by Zena Dell Lowe @ZenaDellLowe
I keep harping on this idea that we ought to be writing stories with “heroes-in-the-making,” and heroes-in-the-making are characters who possess selflessness from the very beginning. While your MC must grow and change over the course of the story to become the hero they were always meant to be, they still ought to embody the right qualities from the start -- the kind that make them uniquely suited to lead and mark them as different from the other emerging leaders. In other words, the number one quality that readers want to see in a character is selflessness, which means that the number one way for writers to ruin their story is to make their main character selfish.
