Do Readers Need to Like the Main Character for the Success of a Storyline?

    In a nutshell, a storyline can definitely be good without the main character being a likeable person. Many of the movies and television series that I’ve watched over the years have lacked a likeable main character, and sometimes I’ve even found myself rooting for the bad guy. Case in point, my favorite character in the movie Heat was Robert De Niro, and I sincerely hoped that he would’ve gotten away with robbing the bank and lived happily ever after with his girlfriend. Unfortunately, he didn’t escape and was shot to death by Al Pacino in the end.

Cuba Gooding Jr.

    One of my all-time favorite movies from the 90s was Boyz N The Hood. The main character in the movie was Tre Styles played by Cuba Gooding Jr., and many would say that he was a likeable guy on the surface―he was a good student, he was a good friend to Ricky Baker played by Morris Chestnut, he had a part-time job at the mall after school, and he had a great relationship with his father played by Laurence Fishburne. However, he wasn’t all that great of a guy as a protagonist in my humble opinion even though he had some good qualities. For starters, he did what a typical teenager would do which was to pressure his girlfriend Brandi, played by Nia Long, for sex and tried the manipulation tactic of the silent treatment to get her to cave in. Lastly, a small detail that I overlooked the first couple of times I watched the movie was when Tre and Ricky went to the grocery store to get some cornmeal, and a beggar asked Tre if he had any money. Tre curtly answered no, and in the very next scene, he disrespectfully threw some loose change at the guy who asked him for money initially.

    The fact that Tre was an asshole to that beggar didn’t take anything away from the storyline because it was a true-to-life situation that happens every day. Furthermore, it wasn’t mandatory for the main character of a movie like Boyz N The Hood to be a good guy, but fans can still appreciate that Tre was a real person with flaws.

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Self-Published Authors Must Be Tech-Savvy

    I remember when I started writing my first book, What Happened to Little League Baseball in the Inner City? back in 2006, I’d just turned forty years old and didn’t even have a computer at the time. I used an archaic typewriter that had correction tape for each time I made a typo, and I must’ve rewritten my book at least a dozen times because it didn’t flow the way that I wanted. My initial goal was to complete my book and deliver it the traditional way―which was to mail it to a publisher that was accepting manuscripts from prospective new authors. Once I realized that nobody was accepting manuscripts by snail mail, I decided to invest in a personal computer.

Tech-Savvy Woman

    I literally had no clue how to use a computer because I was a novice in every sense of the word. I didn’t know what virus protection was or what a Windows update was for that matter, but I had an unrelenting desire to learn the functionality of a computer. Once I was up to speed in terms of navigating my PC, I decided to self-publish and use a vanity publisher. However, that was a huge mistake―but that’s another article for another day. The best thing to come out of my first self-publishing experience was that I became self-sufficient and tech-savvy enough to strike out on my own and publish my books directly on Amazon and other online retail outlets.

    This is just a quick PSA mainly geared toward new authors who are of the Gen X age range or older and may be less tech-savvy than the vast majority of people under the age of forty. If you plan on self-publishing your first book, it’s an absolute necessity to learn the fundamentals of a computer and navigation of the Internet so that the entire process runs as seamless as possible.

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