Heroic Reflection (which isn’t sucking your gut in the mirror)

I think this is an appropriate topic (on the writing side, not sucking in my gut), as my current draft has an element of this in it. It’s a heroic style book, with a strong dark and gun-wielding hero, but I don’t really want to admire him from his own point of view. Even in stories with heroes that are larger than life, legendary, those same heroes must be modest, humble, and torn with doubt. Only then can they take actions that raise them above the average. They can’t admire themselves, or even acknowledge their own specialness, as that takes away from the humbleness. So how do you show how great they are, without having them say it, especially if you want to use a limited POV (no obvious narrative voice)?

You have to reflect their greatness from those around them. This can be in the other character’s dialogue, if you want a one POV story, or from other people’s thoughts, if you want to move it to multiple POV. This can even be to the extreme of making the entire narrative be the POV of a secondary character, such as Sherlock Holmes’ Watson. If you don’t want to go that far, you can do it more intermittently, such as the occasional female POV in Louis L’Amour westerns, or just through the dialogue and actions of the surrounding cast, such as the more recent (and very high quality) Red Rising trilogy by Pierce Brown.

A hero can’t admire themselves in the mirror.

Others must admire their sucked-in-gut for them…

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I’m now past the 60% mark on my StoneDragon edit. I’m starting to get energized as the end crawls into sight. I will be SO happy when it is done and I can start doing fun things, like some illustrations and maybe even move to a new story. The question will be whether I want to start something completely new, or shift to another already finished story that needs some editing. It can’t be said that I’m not a sucker for punishment! 😀