Yesterday, I was retrieving one of my dogs from my cabin’s 2nd-story porch when I encountered this pair in the illustration with my cellphone. Four hours later, after sunset, the one on the left was soaring around the porch light in reflected green, while the other… wasn’t finished yet. His story wasn’t done. (And, no, I didn’t check to see their genders, etc. Go with it…)
Each character in our stories has an existence in our fictional universe.
Some of them are walk-ons or throwaways, and if we or our readers never see them again, no one notices. Our primary and secondary characters, however — heroes, villains, comic relief, observant neighbors… those people are alive, for varying levels of detail and definitions of life. So… how many of them have character arcs that we care about and expect to be informed of? Have all those ends been knitted up for this particular story? Or are readers left to wonder what happened to the pup that got saved from drowning or the aged mother abandoned at home, much less the newly introduced potential love interest, teasing the next story in the series?
I don’t expect to hear again about the fortune-telling gypsy that gives the hero a clue, necessarily, but authors occasionally introduce charismatic characters that we do expect to become better acquainted with, since they seem to have such promise, as though the author has shone a brief spotlight on them, that I assume they may reappear. When I get to the end of the story without hearing a little more about them, or having a hope that there will be more story later for them, I’m disappointed. Once in a while, some particular forgotten animal or person becomes notorious in the reading community (“what ever happened to…?”) — if you remember one of those, remind us in the comments.
I expect I’m pickier than some — certainly many books teem with characters that are more than scenery/generic, but never appear again. When I write, however, I use a simple criterion: if the character gets a name, we are not unlikely to encounter him again in some form or reference, at least in passing. I don’t think of my stories as finished until I’ve checked that I didn’t leave any such characters dangling, disregarded. I’m not done until I do that.
What are your pet peeves in this area? What obligations do you feel, for your own fictional minor folk? Who gets names? Who’s left dangling as a deliberate teaser?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “How do you know when your story is done?”
When I first got my Kindle (17 years or so ago) I was reading all kinds of stuff, mostly selected by price (free was good). I picked up a crime story – down on his luck private detective type. The story was engaging, the plotting was tight, it was a really enjoyable story. So I immediately grabbed the next two books in the series, and was disappointed.
Why? Because one of the side characters in the first book was an old black man who sat in the local McDonalds all day drinking coffee, and he was probably (most likely) God. I couldn’t wait to see him again in the next book. But he never appeared. In fact, the PI never even went to McD’s again. The writer had this amazing character who dropped pearls of wisdom among mundane conversations about life at this place, and he never used the character again.
I have a loose group of cops I reuse as needed.
I keep thinking I need to find them all at least girlfriends, if not the loves of their lives . . . Heck, the one I started as an ass-kissing ladder climber now has a wife, great in-laws, and a talking horse.
The young one is cohabitating, and fostering a batch of kids.
The first one, the smart one, is still just gazing wishfully at a rich divorcee who’s not about to get married again . . .
And let’s not talk about the Cyborgs . . . they’re supposed to be sidekicks!
I just hope that characters that come alive in the author’s head will do the same for the readers.
And who knows what’s up next with the Rigel Brigade….
The problem is juggling that your character certainly knows the name and that they are meant to be wallpaper
Yeah, barring complications, Maxim and Chloe’s landlady in the WIP is going to continue as “the landlady” to the end.
Usually if they’re cheeky, a bit wrong or kinda broken they get a name and a spot in the story. Sometimes characters like Jimmy and Alice turn out to be main characters later on, sometimes I give them a break and they get to quietly live happily ever after.
Albert and his mother from Unfair Advantage for example. They got their robot girlfriend from the store and we don’t hear much from the three of them. They are busy out there Living Life as they say. But at need, they might very well show up unexpectedly. ~:D
I’ve got a core of characters, some of whom vary in importance from book to book. Then there are major or minor characters for that particular book, and their stories are generally wrapped up at the end. A few minor characters float in and out, like coworkers, members of the officers’ wives group, people at church or social groups, and so on. I try not to name random NPCs unless it is necessary for the story. It would be rather strange for a professor not to use a student’s name when calling on him or her during class, when it is not a “English 101” class of 600 freshmen.
Struggling with this in my book with a cast of thousands. After someone commented on the problem I took out a lot of names but I can’t tell yet if I’ve done it properly or not. I have to rewrite a whole bunch of scenes with dialogue and that’s tough when I also have to throw away the names of the people involved…
I have characters who play a bit part with names, and I have no idea why. It just fits. They need the name. Some of them later on become big players, others haven’t had anything other than a walk on role and one line. *shrugs*
my problem is people just walking into the book and settling in. In my current WIP I have six people who just appeared with no warning and became major players in the book, or its sequel — including the main villain in the book.