Bullies are a very common, almost ubiquitous obstacle for young protagonists.  More often than not, I feel they’re stale, one-dimensionally malicious characters with incredibly thin motivations. (Hell, even Galactus has a better reason for consuming the Earth, and he’s apparently a cosmic dust cloud now).

If you’d like to use a bully, one alternative I’ve never seen would be to do a bully as a protagonist. I’ve never seen that before. You may be thinking something like “of course, because such a character would be so unlikable, you dumb ****.” Granted, likability would be a challenge.  However, if Kickass’s tween serial killer and adult serial killers like Sylar or Dexter can be likable, and I think they are, a likable bully is feasible. (However, making the bully likable might be harder, because it’s harder to give a bully good intentions, whereas you can have the serial killer prey on bad guys). So our writing exercise today is to come up with as many possible story hooks for a bully protagonist, preferably one the audience likes even if they don’t want him to succeed as a bully.

Here’s what I came up with…

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Your proposal needs to accomplish two main goals:  1) show that there are readers out there and 2) show that you are well-poised to grab them.  First, sell your strengths, the factors that make your concept more likely to succeed.  Second, cover your weaknesses.  There probably will be some, particularly if you’re a first-time author.

To get you started, I’ll run you through how I would go about planning a proposal for a nonfiction book about how to write fan-fiction. (If you’d like to write such a book, go for it).

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