Failures escalate a protagonist’s and writer’s popularity

Readers like to see protagonists fail. Questions become how deep of a failure and how many failures?

Failure creates the tension of wondering how the character will recover and triumph. Failure is the birthplace of story.

We put ourselves into the protagonist’s role and learn from their experience with failure. Stories are about how to solve problems.

Any number of movies, novels, and memoirs show us the value of failure—it’s entertaining, enlightening, energizing, and an education.

“Impressive failures,” a term mentioned by scriptwriter Terry Rossio (co-writer, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.) and quoted widely, is about movie characters who try their best repeatedly through failure after failure until they reach their goal.

Moviegoers also loved the character of John Wick for his series of nonstop, high-energy, hand-to-hand “impressive failures” with bad guys. How many of us put our characters through a lot of broken glass windows or make them tumble down seemingly endless concrete staircases? Maybe it would help if we tried a version of that in our own projects!

Failure as a technique applies to all genres and literature for all ages.

How many failures are good within a single story?

That depends on type of story and length, but suggested principles may be helpful: 1) escalate failures, making things worse next time; 2) the “Rule of 3” works, so try at least three failures; however, popular movies and adult books stretch that to five, six, or more failures in an escalating fashion before the final triumph at the end.

If your project has been passed over or not reviewed well, could it be you don’t have enough failures illustrated? Could it be you have many scenes about failure but they don’t escalate in value or importance?

Writing a novel, screenplay, or memoir is hard: It’s definitely not a “one and done” when it comes to a protagonist (and antagonist) facing trouble and overcoming failures. In this case, failure is your key to success.