As I procede with this new story of Jan-Pawel
Trzetrzelewski's youth, I'm running into one of the
most problematic issues in writing a story with a
young protagonist. One of the cardinal rules of
fiction states that the protagonist must solve his or
her own problem, not have it solved by an outside
agency. But when the protagonist is a minor, his or
her latitude of activity is constrained in many ways
by adult authority. How does one create a situation
such that is is believable that the protagonist does
not immediately turn to an adult and hand the problem
over to be solved?
One possibility is a disaster which incapacitates the
normal adult authorities, leaving one's youthful
protagonist without anyone to fall back on. However,
Jan-Pawel's stories are not disaster stories, but more
on the order of spy or international intrigue stories.
Adult authority has not been incapacitated, but is
being subtly undermined from within and without.
Which leads to the second possibility for eliminating
the easy out of simply handing the problem over to the
grownups to be fixed -- adult authority does not
believe that the problem exists, and dismisses out of
hand the evidence offered by the youthful protagonist.
But such a technique must be handled very carefully,
lest it veer in the direction of idiot plot. If the
adult authority figures are so willfully blind that
they refuse to see clear evidence of a problem, simply
because it is necessary to the plot for them to be out
of the loop in this way, the story will suffer for it.
Yet at the same time, it has to be believable that a
villain who can defeat intelligent adults can still be
defeated by a teenage boy.
So tough to find the right balance.
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