[— Karen Myers —]
I’m fresh off perusing a massive Regency Romance set of books by a single author, the sort who likes to conjure up a series of brothers or sisters in a family, knocking them off (“off”, not “up”, if you please) one by one in successive books, and then taking them visiting into adjacent book series for guest appearances in other families.
For some reason, this puts me in mind of knitting test swatches. On the one hand, you want to see how the (charactors) colors will go together, and to make sure that they don’t clash (excessively). And on the other hand, you want to see if you can make all those swatches up into a coverlet that uses every bit of material in a harmonious fashion, with nothing left over.
I think of this sort of plot construction as a form of “conservation” of characters. If main character Sister A in Family X is charming, why not keep her as a bit character in Family Y’s story?
It’s not just in the romance genre where this is a consideration. These issues pop up in a different form in massive historical novels or epic fantasies, with their casts of thousands and multiple generations.
As a reader, I dread trying to sort out dozens of characters within a book (<cough> Russian novels), much less tracking them across several volumes and multiple series. But for favorite works, books I’ve read many times, I treasure stumbling across major characters from previous works now in minor roles, or vice versa, as a form of Easter eggs.
As a writer, I have some thoughts about wrangling the crowd of players with an eye to the reader’s comfort. One useful tool is something I think of as conservation of your bit players or, more casually, as recycling.
Got some plot info that needs to come to a main character’s attention? Deliver it via an existing bit player if you can, rather than introducing a named walk-on just for that purpose. Knit it into the texture rather than just appliqueing it on top as a distraction. Think like a playwright, who cares about the costs of necessary actors and wants to reuse them as much as possible, to make them do double (or triple) duty. The instantiation of each minor player, even in a work of fiction, is effectively a cost for the reader, something he has to keep track of. It’s friction. Fewer characters with more for each of them to do reduces that cost.
There’s a balance to strike between shrinking your story to a cast of four with a change of costumes behind the rickety show wagon and gently reinforcing the reader’s memory by keeping the unnecessary players to a minimum. A “cast of characters” section at the back of the book is a kindness, but it’s also an admission of failure, shoring things up after the fact. After all, no one expects to have to keep flipping through a program to figure out who exactly is on stage while watching a play.
What challenges have you encountered with corralling your cast and recycling them where possible? How do you help your readers keep all the characters straight? (Keep those first initials varied…)
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “Recycling your bit players”
Yes, I wholly agree! I love seeing bit players pop up further down the storyline, and recycling works well for a particularly vivid minor character – or as I call them, scene stealers. I once read of an old screenwriting trick involving pairing two characters who have nothing to do with each other and writing a scene for them, to help develop the characters; this approach might be a good idea when looking to conserve characters, even if you don’t use everything that develops from such a scene.
I tend towards “cast of four, change of costumes, rickety show wagon,” so for me, story ideas that expect me to track a proper suspect gallery of 4-6 persons (backburnered mystery idea) or separate names and titles for two mayors, one of a larger town and one of a smaller one, plus the farmer who called in An Expert on Weirdness, plus the asylum keeper who’s largely to blame for the situational Weirdness, plus, plus, plus, are viewed by me with a certain amount of resentment while I’m writing them.
In the Merchant books I cheat. The priests can relay information or warnings straight from the gods – although not always as clearly as the protagonists would like [or all too clearly!].
Familiars tends to have one of the major characters mention someone either earlier in the story, or in a previous book, then drop that name again. That individual later provides information, or a service, or a warning, or comic relief (Familiars!) when needed without disrupting things too much. Or they get a short story (the jeweler, Martin and Chester). Or you establish a central location for bit players to come in and out of, where the MC happens to work or loiter, and pass information and news there. The reader thinks, “Who is that again? Oh, the barista at Too Beans coffee, the one with the green-purple hair who can’t stand chocolate.” [Orson Scott Card suggests having a quirk for a minor character who might return, a little memory tag that doesn’t distract too much but that helps the reader. YMMV]
Maybe it’s a lack of coffee, but when I read “knocking them off” I think of “killing them off”.
So if they’re dead, are they coming back as ghosts (or worse) in another book? [Crazy Grin]
In the Romance genre, this would be getting them married, of course. 🙂 Also known as knocking them off the shelf, like a penny arcade shooting gallery.
Ah! That makes sense.
Off topic (to a degree), Eric Flint wanted to use some of David Weber’s bit players in his stories in the Honorverse but it was annoying that so many of David’s bit players got killed off by David Weber. [Crazy Grin]
And that’s what makes collaboration so challenging.
Something that really bothers me in the current Disney Princess stuff is, while at the end of their movies, they all got married, in the princess stuff, their now husbands never show up.
I’m like, wth are they?
I remember in the Aladdin TV series, Aladdin and Jasmine were both there and active characters in it.
I mean, if the main character is talking with Snow White, Prince Charming should at least wander by to see how everyone is doing, even if he is immediately shooed off because it’s ‘girl talk’. Where is the happily ever after?
Agreed. The typical Romance brothers/sisters plots do integrate them into some sort of (way too many people) family, but that includes both sides of the romances — no absent husbands, etc. Else what was the marriage for?
Disney is changing the goal of “romance” from bonding into power, and those goals are… not very compatible with pleasure for all the players. Easier to just erase the partners that would walk around neglected. Of course, that makes power the goal of the initial romance, which does not compute.
An arranged-marriage (money/resources for bloodlines/power) story could be presented as Historical or Romance. If historical, the focus will be realism — and power is a major part of that. If Romance, the focus will be relationships — and power might play a role, but not the primary one.
There are many stories that can be told, but not so much if you don’t understand how they work. Fairytales (in the broad sense) are about behavior (“how a person should live, by example”), and few of them are about approving a ruthless path to power where the romantic partner is sidelined.
The problem with that is you’re not considering the historical period and culture all of them came from. Arranged marriages, marriage as treaties, the whole nine yards.
Snow White: Effectively exiled from court. Certainly kept far in the background. In the original story, she never even saw Prince Charming until he woke her up. The moral of her story seems to have been that men should be courageous, and women patient.
Sleeping Beauty: hello, hundred year sleep? None of the people she might have met that weren’t enspelled with her were still alive. Again, her prince was specifically described as out kingdom. Same general trope as Snow White.
Aladdin: Islamic culture. Purdah, hareem….. Say no more.
The blending of historical cultures with fiction is always tricky. And I think both of you are applying a version of the Left’s looking at historical through a still more modern lens.
(Indo-European) traditional tales which have been digested by the folk process (whatever that is) have certain standard moralistic points of view. (Bullying is bad, humility is useful, insignificant friends can be important, truth is powerful, letting someone stumble via his own bad deeds is satisfying, beauty is only skin-deep, etc., etc.). They don’t particularize about political or economic systems, but focus on general behavior.
[Stith-Thompson Motif Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif-Index_of_Folk-Literature%5D
Sleeping Beauty is not a traditional tale, but a literary one, most recently from Perrault via the Grimm Bros. Snow White is a traditional tale (a very old one) but there are hundreds of versions over extensive periods of time.
Arranged marriages etc. are certainly the norm for vast periods and huge cultures. Done well, the stories that include them can dwell upon their utility, the natural bonding of close living, unified or compatible goals, inheritance, etc., as well as their problems and the various necessary accommodations to those.
“romantic love” (lower-case) has been munched via the literary versions from pre-Courtly Love (hell, Homeric Greek) on up, and all we are debating for the Disney treatments is the “flavor we grew up with” vs the “we will all be woke and like it” imposition of the recent years. The judgments are always flavored by the current “culture”, to some degree, but of course the current culture is anything but monolithic.
All versions of any story are contingent upon their local time and place.
My particular objection to the remakes by Disney is that they exploit a local time-and-place view of romantic love (our specific cultural childhood memories of how we view romantic love) and try to corrupt that with something else, and then gleefully pointing out that not understanding how the story levers work makes that goal fail for them.
And for me, the thing that got me was, in the end of their respective movies, they’re presented as having found romantic love, so when some girl is wandering through and meeting all the princesses post story, it’s just really weird that the husband just doesn’t seem to even exist.
I mean, I know they’re doing girl stuff, but when the whole story is focused on letting a girl vicariously live out her princess fantasy, where did the prince go?
And they weren’t even doing girlboss stories where having an honest to God Knight in Shining Armor around to lift/hit/reach the maguffin would short circuit the plot.
In the one that stuck out to me, it seemed more like Disney simply forgot the princesses were all married entirely.
The basic premise was the viewer was following a girl around as she met and interacted with all the Disney princess characters. And I get why the husbands wouldn’t be involved in that sort of stuff they were doing (very targeted toward younger girls in their princess and mermaid phase), but it wasn’t that they were off doing other stuff; it was like they weren’t there at all. It was just so weird.
I did this routinely in my series of historicals – a main character in one book would have a small walk-on bit in another, or a bit character in one would have a main character turn in another. The only awkward part was that I had mentioned certain things about the bit player… that I would later have to work to incorporate when I wrote them into a main character. Or in the case of the current WIP, I did it backwards. The MC was an older character in the last book, but her career as an abolitionist lecturer and battlefield nurse was alluded to … so now I have to put that all into the WIP without contradicting what I had written before …
The problem I have with this approach in general is that I can’t remember main characters from prior books in a series if they don’t have a continuing presence (a common issue in Romance family series) and, just to make things worse, the count of them goes up with each series entry.
Consequently, I almost never buy a “sisters/brothers/family” series in Romance, and only when it’s already completed, since if you add the complication of memory-for-a-character that you read about months or years ago, the person might as well be a complete stranger.
Now, if it’s a big favorite series of mine which I reread, then a character’s full-series presence is less of a headache puzzle.
I will say that Nora Roberts (for that limited selection of hers which I like) does a reasonable job in some of her family series, mostly by restricting the cast (3-4 brother or sister sets), and making them all friends (originally or over time) so that they maintain a significant presence throughout the series. Those series are necessarily shorter, being only as long as the “set” of all-alikes (e.g., sisters/friends) being covered.
I try to keep my casts limited in the first place. The first time I wrote The Sensational Six there was serious cast bloat in the final third of the series. I cut most of that out and gave more prominent roles to my more… demanding characters earlier in the series than earlier versions. Since I set my series all in the same shared universe I like having cameos of different characters in different series. Usually they’re only there to make anyone paying attention smile a little bit. I have a particular character from my third series who ends up making his first appearance in my second series because he is very fun to write. It helps to set the stage for his joining the main cast in my third series.
There’s a character in the MCU that gets maybe a minute of screen time between Civil War and Age of Ultron — an agent of SHIELD who first refuses the orders to launch — “Captain’s Orders” — and then is seen helping with the evacuation.
I have seen memes about him.
That’s the flip side: characters who keep reappearing gain importance.
Easier to make that work when you’ve got film/stage visuals to remind you of the cameo characters. In written stories, you lose that automatic recognition.
Now, you could come up with an equivalent shorthand. Think of the old (cancelled) “Inki and the Minah Bird” cartoons. Prior to the appearance of “Almighty Chaos” in the form of the Minah Bird, we get to hear Mendelssohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” music, typically accompanied by images of animals fleeing the jungle ahead of him.
If you were at a fraught point in a story, and could somehow supply the “Fingal’s Cave” theme, or the running animals, some of your readers would be very well prepped for the character to appear. In a purely written medium, well… you could allude to the sound of a limping man approaching, the glimpse of a special sportscar, the unusual dampness in the weather, the spotted horse parked out front that you’ve only ever noticed with a particular character, or even a casual phrase that becomes a byword “”…if only Freddie were here” / “Don’t say that! You know what happens!”
In other words, you need a shorthand other than just the character’s name which the reader may only dimly recall, and an explicit authorial reminder.
(…and now I’m trying to find a place for a character named Freddie in my current WIP… grrr…)
Got it. There’s a place just warm and waiting for him.
You can look up weather phenomena and use those. A prickling of the skin, or a metallic taste, or your hairs standing on end are indicators of lightning storm being imminent.
Tree leaves go limp when the humidity spikes. If it’s cold you and the walls will have a clammy feel.
High humidity also makes things smell stronger.
You can highlight unexpected sweaty hands by having trouble holding things.
Ozone often precedes a big storm, and it has an odd fresh, but biting smell to it.
Bugs will go quite before a storm, but bees will get extra active to try and lock up before it hits.
When anything larger than a mouse vanishes from an area, I gather it means a predator well tuned to hunt people sized things is active in the area.
Any one of those could be the calling card of a major antagonist.
Like Portena? or Buckley?