero that will be tested later. We get a glimpse of it here, in the opening scene or chapter.

Is this story about your hero’s courage, your hero’s sense of justice, your hero’s honesty, your hero’s self-esteem?

The spark of the hero is how the writer demonstrates to the reader who the hero is. The spark gives a glimpse into the hero’s essence in order to lure us into following them into the adventure of the story.

Here are two complicated examples, just to show that you don’t have to be simplistic about this.

In Jurassic Park (1993), Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill, responds to a young boy who disrespects dinosaurs at the archeological dig. Alan tells a story about how dangerous velociraptors are and scares the kid into showing some respect for these fearsome creatures. This spark shows Alan’s allegiance to dinosaurs and his commitment to his life’s work. Alan isn’t helping the kid. He’s sticking up for dinosaurs, which is relevant to Alan’s journey in the story. (Later, he sticks up for kids against the dinosaurs.)

Think of Bradley Cooper’s character Phil in The Hangover (2009). We meet him taking money from rich prep-school students for a field trip, which is a con. He’s taking their money to fund his trip to Vegas. This is funny, and we excuse this behavior for a few reasons. First, it’s Bradley Cooper: no fair. Second, he’s a teacher, and teachers are good. Third, he’s taking money from rich prep-school kids, so it’s nothing to them.

Imagine if Phil were taking money from public-school kids . . . or from another teacher’s purse. What if Phil were a cop, and he was stopping those prep-school kids and stealing their money? Hoo-boy, we’d feel a lot differently about Phil in any of these scenarios.

Now think of later in the movie when Phil has to draw on his charming con-artist ways as he works with Alan (Zach Galifianakis, not Sam Neill) to cheat at the blackjack table. Again, we excuse this because it’s a casino. They’re not robbing people on the street. And they’re doing it to save their friend.

The spark can be subtle, like Steve Martin opening a tuna can or Al Pacino flashing a badge, but it can also be obviously symbolic, like the letter A on Hester’s Prynne’s chest or the lightning bolt on Harry Potter’s forehead. A spark, indeed.

You can find discussions of how to introduce your hero in just about every book about writing, from Joseph Campbell to Blake Snyder.

Finally, here’s a weird thing to know about first impressions.

We see someone do a good thing, and we think, “That’s a good guy who may sometimes do bad things.”

We see someone do a bad thing, and we think, “That’s a bad guy, even if he sometimes does a good thing.”

We leap to conclusions based on first impressions. The audience assumes, from the first impression, that a character’s actions are intrinsic to the character’s immutable nature.

In real life, first impressions do not reveal the truth about a person’s character, but how we give meaning to first impressions does reveal how lazy we are, as people and as members of an audience.

We judge. We leap to conclusions. We assume. We do this based on very little evidence, and we are very slow to change our minds.

As a writer, you can exploit this dynamic. 

Show a hero doing a good thing, and we’ll be ready to tolerate, if not even excuse or overlook, his bad actions later in the story. Reacher, in the Amazon series, for example, does a whole lot of bad things in later episodes that would otherwise, in the real world, put him in prison forever.

On the other hand, show a villain doing a good thing, and it’s a great way to disguise that villain. The audience will assume they’re good, so it’ll be a shock when a later scene reveals this character to have betrayed the group.

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PHOTO: Our dog, Rosie, wearing glasses to look at the eclipse