There are some plots that legitimately require a team of specialists: caper stories, military patrol stories, trial run engineers, alien diplomats… You know the sort of thing, where you need the safecracker, and the getaway driver, and the bazooka handler, and the thief, and the man who understands gauges and can make a roll of duct tape dance. Those stories have teams made up of one of everything, because each of them is instrumental to making a certain kind of plot happen and that very instrumentation is part of what makes the story interesting.
But for other sorts of stories… When you tell the story, you want your cast of plot-carrying characters to mean something emotionally, not just instrumentally. And that means that each of them has to have enough space to be visible and significant.
This can be overdone, to modern tastes, in the flavor of Morality Plays, where each character allegorically stands for something. Mr. Valiant for Truth may be a fine fellow, but his name is a little too on point. We may not be writing didactic guidance in this way, but we do tend to present Heroes and Villains and all the entities in-between, though we no longer overweight them as prototype specimens directly. Our fictional “plays” are full of “Hero”/”Best Friend”/”Obnoxious Roommate”, and other stock characters, since we have to start somewhere.
Beware, however, of some modern trends.
First, there’s the well-meaning assumption (completely wrong, in my opinion) that readers, esp. children, need to see a character similar to themselves that they can identify with, and thus we should honor a form of artificial diversity. But we can identify with absolutely anything, given a decent writer’s presentation — in fact, it’s all we can do as humans not to anthropomorphize bees, cars, drops of rain, stones in our path, weapons. I’m sure none of us was deterred from reading books where our particular age/gender/name/species etc. was nowhere to be seen.
More insidiously, there’s a craft-level desire to try and repeat a good thing. If this Romance set in Smalltown was successful, then let’s do it again with the siblings of the characters. If our adventure hero is tempted to do something bad, let’s add a character with fewer constraints or a bad past so we can see the consequences of the hero giving in. (And how about another object lesson, and another, just to make the point?)
Those “let’s repeat what worked” or “let’s cater to each audience particularity” or the “illustrative counter example” variants may serve as an excuse for the next book in a Romance series or to provide object lesson companions to the hero, but they work against the unique specificity of the primary characters. They dilute the impact of the basic version, where the characters and their relationships were fresh and clear.
Nobody ever cared about the Seven Dwarves the way they cared about Snow White, even if Disney gave them comic names. No one missed their anonymity.
Too many characters, each a specimen of something, either to make up the numbers or hammer on a character issue – that’s like one of everything. If you put them all into one story or series, they’ll make an indigestible mush of the flavor. Instead, pick your primary characters to tell the primary story, and make them stand against the background of the rest of the people and the world, so that they can present more vividly to give your story impact.
My pet peeves are sibling/friend expansions of Romance. What about yours?
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “One of everything is a whole lot of mush”
“First, there’s the well-meaning assumption (completely wrong, in my opinion) that readers, esp. children, need to see a character similar to themselves that they can identify with, and thus we should honor a form of artificial diversity.”
A freakin’ men.
As a kid? I identified with Spock– half human, but mostly an informed ancestry, he’s more Vulcan than most Vulcans– and Data. Who not only isn’t human, but will assure you he is not even alive.
Even since becoming a mom, do I identify most strongly with moms? Well, some– I wanna be Molly when I grow up– but I’m just as likely to identify with a Papa Wolf character archetype, or The Lone Sane Man, since they often are the one cleaning up messes.
/sigh
Obviously, that first line is supposed to be in quotes.
WDE.
I see it in quotes. Either it got fixed, or WP showed you an incorrect view of your own comment at first. Which wouldn’t surprise me, to be honest, but isn’t the most likely explanation.
<i>Nobody ever cared about the Seven Dwarves the way they cared about Snow White, even if Disney gave them comic names. No one missed their anonymity.</i>
Not necessarily the case, in my experience. When I was little, most children who’d sat through the movie with any interest had a favorite Dwarf (usually Dopey, Grumpy, or Bashful, based on whoever they thought was the funniest; mine was Doc, possibly because I already had glasses), and most boy-children were far more invested in the Dwarfs than in the Princess, for fairly obvious reasons. Grownup Disney enthusiasts tend to argue that Grumpy – who has the closest thing to an emotional arc in the film – is the most interesting character in the piece. The *marketing* heavily favors Snow White, because Disney marketing is so Princess-centric, but that’s a separate issue.
In general, anything larger than the five-man-band tends to end up with superfluous characters, and most five-man-bands of fiction could probably hobble along with three or four members. For instance, after the 1940 film version of Pride and Prejudice and before the 1980 miniseries, most known versions drop Mary or Kitty, or composite them into a single character, and I kind of get the impression that if the adaptors in question hadn’t felt like Lydia needed a sounding board, they would have cut the Bennet daughters down to the three who forge some kind of romantic relationship in the course of the book, leaving Kitty and Mary out altogether.
The young samurais Mifune’s character is riding herd on in Sanjuro blur into a vague mass of young male stupidity, but I think at least part of that is trying to make a point about what young male stupidity looks like from the teacher’s POV. (BTW, any Star Wars fans watching this movie for the first time should keep an eye out for the scene which inspired the Millennium Falcon’s concealed compartments.)
On a somewhat related note, I’m watching Person of Interest for the first time; been enjoying the dynamic between the two male vigilantes (a nerdy billionaire and a former Spec Ops soldier) and am not looking forward to the addition of their up-to-eleven female counterparts in later seasons.
On a related note, something that’s given me trouble when I’ve tried to write mysteries (and seems to give serious mystery writers trouble also at times, if The Third Girl, Whose Body and some of the early Nero Wolfes are any indication) is putting together a reasonably interesting set of suspects.
I was amused when The Lizzie Bennet Diaries adapted both Mary and Kitty out. (Well, mostly: they turned Mary into a cousin, IIRC, and turned Kitty into a literal kitty). I thought at the time that it made sense for a story set in a modern setting, where a family having three children is far more likely than five. I wasn’t aware that adaptations between 1940 and 1980 had done so as well.
$SPOUSE (who normally is allergic to SF) and I watched Person of Interest, and in our (at least mine, but without objections) thought that the women didn’t muddle the dynamics. I haven’t purchased the DVD set (yet), so I’m going from a decade’s memory, but usually it was one woman at a time.
Perhaps the biggest issue with PoI is the fact that similar threads are playing out currently, particularly in the more conspiracy minded sites. (Or even mainstream media, see Insty’s takes on Google’s AI.) Though as Sarah has pointed out, the distance between conspiracy theory and reality is getting to be a few weeks or shorter. Sigh.
That’s reassuring about POI. We had noticed its tendency to defictionalization; with the family members who had seen it before (five-six years ago?) commenting how much more relevant it had gotten in the meantime. Also, this guy, convicted in 2019, sounds surprisingly like how the government and media would describe one of the core characters on the show if he got caught, and has the Harold+$Birdname format that character uses for aliases:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_T._Martin
I love POI. If I recall, too, it was getting rolling just as the whole Edward Snowden thing happened, and I saw a quote from one of the show writers/producers that he knew POI was fantasy, because we just had it come out the the government actually WAS spying on us (albeit not with a hyper-intelligent, moral (or trying to be) AI), and the collective reaction was, so far as they could tell, a shrug and a ‘meh.’
(Of course, he also probably weren’t paying attention to the blogspaces, where many were howling about it, and especially about how the powers that be–especially and including the media–were too busy playing up the traitor aspects of Snowden so they could entirely ignore the government shenanigans.)
And while you did have two to four women in later seasons, only two were permanent members of the team at any given time. And most importantly–the show writers REMEMBERED that the weakest part of a team-cast is failing to make them all individual and interesting, and they definitely made sure everyone was distinct to the others. Honestly, the most “boring” character was Shaw, who was arguably just a female version of Reese. She was still largely entertaining, and memorable, but she didn’t get much of a character arc, likely because it would have looked too much like Reese’s. Everyone else had a pretty distinct character arc. Fusco from corrupt cop to hero, Carter was an arc involving Lawful vs. Good, Finch learning to trust the Machine, Reese learning to live again (sort of–his was probably the weakest of the arcs). Root and a redemption arc. Even the Machine had something of a character arc, of the child with a disapproving father variety!
And they even made some of the villains human. You still hated them, but they were shown to have human cares and loves just like the heroes. And sometimes the villains became heroes (by changing their ways, mind you, NOT because someone just decided they were okay now.)
Honestly, my only complaint about POI is when they decided it was a great idea for John to suddenly start dating his civilian therapist. Ick.
Yeah, Reese strikes me as someone who’s completed most of his character development by the end of the pilot, and everything afterwards is either us learning more about his colorful past(1), or him forging connections with the people around him.
(1)been really impressed with the way this show does flashbacks; Fringe -which we’d already seen- was pretty good at that, but this one seems better. Also, it’s trippy that the guy playing Elias was in Galaxy Quest.
He was?!?!?! I don’t remember him in Galaxy Quest! I definitely remember him as Veronica Mars’ dad, though.
Elias was a great character. You couldn’t–quite–hate him, but he was still very much a villain. (With an extremely heroic end.) He’s like…if Vetinari had decided not to run a city, but take over the mafia instead. Always a step ahead (even when in prison), and you’re never–quite–sure what his motives are. His introduction in Person of Interest was utterly brilliant, too.
Here he is in Galaxy Quest 🙂 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYhz5tArAnk
Holy crap, I never recognized him!!! (Probably because he has hair, and looks so tall…)
Expanding a romance standalone to a series about the whole family or group of friends can work (Mary Balogh does it well, Jo Beverly too) but you’ve got to know when to stop or focus on only the selected “new” central characters and let the others just get name-dropped.
I liked Mary Balogh’s first Westcott novels but after number 5 or so, they got tedious and silly.
I enjoy the ones produced by the clever, too, but it reads like fan service after a while, as yet another sibling-and-spouse-and-progeny set of names from a book 4 entries ago shows up for their cameo when the current plot is indifferent to them.
There aren’t a lot of favorite-of-a-lifetime stories whose props I remember forever, and it’s irritating being put to a “you mean, you really don’t remember who these people are? Well I won’t tell you then!” sniff (especially when there are gaps of years in real time between entries).
Exactly. I guess her publisher waved too much money at her to say no and she thought she could make it work. She couldn’t.
An indie romance author I like (Mary Kingswood) uses this trope–but she has set limits to the series. They are x number of books, and follow x number of characters (sometimes related, sometimes the neighbor) About the only perpetually recurring characters are the ones that pop up to investigate mysteries, and they are never the main focus. And she’s good at making sure they are all quite distinct.
(I also love that her heroes and heroines are not all Young Beautiful Things, but often middle aged, sometimes rather frumpy, often widowed…)
Thank you!
Every single book of hers I’ve read is delightful, and I’ve reread most of them more than once. They’re fluffy and charming, and very feel good.
The ones where you can almost see the check-boxes of politically correct characters, and the author doesn’t focus on the character, but on the characteristic. If I think, “Why is this [characteristic] so important?” it’s not a good sign. OK, so the best friend is a Wise Latina, the only Hispanic person in the book, and what’s important is that she is Latina, not that, oh, she has important information because she works in the Vatican Archive, or something.
And certainly not because war is the pursuit of politics by other means, and consequently you need to prevent this group from complaining that other groups keep on wanting wars because it will benefit them and kill the other group’s children, while the other groups complain that this group thinks that because they predominate in military positions their interests are greater. . . .
There’s a reason why West Point has nominations from every Representative and Senator. Spreading the officer corps out geographically has political implications.
But as reasons for diversity goes, that makes sense, so they can’t use it.