The Non-violent Heroic Confrontation

I came across this in my reading. 

The article considers,
"How does the hero confront violence without becoming violent themself?"
and,
"How intrinsic is violence to the idea of heroism?"

Interesting to me. Maybe a thought-provoker for others who write or review.

Movies: The Irregulars and Gunpowder Milkshake

Both these movies have multi-racial casts and pass the Bechdel test.
For me, that's icing on the cake rather than a requirement.
But — iced cake.

 

I've been looking at Fantasy, Urban Fantasy, and Paranormal books for a while now. Lately I've expanded to movies and TV series.
Endless delights delivered to my computer screen.
We live with such splendid technology.

First, consider the tongue-in-cheek, cynical, and bloody romp that is The Irregulars.

It's "a British mystery adventure crime drama television series" created by Tom Bidwell for Netflix."*

Some paths in the Magical Wood  are well trampled. Beer bottles and McDonald wrappers litter the roadside.
I'll admit to being jaded about powerful lost heirs, schools for angsty teenage wizards**,  colorful squaddies on the battlefield of clashing magical empires, and other staples of the genre.

One could make the case that The Irregulars is wuxia
which is trope and utterly predictable,
but it's a story I like.
Finding such a story with good tropework is sweet. 

Irregulars is a nugget of gold in the spoils pile of the Sherlock fictive universe.

Gunpowder Milkshake also pleased me.
This one glows with subtle, intelligent acting from everybody on the set.

Now, there are long sequences of car chases and kung fu fighting and extras dying bloodily ***.
Presumably the intended audience likes car chases, martial arts, and gore.
Me, I fast forward through that stuff and it does not interfere with my enjoyment of the movie.****
Ain't technology grand?

A study of Jackie Chan's corpus of work might have kept the frenetic action scenes from being so boring.
I dunnoh.
Maybe it would have subverted the spirit of the story . . .
I have no wisdom in critiquing movies and my taste is not especially commercial.

Final thoughts on Milkshake is that it worked for me and I recommend it.  

 

*  I pulled the description from the wiki so it must be true.

** I wasn't much interested in teenagers even when I was one.

*** Some of the violence is disturbing. Most of it is like those old Westerns where cowboys have 37 bullets in their handguns and spin and fall dramatically when hit,

**** Some Romance readers flip past pages of the explicit and go on with the story. It's a skill.

 

Whatever gods there be

I'm thinking tonight about how characters deal with the acquisition and use of immense magical power.

How do you write this?

Ilona Andrews, Patricia Briggs, Nalini Singh, and Charlaine Harris handle this by giving other characters lesser but still important powers. The mucho powerful character is part of a continuum. There's shared experience and a knowledge base. There are systems in place.

Often their power arises from discipline, work, study, diligent effort. The character's attitude toward power is signalled by a history of deliberately building that power. They're not so much conflicted. The character gets a magic sword because they've
trained in swordfighting since childhood.

This is Iron Man's power arc or Batman's. Not Spiderman's. You may still get reconsideration of motive and responsibility in use of power, but it's late in the arc.

Often characters develop new abilities in immediate response to threat. The action separates acquisition of new power from a later intellectual exploration and emotional response to it. The emotional response may be explored in scenes of relative quiet with a trusted advisor.

But the internal response is explored. In an earlier posting I looked at a book where the two protagonists are destined to in some way become an abstract universal constant.
Like becoming Pi or E=MC².
This sounds uncomfortable and destructive to a sense of self,
but we don't see the emotional and intellectual internal fallout in the characters as they grow and change.

The author leaves the story before the characters get more than a taste of their universal constant-hood. The author is not looking at that aspect of the story. We don't take step into the apotheosis because is simply not the author's intent.

How is this handled? How well does this work?

I feel as if  the author deliberately moves the story slightly into mythos mode. Into traditional storytelling. Eastern European Folk tales and American Indian Folk tales show surreal illogic of character motivation. There's virtually no internals and self examination.

I'll have to reread Zelazny's Lord of Light and see how he handles this.

How else?

Well, there's a magical child growing up to be a more-than-human avatar in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Two of them, in fact.

We got Bran who is the Pendragon, son of King Arthur. He's a minor character with magic. 
How does he feel about all this?
We don't see deeply into his POV so we're not sure.

This works okaybecause this is a tertiary character. And the author responsibly tidies his story neatly away in the end. In the series farewell scene, we see Bran renounce his potential for magical power. He will be a vanilla human to do human work in the world. 

In a couple hundred words Cooper shows us what's been going on in Bran's mind the whole time. It makes an emotionally satisfying wrap up and we didn't have to overbuild a minor character to look at this.

Will Stanton is the more interesting character problem.

Eleven-year-old Will learns he's one of the Old Ones — human incarnations of magic, born to save the world from a rising evil. In four books we see him sweat and suffer and fear his way to agency and power. His internal growth from boy to a powerful adult in a kid's body is convincing and, in many ways, tragic.

The author shows Will knowing and regretting the distance that opens between him and his family and friends. At what point does he cease to become a human boy? Some good internals there.

***

Romance genre studies human emotion. What do the protagonists feel? Authors flay it out on the dissecting table for all to see. They build the plot structure to reveal those feelings. They stud the page with internals and emotional conflict.

Mostly Romance explores the love relationship and at least one emotional conflict. It's interesting to look at magical power as the emotional conflict
Lots to think on.

 

       

The Latter Stages of Editing

I was talking to a friend who is looking at the final stages of her Southern Gothic manuscript. She says, kinda doubtful, "What do I do next?"

I thought about what I do in the later production stages.
"Well," says I, which gives me a moment to organize my thoughts, "I pick out the five or six Emotional High Points of the story and then I look back to see how I have prepared the reader for them."

I expand on that, since we're neither of us in a great rush with something burning on the stove and she is willing to be patient with me.

I says -

You got a few couple places in the manuscript where you want the reader to FEEL^TM .  

-- Not solve a problem or enjoy the sunset or ponder the mysteries of the universe, but get angry or jealous or guilty or sad or ashamed or lustful or horrified
or something. 

FEELS^TM ya know. Words with emotion attached to them. 

Because the reader is there for the FEELS^TM, this being fiction.

These five or six scenes of important Feels are almost always going on in the protagonist's POV, btw,
because why would you want to waste this storytelling emotional charge on a minor character's subplot anyhow?
Unless you do want to, in which case that is also cool.

Look at Annique when she discovers her mother has been lying to her about everything important for years and years and years. 

The actual scene attempts to tug the emotions. Yes.

But it does that by having a foundation made of solid blocks of Feels,
rather than just blocks of information. 

It's built on scene after scene of Annique missing her mother and hearing her mother's wisdom in her head.

We see Maman again and again through Annique's eyes, with all of Annique's Feels firmly attached.

-- Now Maman was dead in a stupid accident that should not have killed a dog. Maman. Maman, how I miss you. -- p. 5

--The mindless optimism of the English. Who could comprehend it? Had not her own mother told her they were all mad? -- p. 6

-- She laughed, a deep, throaty sound copied exactly from Maman. -- p. 55.

And so on and so on.

The reader's emotional belief in Annique's pain and shock at Maman's betrayal comes not from explanations and reasons, not information or backstory or assumptions about a mother and daughter relationship.
It's dozens of little Feels scattered everywhere.

 

TL:DR version: When you want to punch up a late stage manuscript, consider looking at the big-ticket Emo scenes. Track back to make sure the emotion of that scene is supported by previous Feels.

*****

photocredits Deedee86, Sarah Richter, press 👍 and ⭐, Peter H

Mulan and Plotting

Watched Mulan -- the live action movie, not the cartoon.
It works, and the story message is one a lot of young girls and women want to hear.

Technical weakness in the presentation of the soldiers who are closely associated with Mulan. The final group of five or six who survive to the end. The strike team.

 There's physical differentiation between them. That's good. But give them nicknames. Give them something distinctive in their outfits. Have something one of them won't eat. One whistles as he strolls around. One is anxious and wakes up with bad dreams. One tells shaggy dog stories. 

 

The movie differentiates with individual backstories, which they confide to Mulan. 

More interesting, I think, to give the revelation of backstory to the group.  The pessimist among them has one view. The optimist, the humorist, the prima donna, the playboy show who they are as they react to the same story.

We've seen this group building in a thousand war movies. Army unit, cops at the station, or criminals doing a heist become a close-knit group. Showing Mulan joining such a group would add an interesting dimension. It is a missed opportunity, I think.

 

Hollywood knows how to economically differentiate within a group.

Technical Topic -- Fiddling with Words in the Second Draft

 

There are folks who get the words right the first time they lay them down. I am not one of those people.

Think of it as shooting an arrow. Some folks let it fly and it hits in the gold. I shoot and the arrow lands all bent up at an angle and it's somewhere out in the third ring, which is blue. So I go over and take it out and try again. Or I sneak it out and move it a bit inward and decide whether I like it there.
And I usually decide not and move it a bit ... and move it a bit more.

Because that’s how I roll.

So anyhow, here's the process.

I've taken a paragraph of the new WIP and put down the decisions that lie in the slow, tedious process whereby I move Draft One to Draft Two.

I’m sure you will all be fascinated by this.

This paragraph is way early in the first scene.
Its purpose is threefold:
-- I lift the top of the POV character’s skull and show what she’s like.
-- I describe some scenery.
-- I signal the reader that we got a Time Traveller here.

what the jug/pot would have looked like

The Draft Two paragraph:

A jug nudged at her from the left, passed over by Hishisha who was at the blinky, giggly stage of mead imbibing. She was fifteen or sixteen, tall even in this crowd, snub nosed, pale blond, tanned brown with the summer, [anthropological  skull type]. She was one of the unmarried sisters, half sisters, cousins, and god knew what who lived in the house of Medkarratu, chief man of the village. They’d amiably gathered in a stranger, here for the festival. More than gathered her in. They’d shoved over and shared the furs of their bed with her, chatted with her endlessly and incomprehensibly, sprinkled generous helpings of fresh seeds and berries on her gruel, and combed and braided her hair into the same knots and interweavings they wore.

Here’s how I arrived at it:

First DraftL:

Hishisha who was at the blinky, amiable stage of mead imbibing

In the Second Draft it becomes:

Hishisha who was at the blinky, giggly stage of mead imbibing

Why:

Giggly is visual and specific. Amiable is less so. And I probably want to use amiable somewhere else.

Draft One:

 She was fifteen or sixteen, marriageable in this wherewhen, tall and slender as a New York model, (or tall for this ethnic,) blue eyed, snub nosed, fair skinned but brown with the summer, [anthropological  skull type].

Draft Two:

 She was fifteen or sixteen, tall even in this crowd, snub nosed, pale blond, tanned brown with the summer, [anthropological  skull type].

Why:

The sentence is supposed to give an immediate picture of one person, and by extension, the crowd that surrounds the POV character. I want to put the one person in a historical context.

And I want to pull out every word I can. This “person description” is exactly the sort of thing the reader’s eye skips right over.

Let me go back and unpack my choices, phrase by phrase:

fifteen or sixteen. This imprecision is consistent with the POV character not being well acquainted with the girl. This works.

marriageable: This is true and interesting and it’s the sort of thing an anthropologist or other  scientifically trained observer would think. It sets us in a historical context.
But it also takes us haring off with the girl’s marriage prospects in our teeth and we’re not going there. This info is not visible in the immediate scene. We want to stay in the scene.

Wherewhen: One of my made up words. I’ll use it later in dialog, not here in narration. We don’t expect the narrator to be the first to drop jargon on us. When the word appears in dialog, it’s the character laying a neologism down and dialog has looser expectations and rules than narrative.

tall and slender as a New York model. Oh Pleeeease! Jo, this is dreadful.
I put this in to emphasize we have a modern POV here. But my POV character wouldn’t think in pop culture terms. This is (1) imprecise, (2) not appropriate to the character’s mind, (3) not suited to the mind-set of my likely readers. Tawdry phrasing. Ugly. Kill it with poison.

tall even for this ethnic. which I put in to see if it was better, isn't. It's maybe something an anthropologist would say -- I'd have to find out -- but “ethnic” is a quagmire into which I do not want to step. Let’s just not.

tall even in this crowd. I like the informality of “crowd”.  It's idiomatic, modern phrasing. But this isn't right either.  But it doesn't sing. I dunnoh.

blue eyed, snub nosed, yellow haired, fair skinned but brown with the summer

becomes

snub nosed, pale blond, tanned brown with the summer.

This is fewer words and fewer images but it conveys the same picture. Nine words instead of thirteen.
If I say she’s tanned I don’t have to say she’s fair skinned. If she’s pale blond we can assume she has light-color eyes. Who looks at or thinks about eye color anyway unless they are gazing at length, close up, into the eyes of their beloved?

Fair skinned is another clumsy-footed word choice in 2018. 

Draft One:

one of the unmarried sisters or half sisters and cousins, women who lived in the house of

Medkarratun, chief man of the village.

Draft Two:

one of the unmarried sisters, half sisters, cousins, and god knew what who lived in the house of Medkarratu, chief man of the village.

Why:

I changed the name Medkarratun because I’m trying for a made-up Celtic name that doesn’t look so much as though it’s been filtered through Latin.

The line up of relatives who live in the chief’s house is fiddled around a bit for clarity and to simplify sentence structure.

Draft One:

They’d amiably adopted the visitor, here for the festival.
Draft Two:

 They’d amiably gathered in a stranger, here for the festival. More than gathered her in.

Why:

When I look at some bit of writing and say “This is not good writing” it’s usually because the wording is not exact. One common type of "not exact" wording is exaggerated, overstated, overdramatic, purple prose.

The women in that chief’s house didn’t “adopt” her. They gave her a warm, sincere welcome, not a lifetime commitment of sisterhood. Let us be prosaic for 99% of what we're talking about. This makes the occasional forays into purple pack a little more punch.

Draft One:

given her generous helpings of fresh seeds and nuts on her gruel

Draft Two:

sprinkled generous helpings of fresh seeds and berries on her gruel,

Why:

"Sprinkled" is a more exciting and visual verb than "given". And if it’s midsummer they won’t have many nuts yet, but they will have berries

Draft One:

braided her hair in the same complex of knots and interweavings they wore.

attrib kwarner

 Draft Two:

 combed and braided her hair in the same knots and    interweavings they wore.

Why: I added “combed” because I have so many pictures in my head of Celtic combs. They’re a big part of the toolkit for these folks.

(We are not going to mention lice. No. This is a Romance-y sorta story and we are not even going to think about them.)

I pulled out “complex of” because I just wrote that bit so I could use complex as a noun. This is me showing off. I convey that the hair is complex plenty fine when I talk about knots and interweavings. I don’t have to say this twice. 

Time to simplify and toss out my fancy usage.

Also, if I use interweavings that’s enough showing off for a couple of pages.

Should I make that" braided into knots and interweavings" Hmmm ...  Can you braid an interweaving? Whatthe hell is an interweaving anyway?
This is why I have Third Drafts.

[anthropological  skull type]. Brachiocephalic? Whatever. I do not mind going all science-y but I have to look it up. I think a nice long technical term fits nicely here for cadence or something. 

So there you have it. That's what I was thinking as I moved from earlier words to later

ones. While this is a single case here, working on a single paragraph, it's pretty much how I do this part of wrestling words.

It's a lot faster to d than to  write about, thank goodness.

 

Technical Topic - Why Are They having Sex on a Cactus?

Someone mentioned --
this is a kinda summary and paraphrase here --
the unlikelihood that our Hero and Heroine would fight a pitched battle in the morning, scamper like hell cross-country in the afternoon, and then fall onto their bedrolls in the evening with energy enough to stage a six-page sex romp.


And I have to agree.
Even when I was young and and limber I could manage no more than two out of three of those on a good day.

So why do we see love-on-rocks romps and stufflikethatthere in good Romance?

Why do skilled writers give us this sort of over-the-top scene?

More to the point -- why do readers love these scenes?
Why does the reader suspend disbelief here, when she'll go ballistic on the authenticity of the fish knives?

Couple of tropes at work here.
One I think of as 'Naked in the Heather':

genuine heather

Our redoubtable hero and heroine think nothing of stripping down to the buff and having at on a heather-covered hillside in the Highlands, in March, taking no notice of gorse bushes and rocks and bristly heather and, well . . . March in Scotland.

genuine sand

The H&H make love on beaches, (with sand in every crack and crevice and I do not mean among-the-tidal-rocks crevices,) in haystacks, on New York City ledges high above the traffic, and in public toilets at the airport, (Ewwww.)


The other trope I call 'It's Only a Flesh Wound, Honey', which is often also Glad-to-be-alive Sex.

Our H&H take time out for some nookie while fleeing packs of ebil men armed with AK-47s or rising hurricane waters or, nowadays, zombies. Nor are they deterred by various wounds acquired in their travels.
One can only marvel at the good health and general enthusiasm of all concerned, frankly.

Why are these tropes not merely tolerated, but popular?
I haz theories.

genuine passion

One is that readers see sex in these unlikely situations as a sign of overwhelming passion. They know they would be distracted by the prospect of hermit crabs scuttling over their private parts on some secluded beach.
The heroine isn't ...
because she's transported by passion.

Many folks come to Romance genre for a fix of exactly such overwhelming, transformational, the-world-well-lost-for-love, crazy passion . . . an indifference to gorse bushes and gunfire being absent from most folks' real lives because they are not fruitcakes.

And readers enjoy the mix of desperate, adrenalin-producing action and sex because it's just plain exciting. They'll tolerate the unlikelihood that one would pause for a quickie in the middle of hot pursuit if the sex is really, really good.

Romance writers use these old reliables because they work. The tropes heighten emotion. They feel familiar and comfy to long-time readers. 

Now.  Full disclosure here.  I did the Glad-to-Be-Alive-Sex thingum once that I know of.  It was in  .... um ... My Lord and Spymaster.  Jess and Sebastian have escaped, unhurt, from the lair of Lazarus.  Jess had done some knife fighting in that incident.

genuine Romance book

****

Oh, but she was amusing him, wasn't she? 

 [Sebastian said,] "When you brush up against death, you want to couple afterwards.  I found that out years ago.  I didn't know it worked the same with women.  Does it?"
 
"Does this time," she said frankly.  "Mostly I was real young.  And the last couple times I was so seasick I didn't want to do anything but curl up and die. 

******

So that is my own particular contribution to this trope.


Writers have the special joy of watching really good writers subvert these tropes.

not quite a sex scene, however

Remember the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where a bruised, exhausted Indy falls asleep before the H&H can make love? Spielberg pokes fun at 'It's Only a Flesh Wound, Honey,'and makes the writers in his audience fall in love with him.

Technical Topic -- When They Get It On and Story Structure

Elsewhere, someone asks
-- I'm paraphrasing here --

"Can I put my big consummation scene as the end of the story?"

I love to see the straightjacket sructure of genre Romance shaken up a little.  I really do.  But I had to be a bit discouraging about this.
 
This below is me being discouraging because I am just the slave and dogsbody of plotting structure.

Problem? -- Denouement resolves it

Romance genre books have a conflict, (often two conflicts -- one in the outer world, one in an inner, emotional world,) that keeps the H&H from their happy ending.

In plottingspeak, the scene where the conflicts come to a final, explosive resolution is the climax or denouement.

Digressing here: 

Dénouement is a French word meaning literally, the untying'.   
Dénouer = 'to untie'  Noer = knot.
Denouement seems to have entered the English language in the mid Eighteenth Century, before which we presumably didn't do this in our plots.

So, the resolution of about-all-conflict is the denouement scene.
And it comes near the end of the book because -- hey -- solve the conflict and the book is over.

To get a sense of how denouement works, pick thirty books off your keeper shelf. You know what the conflict/s are in each of these. Flip to the tail end and work your way backwards till you come to the moment these conflicts are resolved.

What does the author put in after that denouement?

All's well

After the denouement we generally get an 'all's well' scene or two, a return to normalcy, a tying up of any bits that weren't clear before, an epilog to show a happy future. And this part of the book is short, because the reader is already leaning forward in the chair, about to put the book down with a happy sigh and go fix a pot of tea.




In movies, we see denouement and falling-off ending very clearly.  When Luke blows up the Death Star, the next scene is a set-piece of him getting a medal. When the Disney Prince battles Teh Ebil and wins, the next scene is H&H riding off into the sunset.

Folks who watch more movies than I do would have better examples.
  

Does the Big Consummation scene belong after the denouement?

detailed consummation happening onstage

In straight Romance -- this isn't true of Erotica, of course -- a unique 'detailed consummation happening onstage' is a Big Deal Scene.
We expect emotional consequences of the First Sex Act.
We expect plot results.
We want to know what happens afterwards.
We are enthralled by it.

This emotional impact, this expectation of fallout and change, this sheer story 'size' of scene, make the First Big Sex suited to the onrushing torrent of the main plotline. This Great White Shark of a scene doesn't fit well into the little spray puddle that is the plot space after the denouement.

Technical Topics -- How Does Action Relate to Length?

Starting out with an honi soit qui mal y pense, we're talking about how plot action relates to the number of words we need to write it.

Down in the comment trail, someone asks:

. . .  how do you judge if your plot is long enough? if you've got enough scenes or enough things going on to make a full length novel? This is a problem for me because I end up never writing because I've fretted over the story to death, wondering over the length.

It's an interesting part of writing -- this relationship between what's going on in the book and how long the book is.  How many words will we use to convey our action?

Now, the short answer is; everybody has to find this out for themselves.

The Writer's Journey ... if the writer is a dog

What we do -- we write and write and write and build up a stack of stories.

This is the writer's 'prentice work.  This is the garage band years.  Among the very many things we're learning on this first leg of our writing journey is how many words it takes us to get a particular bit of plot action across.

We sit down and put words on the page and -- hey -- we find out that a fight with six bad guys in a back alley needs 2000 words.  A love scene, on the other hand, just keeps stretching out and stretching out till it logs in at 8000.   Walking across a street might be 30 words of action in one scene and the same 30-ish words plus 1000 words of introspection in another.

We learn the flavor and grit and idiosyncrasy of our own writing only when we have some writing to look at.

Some of those half million words, y'know

After the first half-million words
-- did I mention we serve a half-million-word apprenticeship? --
we get a practical sense of how much heft different sorts of scene are going to add to the manuscript.  We get a storyteller's 'feel' for how words run the pacing to build that narrative drive we want so much.

I guess maybe this wasn't the short answer after all.

Okay.  Short answer:
Everybody writes differently and you won't know how many words it takes you to write your action until you've done some writing.

Will you be one of those excellent writers who shoot through 60 plot points in 70,000 words and the reader does not feel rushed?  Or will you be one who tells essentially the same story in 120,000 words and not one of those words is trimable excess?

All that said -- and wasn't that a lot of 'all'? --  I am not going to condemn you to months and years of writing before you get an answer to your question.
No.  I am not going to do that.
Because I know that would discourage me and I see no reason why it wouldn't be daunting to even the brave soul I imagine you to be.
So.

Sure to be interesting scenes in your story

Best answer to your question is to write maybe eight of nine scenes that occur in the story
-- scenes that you are particularly fond of and can picture very well --
and see how many words you use.

This will give you a ballpark estimate of your action-to-words ratio . . . remembering that your first ratio is not necessarily where you are going to end up after a year of hard work writing and thinking.


Two common problems writers may start out with are being prolix, (that is, being tediously lengthy, long-winded, verbose, flowery, writerly, indirect and generally slowing the pacing to a crawl,)  or, on the other hand,  telegraphing the story, (which is talking about the action and racing along, never adding the description and internals and suchlike that draw the reader in.)

The first sort of writer comes up with 257,000-word Historicals.  The second, with 45,000-word Contemporary Romances.  Both of these are ... problematic when it comes to selling them.

But, while the gift of storytelling is just that -- a gift -- and inborn, the craft of writing can be learned.  (Though 'prolix' may end up being fixed by your long-suffering editor who pulls out the blue pencil and just crosses out paragraph after paragraph of internal nattering.)
(Ask me how I know this.)

What's important here is that these technique problems and many others get fixed only after you lay down words to fix.  No draft material lined up in neat pixels on the screen = no way to learn how to lean down or buff up the prose.  No way to acquire the fine art of padding a too-short manuscript with an exciting subplot.  No set of deft editing scalpels with which to cut away the excess.  

Write because you delight in writing.  Let the story come as it will.  Trust that you will solve whatever technical problems beset you.

And if in the end you discover that your 'natural' writing length is epic fantasy or novella --

We live in exciting times.  There's a market for writing at about all lengths. 

stack of paper attrib elchupacabrito

Technical Topic -- Character and Query Letter

Someone asked elsewhere --

(I'm paraphrasing here)  "My story is about several main characters.  Which one do I build my query letter around?"

I have answers for about anything.

An ensemble cast of four, heigh-ho

So let's say your story follows four characters' intertwined lives. You want to know which of these four stories to emphasize in your query letter.

The really short answer is -- Any of them.
Your query letter can approach the manuscript  using any main character as your focal point.
I don't say you necessarily can talk about this manuscript mainly from the experience of the dog, but close.

If you have a strong instinct to cast the query using the story of LolaJo instead of Kindle, Edward, or Framis, then do so.
Nobody knows the story better than you.


But which is the optimal character?

Oh.  You want optimal?
I'd look at the manuscript as a whole and ask myself:

What's the point of the story?
What am I saying here?
Who gets the most on-stage time?
Who is present from pretty much the beginning to the end?
Who feeds us the most internals?
Whose problem fuels the action?
Whose resolution provides the emotionally satisfying ending?
Who has the most to gain or lose?
Who does the reader identify with?
When the last chapter rolls round, whose goal has been reached?'

This sort of stuff tells you who owns the story.

The general shape of the story also tells you.

Selecting the most important character in the room

If the manuscript is paced and plotted as a mystery -- if the point of the story is that a mystery gets solved -- I'd use the mystery-solver as the center of my query.
If the story is a Romance, I'd talk about the romantic couple.
If it's a coming-of-age story, I'd talk about my young person coming of age.
If this is a story of transformation of the antagonist, I'd choose the antagonist to talk about.

Your main and most active character is probably the one to pull front and center when you talk about your manuscript in the query.