Young Writers Society

I just began writing one of those spontaneous stories that just pop out of my head. The main character is a thief, and i have to justify his strange action. That is, getting deliberately caught.

The thing is, my character is a rebel who likes to make trouble, and he steals an item of power in order to send a sort of message to the king. ( the kind of message that says 'haha, here I am, f u, you can't even prove I'm a thief). It ticks a lot of people off, especially the monarch. (who the protagonist knows personally.)

The thing is, my protagonist is exactly the cocky, over confident sort of guy to be able to pull it off. But I don! Know how to make him seem.... I don't know. Less petty? He has a powerful motivation behind the theft (greater good, yadda yadda) but this scene is early into the story, and although I do want to explain his character in more deph, I'm just not sure how to pull this off and make it right. Any advice?

Let people wonder "what the heck is he doing?" for awhile. His greater motivations will be revealed in time, and it'd probably force the story into boring infodump territory if you tried to get all his motives into place in one early scene.

Just focus on making it interesting so we keep reading. Let us figure out the rest.

Ooh, interesting predicament!

First thing- listen to Rosey. Interest is the key.

One of my favourite series of all time (which I won't name) has a protagonist who plays the perfect lax, overly cool guy who makes everything look stylish. He's the kind who's tall and proud and don't need nothing from no-one and all that jazz. Sometimes it seems like he doesn't even care if he lives or dies, because he's so reckless. He's there as a mechanism for everything else to swing around until the last two episodes when... Hey, what?

Enter the girl who tore out his heart and suddenly that haphazard, careless, don't-need-nobody demeanor makes sense in a thousand different ways.

His character is what made that series so amazing and yet it wasn't even revealed until the final two episodes.

Okay, I'm getting to the point. You can't reveal a deep, amazing inner motive too early, otherwise your reader will be totally confused. Resist the urge to try and make him perfect and let him be a petty, arrogant twoop for the first few chapters. All you have to do is give him a bit of wit and a sweet charm to keep your readers in.

Don't forget that you have to make your reader trust you, so in the beginning you need to establish concrete personalities that your reader can attatch themselves to. If you go too deep too fast and bring in the alternative motives early then it will seem like you don't know what you're talking about or too rapidly changing and your reader won't trust you. Then it doesn't matter how great your character is because they won't feel that sense of curiosity or attatchment because they'll expect you to let them down.

Added note: I recently had this same problem with one of my own protagonists, trying to reveal the darker side of his personality too soon. The solution (courtesy of a friend) was to drop a subtle hint about his childhood when his mother got called into school, a fearful looking headteacher and a remark she made to my protagonist afterwards. It drops a hint that there is something else there without me infodumping or divulging too much information.

In your case you could make a subtle hint about him choosing the lesser of two sins without explaining what the other sin is- which would show that he has a concience and an alternative motive without conflicting with the above advice.

I read a book where the main character was a thief. He purposely got caught so he could learn from a master criminal.