: Advice on portraying my protagonist's anger without making her insufferable Background Info: My main character starts out the story with kind of a sad back story, it's not in a tragic way, just

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You could put her in a situation that forces her to relive her past. That definitely would make her your main character as not only is she confronted with her past but she must do so with something she must deal with in the present.

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Dialogue and monologue.

Dialogue with her friends, one by one, until they leave. With a bartender or barista. On a chat room or a BBS.

Monologue could be writing in a diary or a blog. Or potentially she monologues at her cat, who will look interested only until she's fed.

Whoever the audience is, have the character say out loud the things she's thinking and feeling, with occasional asides of things she's thinking and feeling that she doesn't want to admit out loud.

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One key thing you can do is to have your character fight against their own anger, instead of luxuriating in it. If she's really doing her best to move on, but having trouble --well, most of us can identify with that.

You also don't have to have all the back story come out at once, and you might want to simplify it. If one detail or another has a real and living impact on where the character is now, that gives you an organic approach to it. If it doesn't, do you actually need it?

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Being filled with regret does not necessarilly make your character pathetic.
If what she is regretful about is truly horrible and self-damning, then that regret may be an appropriate response to the loss. It only becomes pathetic in the eyes of your readers, when what has been lost and is now sorrowfully missed, was never real or really valuable in the first place. If you want your reader to empathize with your character, invest in making what she lost real and tangible to them.

Beyond building empathy, you can postpone most readers' judgement of your character by making her aware that this anger and regret are personal faults which need to be healed. Have her struggle to overcome them and to consciously change the way that she sees the world. Most readers will tolerate a little pathetic in their heroes, as long as there is some foreshadowing of the growth which is soon to come.

Finally, consider that anger and regret are not the only way that an unfortunate history can express itself within your character. It can also come out as wisdom and compassion. As she is sitting in a bar, have the bartender offer her another round and with a sad smile, have her pass on the opportunity, reviewing in her mind how she has already paid those dues and therefore doesn't need a repeat. Have her view the bar's other patrons with pity instead of disgust. If you don't want her to seem pathetic, don't paint her that way.

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I suggest a popular literary technique called 'indirect characterisation'

If your writing in first person; write about her thoughts and reasons and actions. If she is approached by someone who speaks and she reveals how that person has affected her ,good or bad.

If in second person you may start a chapter revealing that she had suffered a breakdown and is recovering in a bar, then you hint what's going on in the bar and what affect this has on her senses. Smell of beer, taste of free water, feeling of splinters under the bar table...and so on

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