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a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end. The belief I've acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world. But, on the other hand, I've always enjoyed a journey.
    Will Cooper is clearly a man of wisdom. His days have been long. He has experienced much. More than that, he has lived a unique life that was remarkable in its breadth and reach. In his final days, Cooper pays a visit to the Warm Springs Hotel:
    A prominent family from down in the smothering part of the state had come up to the mountains to enjoy our cool climate. The father was a slight acquaintance of mine, and the son was a recently elected member of the state house. The father was young enough to be my child. They found me sitting on the gallery, reading the most recent number of a periodical— The North American Review to be specific, for I have been a subscriber over a span of time encompassing parts of eight decades.
    The father shook my hand and turned to his boy. He said, Son, I want you to meet someone. I'm sure you will find him interesting. He was a senator and a colonel in the War. And, most romantically, white chief of the Indians. He made and lost and made again several fortunes in business and land and railroad speculation. When I was a boy, he was a hero. I dreamed of being half the man he was.
    Something about the edge to his tone when he said the words chief, colonel, and senator rubbed me the wrong way. It suggested something ironic in those hon-orifics, which, beyond the general irony of everything, there is not. I nearly said, Hell, I'm twice the man you are now, despite our difference in age, so things didn't work out so bright for your condescending hopes. And, by the way, what other than our disparity of age confers upon you the right to talk about me as if I'm not present? But I held my tongue. I don't care. People can say whatever they want to about me when I've passed. And they can inflect whatever tone they care to use in the telling.
    The son said, He's not Cooper, is he?
    The passage above accomplishes several things at once. It quickly sketches in for us the broad outline of Cooper's life: it's backstory, yes, but in service of the friction between Cooper and the condescending man speaking about him as if he isn't there. Cooper's irritability over how he's spoken of shows a spark of dignity, which right away
    is tempered by restraint. Step by step, Frazier is building this dying man's strength.
    Most telling of all, though, is the son's awed surprise at finding himself in the presence of the legendary Will Cooper. That is impact. It's key is not the great man himself but the people around him. They, in a sense, make him great.
    Have you ever been in the presence of someone who awed you? My eyes boggled upon meeting the American poet Robert Lowell in a London pub. Shaking the hand of Ray Bradbury at a publishing party in New York, I found myself unable to speak. I once delivered a contract to Isaac Asimov at his West Side apartment and blathered like a fan boy. (Asimov was amused.) I remember each occasion with vivid clarity. Each time I felt small yet lifted and inspired by the great writers before me.
    Is your protagonist great? In establishing her at the outset, it is important to look not toward what she will do later in the story but the impact she has on others now. Her actions will speak, I have no doubt; but who in your hero's circle already has respect, feels awe, so that we can feel it too?
    PROTAGONISTS VS. HEROES
    Who is at the center of your novel, a protagonist or a hero? Is he merely the subject of the story, or a real human being with extraordinary qualities? I hope it is the latter. Every protagonist can be a hero, even from the opening pages. Indeed, that quality is essential if readers are to tag along with your main character for hundreds of pages more.
    It does not matter