Why Every Good Story Needs a Character Who Doesn't Want to Be There
- Glenn Fletcher
- Jul 1
- 3 min read
✦ The Herald Dispatch ✦
Mark the Herald Angel does not want to go to Earth.
He makes this abundantly clear on the bus ride home from the Eternal Herald, after his editor dismisses his story and hands him an itinerary with a single word on it: Earth. He mutters about it. He slumps in his seat. He crosses his little arms. He is, in every particular, a being who has been asked to do something he did not sign up for and does not want to do.
He is, in other words, one of the oldest character types in the history of storytelling.
The reluctant hero. The unwilling participant. The person who would very much prefer to stay home.
I made Mark a reluctant hero deliberately, and not just because reluctant heroes are reliably more interesting than enthusiastic ones. I made him one because reluctance is the honest emotional response to being assigned something genuinely difficult. And Christmas, it turns out, is full of reluctant heroes.
Why Reluctance Makes Better Stories
The enthusiastic hero has a problem: there's nowhere for them to go.
If a character begins a story eager, capable, confident, and fully committed to the mission ahead of them, their arc is essentially flat. They wanted to do the thing. They did the thing. They were right to want to do the thing. Where's the drama? Where's the growth? Where's the internal transformation that makes a reader feel like they've witnessed something real?
The reluctant hero, by contrast, starts in the wrong place. They don't want to go. They're not sure they're the right person. They have serious reservations about the assignment and the place and the whole enterprise. And then — through the experience, through the encounter, through the story itself — something changes. They become, by the end, the kind of person who was capable of doing what they couldn't quite bring themselves to do at the beginning.
That arc is transformation. And transformation is what makes a story worth telling. Mark can't sing at the beginning of the book. Not because he lacks the physical capacity, but because nothing has happened to him yet that would call a song out of him. By the end — standing in a field outside Bethlehem, looking at the face of a newborn King — the song erupts before he can stop it. He didn't become a singer. He became someone who had experienced something so real that silence was no longer possible.
That's what a reluctant hero's journey looks like when it works.
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Christmas Is Full of Reluctant Heroes
Here's what I find so compelling about the Christmas narrative when you look at it through this lens:
Almost nobody in the Christmas story volunteered.
Mary was a teenager in a small town who received the most world-altering announcement in human history without warning. The text says she was "greatly troubled" and "wondered what kind of greeting this might be." That's not enthusiasm. That's a person trying to process something that has no category in their existing experience.
Joseph received a message in a dream that required him to take on a responsibility — and a social cost — that he had not chosen and could not have anticipated. He complied, but compliance under those circumstances requires a particular kind of courage that we tend to undervalue because the story tells us he did it rather than how hard it must have been.
The shepherds were on night shift. They had not applied for the position of first witnesses to the Incarnation. The angels showed up in their field uninvited, terrified them thoroughly before getting to the actual message, and then left them to make their own decision about what to do next.
None of them wanted to be there. All of them went. And all of them were changed by it.
Mark the Herald Angel fits right into that company. He was assigned an assignment he didn't want. He boarded a train to a place he actively disliked. He found the story in the last place he thought to look.
And he sang.
✦ Read the full story of the reluctant reporter who found his song.
MARK! The Herald Angel is available at MarkTheHerald.com.
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