I must be dealt with.
Few people think of me as an expert in anything. Well, booze, yes, I suppose there’s that. But in general I am regarded in social settings as a mildly alarming Wild Card (or, more accurately, I go around demanding that everyone call me by the nickname “Wild Card” so I can use my self-made catchphrase, “I have to be dealt with! BECAUSE I’M A WILD CARD, BABY!”)
<crickets>
Maybe I’m an expert in novel writing, as I have published nine of them. Though technically that makes me an expert in selling novels, not necessarily writing them. Which leads me, with the drunken grace of a shore leave sailor, to my point.
There is a rule in fiction writing called the Law of Conservation of Characters. Is there? I may have made that up. Actually, after Googling it’s something Roger Ebert said about movies, but it still applies. It has to, or this blog post is a waste of everyone’s time.
Basically, what this boils down to is the idea that an author doesn’t waste time on characters who have no purpose in a story, so if you’re, say, trying to figure out who the killer is in a mystery novel you know it has to be a character you’ve spent some time with – and any character who so far hasn’t had much reason to be there is the most likely suspect.
There’s a flip side to this rule that doesn’t get talked about much, and that’s because it’s a rule you should apply while writing the damn story in the first place. This is the Rule of Character Attrition, and it might be a Somers-Only Rule, who knows, but it goes like this: If you’re struggling in your novel, consider cutting characters out and combining their role and attributes into another character. It’s often a tonic for an ailing novel, in my experience.
For example, I’ve got a WIP. As is my wont, I started this book off by throwing everything I could think of – exposition everywhere like a slow flood of molasses, details that just drop like anvils here and there just so I wouldn’t forget them later – and every character I could think of that might be useful. I do this. If I think there might be a scene later that would benefit from a unicorn, I will create a unicorn character.
End result? My protagonist has a very large posse of people following him around, and the story gets bogged down. And then I realize that character #5 hasn’t said or done anything in 50 pages.
That’s when it’s time for a culling.
I start over. I boil down my characters: Who can be combined? Who is unlikely to ever get a Big Moment or a reason to exist? Who have I completely forgotten was even in this book? Burn them off, and what you’re left with are the characters that actually matter.
It really just goes to show that we novelists really have no idea what we’re doing. We just make it up as we go along. It’s actually kind of surprising that any of us manage to feed and clothe ourselves – and yes, I know that in my case the definition of “clothe” is very loose. DAMN YOUR EYES.
Excellent advice… I find when I start confusing characters, it’s time to kill/cull/combine. In my last book, I had a lacrosse team and finally decided I didn’t need the whole damn team — just a core clique of players who’d band around the MCs. At one point, they were no more than dummies much like the kind accident investigators use to recreate a scene, place holders because I needed bodies.
In one of my first novels, I actually gave POVs to these extra characters!
Maybe that’s why it was never published…
I’ve done that too – giving POVs to chars just because they were there. Although sometimes that works as you stumble on a POV more interesting than your MCs, and you start over.
Love ya, Wild Card!
As someone who came from writing plays, man, you gotta make characters count. In fact, if you have over 7 in your script, you’d better be the next fucking Shakespeare, or your play ain’t a happening thing.
It’s been a great teaching ground for 1) making each character mean something, and 2) giving each character a moment that makes them showing up every night worthwhile.
So I think we’re on the same page, sorta. Though I’m less of a wild card than you, and I do tend to wear pants, so I’m somewhat better clothed.
Sarah: I’m like Einstein, I have no time to think about clothes.
I just had the opposite problem with a novel I’ve reached the “send to Betas” point on; I had too few characters. Like, the book was about my Main Character. And…stuff he did. Alone. He is not the last man on Earth in my novel. So in subsequent drafts, I focused on fixing that in the scenes which cried out for more humanity.
I am now suspicious Jeff, because you appear to have wrote a blog post based on a physics principal! The law of conservation of energy states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can change form.
Great parallel to character creation and destruction and combining.
Now, I expect drunken ramblings and misplaced pants from you here, not mathematical theory extrapolated into parallel writing techniques, so I pose the necessary question: Who are you and what have you done with Jeff!
I’ve honestly never had that happen – it’s always too many folks in my work, for whatever reason. Thank goodness, because I suspect cutting is easier than adding in this instance.
Me smart. Me can write theory.
I’m attempting my first novel, 60K words in, and one of the first factors I discovered is that I cannot manage a large cast of characters. I ended up breaking them down into primary ones, secondary ones, tertiary ones, and extras.
The primaries have names, detailed appearances, motivations, histories, personalities. Going down the list reduces or altogether removes some of those elements. I don’t know if my methodology is sound, but it’s what this non-novel writer is using his first time around.
Malcolm, any methodology is sound if it works. The key to dealing with character issues is first acknowledging that you have character issues.