Spotlight Your Main Characters

Every sentence tells a story.

And your reader has one question the moment they start reading it: Who is this story about?

A film director faces the same question. Their answer is simple: put the character at the center of the shot.

When Spielberg wants you to care about a certain character, he doesn't leave him in the corner of the frame. He centers him. Your eye goes where the director puts the subject of the shot—and that, instinctively, is who you care about.

Writers have the same tool. It just has a different name.

The Subject Position Is the Center of the Shot

In writing, the center of the shot is the subject position: it's the structural location that tells readers what the sentence is about.

Your reader's eye moves through a sentence the same way a viewer's eye moves through a film frame. It looks for the center—the thing the shot is about—and that's where it plants its attention. In a sentence, the center is the grammatical subject. Whatever you put there is who the sentence belongs to.

Consider the same moment framed four different ways:

Same information. Four different stories: Tom's story, Jerry's story, the towel's story. It all depends on what you center.

This is the writer's version of shot composition.

When you choose what goes in the subject position, you're choosing the main character of that sentence.

What Goes Wrong

Directors learn early: if you want the audience to care, keep the camera on the character.

Writers forget this.

They drift toward putting abstractions at the center of their shots. The characters get pushed to the edges. They show up in possessive phrases and prepositional clauses and adjectives, structural locations that instruct readers to ignore them and focus on whatever's in the spotlight. The characters appear like extras hovering just out of frame.

Here's a sentence with its characters hidden:

Who is the main character?Administrators.

Where are they—center stage? No, they're hiding in an adjective (administrative) while the abstract noun delays holds the center of the shot. The reader is told to focus on an abstraction (delays) instead of a character (administrators).

Now the same sentence, shot differently:

Same information. Different shot. Now there's a character at center. The reader knows whose story this is from word one.

Where Characters Hide

When characters aren't in the subject position, they're usually hiding in one of three places.

1. In possessives. 

The writer's fear centers fear, not the writer. The character is treated like an extra—the incidental possessor of fear instead of standing in the spotlight.

2. In prepositions.

This prepositional phrase puts recommendation in the spotlight, not the publisher, who is the real flesh-and-blood character in this scene.

3. In adjectives. 

Congressional support puts the spotlight on an abstract action (support), not the character who carries out that action (congress). The character has dissolved into a modifier.

Once you know where to look, you start seeing this everywhere.

How to Fix It

The diagnosis is simple:

1. Underline the first seven or eight words of a sentence.
2. Analyze the noun phrase to find who/what is in the head noun—that's what's in the spotlight. Could you draw it? Could you stub your toe on it? Is it capable of performing the action of the verb?
   If not, it's an abstraction.
3. If it's an abstraction, look for the character hiding behind it—in the possessive, preposition, or in adjectives; or sometimes it's implied—then move that character to the head noun.

Take this sentence:

The worry of the students was that an assignment of homework from the teacher would take place.

Who's this story about? The students, and the teacher.

But both are pushed off-center—the students is possessive, the teacher is prepositional. The subjects are worry and an assignment. At the center of this sentence is not a flesh-and-blood character, but abstract actions dressed up as nouns.

Reframe the shot:

The students worried that the teacher would assign homework.

Now the students steps into the center, and the teacher follows right behind.

The sentence tells a story about characters. The reader knows what to focus on.

Who Your Characters Can Be

I've been stressing the importance of putting flesh-and-blood characters in the subject position. But that's not always necessary.

A concept can be a character, provided it's familiar enough and you keep it consistently centered through a series of sentences.

Let's say you're writing about inflation.

If you keep inflation in the subject position—inflation rose, inflation eroded, inflation forced the Fed to act—you give readers a virtual character to follow. Inflation is not a flesh-and-blood character; your reader couldn't draw it, see it in their mind's eye, or stub their toe on it. Nonetheless, they can treat it as a virtual character because (1) the concept is already familiar to your specific reader; and (2) it is repeated consistently across multiple successive sentences.

The danger is when you surround an unfamiliar abstraction with other abstractions. Then there's nothing for the reader to hold onto. The camera has no subject; it's just pointed at a wall.

The writing tool is not: never use abstract subjects.

The writing tool is: don't bury your actual characters behind abstractions when you could center them.

Keep the Camera on the Character

The subject position is the center of your shot.

Whatever you put there, that's who your reader thinks the sentence is about. That's who they'll follow, care about, and remember.

When your main character is in the subject position, readers lock on from the first word. But when that spot is taken up by an abstraction, readers can't see what's going on. So they either go searching through your sentence for the real characters, or they give up.

It's the same lesson directors learn in their first year of film school. The camera goes where the story is. In writing, the subject position is the center of the frame.

Train it on your characters.