Where The Grass Is Green And The Girls Are Pretty: Starting With A Tragedy

It’s very hard to write a novel with an unlikable protagonist. Sometimes you can make them cool, like Dexter in his title series, or you can make them hilarious as with, say the Wolverine in various X-Men media. When you get it right, then you have delighted readers.

Tragedy can still happen in modern times. It doesn’t have to be death necessarily, but you can show a character suffering a great loss. Classically, tragedy happens in fiction because the main character makes a mistake that blossoms into a…