: Re: Is it a bad idea to have three protagonists? I'm writing a story that involves three main characters. They appear in linear form, each one's story leading to the other. So for example character

@Karen856

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Brandon Sanderson's Elantris does this to good effect. There are three protagonists, all of whom are intelligent, strong characters who are competent enough to carry a story on their own:

Crown Prince Raoden, the most beloved man in the kingdom of Arelon. His father is not a particularly competent king, and Raoden is the only one who has a good chance of holding the kingdom together. Unfortunately, the book opens with the curse of the Shaod falling upon him, a chaotic magic that turns him into what the author once described as "a zombie leper." He gets thrown into the ruined city of Elantris, which was once a glorious place but is now a filthy oubliette where Arelenes send those who have been transformed to forget about them. From this point on, the rest of the kingdom considers him dead.
Princess Sarene of Teod, Raoden's fiancee in a political marriage to cement an alliance between Teod and Arelon. She arrives by ship soon after Raoden's transformation and is not told about what really happened to him, due to the highly embarrassing nature of the Shaod. Instead, she is told that he died while she was en route, and by the terms of the marriage contract, she is officially considered his widow. Due to the political nature of the marriage, she's required to remain in Arelon.
Gyorn Hrathen, a high priest of Shu-Dereth, a foreign religion that combines all the scariest and most authoritarian aspects of the Roman Empire, the Vikings, and militant Islam. He's been sent to Arelon to convert the people before the Wyrn (Pope/Caliph/etc) of Shu-Dereth decides to launch a holy war and wipe out the Arelene unbelievers. He doesn't want such slaughter, so he sets to the task of trying to bring Shu-Dereth to the people. He arrives at roughly the same time as Sarene.

The story alternates between the three viewpoint characters by giving them one chapter each in strict rotation: a Raoden chapter, a Serene chapter, a Hrathen chapter, then a Raoden chapter, and so on. In Teod they view Shu-Dereth as a religion of evil, which sets up a direct conflict between two of the protagonists right off.

Meanwhile, Raoden may have been thrown into Elantris, but he refuses to believe that his life holds nothing more for him than to rot away and become a miserable zombie leper, so he tries to figure out ways to improve things for himself and the other victims of the Shaod in Elantris. And eventually, as the plot goes on, he starts to interact directly with Sarene and Hrathen for various reasons.

The three character rotation structure works well as a rule to write by, and it also works well when the author breaks the rule: when the story begins to approach the climax, the strict viewpoint rotation falls apart, which really adds to a sense of wild, chaotic plotting and helps build tension for the reader.

If you want to do a three-protagonist story, you could do a lot worse than to study how Brandon Sanderson did it in Elantris, because he did it really, really well.

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