Message Board Topic For 3/17

[Comsie]

Alrighty! You've gotten your story going for a few chapters now, you're enjoying it, readers are enjoying it...wonderful. You've got the lovable main character, you've got the sex love interest, and maybe a few other surrounding characters to help round out the small family of personalities that you want to write about. It can make for a really entertaining story.

 

However, as time goes on, and you find other issues that you want to tackle or other situations that you want to take place in your storyline...you may find that your current list of characters isn't able to offer you any fresh breaths of air. You certainly don't want to repeat yourself or let the story slow down to a boring stop. And you might decide to add a new character into the center of your story, just to shake things up.

 

The question this week is...how can you smoothly integrate a brand new character into a story? What reasons would you have for even trying to do it? And have you ever been reading a story where the new character arrivals just seemed unneccessary or distracting? Or like they just didn't seem to fit? Trying to adopt new 'friends' into an already established family can be just as difficult in writing as it is in real life. So what are your thoughts on this? Let us know!

[Graeme]

I've done this in each of my novels. I didn't find it difficult. In all cases, the characters met through normal and reasonable events. In my first novel, I had a (admitedly minor) character appear in chapter 8, and he presented a very good reason why he had jumped into the story. In my second novel, I had the protagonist meet some of his love interest's friends -- up until then all the interaction had been with the protagonists friends. In my third novel, I had the characters go elsewhere, looking for someone, and they found the new character -- an old friend of someone.

 

It doesn't take a lot of effort to think of ways to introduce a new character without being heavy handed. As long as the situation suits, new characters can be introduced. After all, people meet new people all the time. The trickier part is to justify why the new character stays in the story. If there's no apparent justification for it, it stands out like a sore thumb. Give the new character a good reason to stick around and everything falls into place. The introduction part is the easiest part of the whole thing.

[JamesSavik]

I think that "new" characters in a story have to "fit" or they may seem contrived.

 

By "fitting" into the story, this is very, very subjective. Friends or X'es popping up out of nowhere have to be handled with care. There has to be enough common ground for them to be friends and lovers but the old maxim opposites attract also applies. The back-story and the relationship has to make sense.

 

eg. David is a neat freak but his friend Frank is a slob. They were room mates for a while but couldn't stand living together. Now they are close friends who share a fanatical devotion to the Chicago Bears and the scene on the South side. Here we have opposites (neat freak/slob) with common ground (da Bears and da South Side). [not that i've ever been to Chicago]

 

eg. Cam and Jerry are X'es. They met at college where they both majored in biology with an eye toward med school later on. Problem is that Cam is out and Jerry ain't. Jerry can't come out- his Mormon family would freak out. They'll turn a blind eye as long as the party line is that Cam and Jerry are best friends. Cam feels alienated and came out in the first place because he was tired of lying. In this example we see how the couple came together and the issue that broke them up.

 

People aren't aliens. They may behave strangely but there is usually some method to everyones madness. Even the acts of crazy people make sense to themselves and might make sense to you too if you heard the same voices and saw the same hallucinations. It is up to the author to give the reader as little or as much information to figure that out.

 

Some characters may exist on the periphery of the story at at some point play a more important role.

 

eg. Frank and Mikie are on the same soccer team as Jack, John, Tommy and Kevin. Any one of the four could become more important at some point later in the story. Frank and Mikie are best friends and know all of the others. At some point in the story Kevin gets hit by a car and becomes a more important role in the story as his friends support his recovery.

 

In my own long story Broken, the character Brian isn't known at the beginning of the story but he is introduced, and becomes more and more important as the story progresses. He may have been a "new" character but his position was established and we got to know him through activities, actions and dialogue.

 

My 2 cents on the subject which may be worth about face value. :wacko:

[Comsie]

For me, I do sometimes worry about introducing new characters into my stories (with the exception of "GFD", where I already knew what characters are necessary to propel the story forward from the very beginning). But I do try to integrate them into the story if, and ONLY if, I think it's necessary!

 

usually, if I'm adding a new character to a storyline I'm writing...it's because there was a certain 'angle' or approach to a certain theme in the story that I didn't think that I could reach with the characters I already had. If I had a story with only two gay characters, and wanted to add a 'homophobic' element...I'd need a straight character to make that work. If I had two shy, closeted boys in a story...and wanted to tackle the concept of coming out and displaying gay pride, I might add an 'out' boy to the mixture. So I do it more as a plot point than just as a reason to have a new cute face in the series.

 

So I think that if authors think of the story 'first'...and the character's fit second...then the two should fit in just fine. Because as long as that character has a cause and a purpose...then the story won't suffer from his or her arrival into an already balanced storyline.