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I have an idea for the 25th anniversary story contest. The problem for me is that it will mean writing twenty or more characters. I don't like writing "spear carriers". I try to have some feeling of every person in the story even if it isn't obvious (Did anyone catch the leather biker's "craft" magazine in The Worst Day?). I'm afraid of having four people and a bunch of cutouts. That's the kind of story I have trouble finishing. How do any of you deal with making secondary characters real?
Comments
Many Characters
Unfortunately, I'm one of the last persons to give advice on loads of characters. When I write something long, characters tend to proliferate. But here are some possibilities:
Combine two (or more) characters into a single character.
If a character has a single function then vanishes from the story, don't give her a name.
Show what the character does. Give the character dialogue when the character says something. Perhaps have questions and answers, or comments and responses.
Have the viewpoint character comment mentally on the character in question.
Introduce spurious events or sections into the story to involve the character. If you're lucky or moderately skillful, they'll seem natural to the reader.
Write in 1st person or 3rd person limited. Only change viewpoint characters when changing sections. Eschew ghosts in the viewpoint character's head who comment on his thoughts, attitudes, and actions.
-- Daphne Xu
I have the "reverse problem" as a reader ...
This is entirely =my= problem, it just seems to be the way my mind/brain "works."
When a story has 'too many characters' (as defined by my brain), I tend to get lost, with my "mental eyeballs" glazing over.
The nature of the stories here (usually one character changing name and gender) makes my problem worse ...
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Sometimes, characters don't need a lot of fill-in. Think of our personal lives:
The grocery store we 'always' shop at: name a teller. Unless they are special - say "colorful", "a real botch", really helpful, or they show up later ... yeah, they really are just "cut-outs" or 'red-shirted spear carriers ...'
Some ideas:
= Separately, have a back-story for each character, one or two lines or paragraphs. Especially, include =why= are they in the story; and are they really needed? "Sold me the magic lamp"; Main Character married them ... Oh, and the back-stories will keep you from randomly changing details, like name, hair color, birth city, name ...
= "Reduce" the story. For the contest, tell just a =stands-alone= (required, I think) part or chapter. Expand later. joannebarbarella did this with https://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/fiction/101852/unexpected-chr....
= Important characters can appear off-stage, or in memories ... The Great Teacher who set us on our Path; the bullies who (ick) shaped us...
= I think someone else has said "Take several characters, and 'fold' them into a single recurring character." Those three wonderful teachers ... make them just one who teaches in all three: grade-school, and middle school and high school, seeming to follow us ...
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Take "War and Peace" - when the one and only Gospodin Ivanovich is also Aleksander, and Shura, and also Shasha; and it depends on who is talking to him, or about him ... "My brain hurts."
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Again, "too many characters" is my own problem.
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I have a comfortable reading limit, somewhere around 6,000 words. Longer than that, in in the background my mind starts to shift from "Great! Keep going" to "Are we done yet", to "Why did I even start?" ...
Character overload!
Twenty characters in a short story does sound like a lot, and this coming from someone crazy enough to have over a hundred characters across a saga of books with 600k+ words published so far! That works out to what, one new character per 6k words on average? So twenty in 15k words may be tough. :)
The first challenge would be to seriously give them distinctive 'voice' and presence in such a way as to establish them as individuals immediately in the writing. And then past that will be the mega-challenge when each and every one of them starts demanding to have their own story-arcs in some way. To deal with that may require extensive notes, so that at least private to you as the author they each 'get their due'...even if the full resolution/exploration of that never makes it into the specific story you -are- trying to write. But if you know that much about them for where they've been and where they're going, you may be surprised at how they will feel 'more real'.
My zero-cents contribution anyway. <3
story involves a travel team
Young ballplayers, one of who's sister has cancer. That makes at least fifteen for the team plus several parents/coaches. At least a couple of villains from a rival team, though they might just be evil/ignorant without more explanation. I'm seriously wondering if this can be done in a short story.
The idea, if anyone is interested in such things, was sparked by a recent internet photo of Joey Voto and Bryce Harper as teammates at that age and Voto's comment about how much fun they had.
G&S
Consider what Gilbert and Sullivan did with his "teams": he had two or three representative leads, and the rest were lumped into the chorus. You may have fifteen players on your team, but you don't have to name them all; you don't have to do much of anything with most of them.
-- Daphne Xu
First and foremost
Backstory. At least in your head, there needs to be a backstory for each character. That doesn't mean that the reader ever hears the the story, In my most recent offering, "Secure Haven Academy" there are a number of teachers who are mentioned only in one scene. All of them are women and for each of them there's a back story. One of the most complex is a returning student who's graduated, got her teaching certificate and come back to teach at Secure Haven.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Some thoughts
Sometimes, fewer is better. When 'Rocket Boys' was made into a biographical film, 'October Sky', they merged some people together as a solution to the "too many characters" problem. (Films generally have to be simplified, compared to books telling the same story.)
In selecting to do a short story, you're operating under a similar constraint - as are those who serialise. You just can't give everyone some "screen time", and some of them end up fading into the background. It might be necessary to go back to the drawing board and see who you really need, by looking at what each scene is meant to achieve. Don't grumble about the re-write: take your medicine and you will be rewarded with a better story.
I remember agonising over the "too many characters" problem when writing 'Ground Rush' - but when the whole story revolves around a women's eight-way parachute display team, I was kind of stuck with them. (At least I had more space, since that was novel length.) A team of eight, plus the one who's pregnant and the one who gets injured, requiring them to substitute with a boy; add in a few other friends and non-jumpers for exposition and you've got a lot of plates spinning!
What I would say is... don't be afraid to write a stack of character sketches that end up longer than the story. The reader doesn't need to see them, of course, but fleshing out the characters in your own mind will help to keep them from becoming 'also-ran's.
Sugar and Spiiice – TG Fiction by Bryony Marsh
Don't Obsess About It
Most supporting characters will just about write themselves. A police officer does what police officers do, a doctor likewise. A few sentences give enough detail, often through the observations of the principal actors.
Your audience will judge if you've done it right! If not, do it better next time.
My opus
Has a huge cast but just as in real life there are usually no more than about half a dozen in play at a time. Characters come and go, some will have bigger parts, others won’t even get a name check.
For a one off short story you don’t need an in depth bio for everyone. Only mention stuff that matters, “a was the tallest on the team so it was no surprise he caught the ball” but if the ball isn’t thrown we don’t need to know that, “b was always on my back” but unless he does something we don’t need to know more. Could you, without prompt, name everyone in your class at school? Probably not, you had your own circle and the rest of the school were just faces.
Think Quo Vaduz, a cast of thousands but only a handful of named speaking characters.
Good luck
Madeline Anafrid Bell
A different approach
I think you're coming at this from the wrong perspective... Apart from some very unfortunate people with serious brain trauma, some edge case mental health issues, and the seemingly ever increasing amount of bigots and people filled with hate, most people assume others are real and have their own things going on.
Unless you're writing from a not very typical perspective then you'll probably have a single protagonist, or maybe a few POV characters, they're who matters. You already seem to realise this by acknowledging the ones you have issues with are "secondary characters."
If you start with the assumption that most non-insane (insane medically or through selfishness) people just default to assuming others are as real as anyone else then we find out their depths via their meaning to us, and their relationship to us. I don't think people aren't real because I know nothing about them, I know I don't know much about them because I haven't interacted with them enough, or been in the same space as them enough, observed them enough. Sometimes it's even just a case of seeing someone who you've never talked in the same bar for years and years, they end up sitting next to you, and suddenly it feels like you do know them. Even though the most either of you has ever said to each other is "Hi!"
People aren't "real" because we don't know about them, they might mean less to us but it doesn't mean they're "not real." And how they mean more is by their relationship to us, which can range all the way from literal family to person who takes the same time bus every morning for the past five years. You get to know people by talking to them, hearing about them, and being around them.
Characters and supporting characters
To my mind, supporting characters are just that. And just because a character is physically present doesn't make them a supporting character. I tend to think of a supporting character as having one of three jobs: to move the plot forward, to help reveal something about the main characters, or to comment on the theme. And preferably more than one of those at a time. If they're not doing that, then at best they're scenery or (more likely) they're distracting from the actual story.
I mean, if you think about the characters' teammates, I'm sure it's deeply relevant to each of them how Jamie's mom has a drinking problem, or how Pete carries an EpiPen because of his peanut allergy, or how Blake is failing Math and might get kicked off the team if he doesn't get his grades up. And yes, Sean's thick Irish accent is delightfully charming. But if they don't comment on the plot, characters, or theme, they're probably not only irrelevant to the story at hand, they can detract from the story. Putting a thousand ornaments on a Christmas tree doesn't make it better, it makes it a mess!
On the other hand, if their taciturn coach had a young daughter who died of leukemia, then he's probably more on point for a story where a character's sister has cancer. Putting in a little more effort to make him more interesting is probably time well spent.
thank you
to everyone who has commented. I have never written out a bio for characters but have had an image and some ideas in my head that probably never reach the story directly. In this case I think Erisian may be right. It's too many characters and too much plot for a short story. I'm thinking about trying to focus on a few of the boys and let the rest of the story just be background in my head, only used when necessary. It remains to be seen if I can find a way into that storyline.
You're on track now.
In "Secure Haven Academy" I could have put names to at least a dozen students, but I only needed three to advance the story and chose to give names to four instructors with short speaking parts. For students, I only had four who had more than a one or two line speaking part. Everyone else served to fill in the atmosphere of a boarding school.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
I think you're on the right track
With one of my stories I have so much knowledge about the world, the main characters, the secondary characters, and even some characters who may never appear again I could fill another book with that information. Maybe there will be another book, and maybe some of that information will appear. If I do write it I'd imagine a lot of what I've thought I would put in won't end up in, and with the new information I generate I could write another two books. I can't remember if I've had this experience it with writing before. But it is absolutely delightful — if exhausting and driving me to drink.
I didn't set out to do this. I didn't have it planned out before. It came from writing, then going over what I'd written for language and detail checks before I published (an advantage of publishing as a serial or chapter-by-chapter,) then going over what's already been published to ensure I'm maintaining the flow and thread of the story. It happened naturally. Even if I had the entire thing planned out beforehand I assume I'd still get new thoughts while I actually wrote it down. I assume when it's completed and fully published I'll still get new ideas or find new details. That's what being both a reader and author is. It's what being creative is.
The only thing I'd say is have as much or as little of a plan as you want but don't be afraid to adjust, in a small or big way, or even change course entirely. You are not tied to anything. If you get the desire to change something consider it, do what you think is best, what you want to do. You're the author. They story doesn't exist until it's out there. Even if it's out there some authors have published a new version of old stories, even complete novels, decades later, to include their later thinking (Huxley did this with Brave New World and BNW Revisited.)
As an aside don't worry when people don't 'get it.' You can correct them if you want, you can provide them with a little more information (I've made assurances, as I knew them at the time, to people in comments.) Or you can just let them think what they want.
Sorry, couldn't resist
I once evaded having too many characters but only just.
I had an assignment to hand in with a maximum of 10 000 characters. I sent it ten minutes before deadline and it contained 9997 characters.
Unfortunately my conclusion in the paper was erroneous, even if I got a 10 on it from the chief foreign policy adviser to the Lithuanian president. It was about oligarchs in Ukraine and I predicted that they'd continue to thrive for the foreseeable future in the absence of an unlikely external shock. The external shock did come. In my defence it was written in early 2014.
Watch those characters!
Yeah, that can be tricky. After all, 10,000 characters is only about 2,000 words. You gotta watch out for those punctuation marks; they'll get you every time. ;)
External Shock
"I predicted that they'd continue to thrive for the foreseeable future in the absence of an unlikely external shock." I don't see anything wrong with this conclusion, once the external shock came. Okay, "unlikely external shock" might have been a mistake -- or it might have been accurate.
-- Daphne Xu
Just Reminded Me
... of this blonde joke.
A blonde has to create a password satisfying these requirements: at least ten characters, along with three capitals. She comes up with this:
MickeyDonaldGoofy[the Seven Dwarfs]ParisRomeBeijing
Of course, she has to memorize the Seven Dwarfs in a particular order.
The punch line: this is a great password, as long as the system accepts it.
-- Daphne Xu
hijackers beware
I found my gun and I'm polishing the rust off. :)