There Goes My Hero…

In May, my  husband and I went to the Foo Fighters concert. 

It was AMAZING! 

One of my favorite songs is “My Hero.” 

Rock is all about the big, the flashy, the in your face. The extraordinary. Rock stars and super heroes all seem to live in the same rarefied air of our cultural awe. 

Yet, here is this song, with the lead singer blatantly announcing that his hero is, well…

Ordinary. 

So while those of us in the audience may be looking up to Dave Grohl as musical heroes, he, in turn, is looking back out and essentially saying, 

“Nah, man. You are.” 

I will never be able to command a stadium with my voice (other than perhaps getting them to all chant in unison for me to please stop) or tingle the back of someone’s spine with a guitar solo or pound a kick drum straight through to your heart beat (RIP Taylor Hawkins). Most of the rest of us probably can’t either. 

I’m just ordinary. 

And so are your protagonists. 

Finally! (I know, I do have a point that comes back to our shared love of writing)

Most of us are also not writing super hero adventures. Some of us may be, and that’s a whole different level of fun and challenge to make the extraordinary ordinary (thinking of all those Avenger origin stories!). But the rest of us? 

We’re writing about…

…retirees (The Thursday Night Murder Club)*

…chemists (Lessons in Chemistry)*

…recluses (Where the Crawdads Sing)*

…a young man in Appalachia (Demon Copperhead)*

…Vegas impersonators (The Princess of Las Vegas)*

…orchard owners (Tom Lake)*

…an octopus (Remarkably Bright Creatures)*

And that’s just a cursory glance at my bookshelf. Nothing about these people in a one or two word description is all that extraordinary. They aren’t the stuff of crime fighters with superhuman powers brought on by spider bites or strange faraway planet minerals. 

They are just everyday people in everyday situations forced to step outside their lives for some extraordinary reason to them. It might not even be that extraordinary to the rest of us. 

What makes us love these heroes, turn the page, relate to them, and talk about them with our book clubs and friends and family is that they are ordinary. We can see something of ourselves in them and spend 300+ pages walking in their shoes and wondering if in these strange or unique circumstances, we would do the same things. Make the same choices. Or would we have been braver or more cowardly or chosen a different adventure altogether? 

Our protagonists are ordinary. Doing extraordinary things like…

…finding love

…fighting injustice

…healing their wounds

…honoring their dreams

…surviving each day

What makes your hero ordinary? What can your reader relate to? 

What makes your hero extraordinary? What makes them unique? What thing inside them drives them, motivates them, causes them to make a hard choice without thinking twice about it? 

What has triggered your hero to take an action outside their ordinary? What about their ordinary lives would they do anything to protect? 

Find that inner, ordinary magic in your hero and watch her do extraordinary things! 

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Featured photo by TK on Unsplash

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