Success! Since my post last week, I’ve prioritized prep work during my writing time. It’s been good. I haven’t had that much writing time, and I haven’t answered all my questions. I definitely shouldn’t jump back to the story yet. But I have identified several problems that were eating at my subconscious, and I may have resolved one of them.

Unfortunately, that resolution could be painful.

This prep work hasn’t felt satisfying in the same way as putting words on the page. Something about the work has even felt a little hollow. It’s like I’m merely whetting my appetite, and now feel even hungrier for “the real deal.” And yes, I agree, that’s unhelpful terminology for reinforcing my prep work habits.

It doesn’t help that I’m spending a lot of time and effort looking at the holes in my hopes and plans. Realizing that something’s going wrong, that I need to cut or make big changes, isn’t precisely inspiring. But every so often, I get little insights—yes, they sometimes hurt, but I’m excited to try implementing them, to see whether they solve even bigger problems that I’d only barely glimpsed on the horizon.

Let me give you an example.

I conceived of this story with a suite of four central characters. I like all of them. Two of those characters swap close third person narration back and forth and play off each other (Lila and Reggie), and two of them were intended to be foils (Joey and Evan). Given my foreshadowing above, I obviously need to cut one of these characters, right?

Maybe.

Two nights ago, I thought I had to. I’d wrestled back and forth for a while and knew that I couldn’t leave all the characters as they were. Yesterday morning, I realized that there was another change I could make which might work just as well. I just had to rewrite the character instead of cutting him out. Maybe the addendum to “kill your darlings” is “or at least change them significantly.”

Truby’s book The Anatomy of Story is a useful point of reference here and it informed my thinking.  If me writing about that sounds familiar, you might remember it (and LocalScriptMan’s similar take) from my post on Guy Ritchie’s TV show The Gentlemen. Crucially, Truby pushes for each character to hold different moral or ideological positions (see Chapter 4: Character & Chapter 5: Moral Argument). Characters that don’t occupy a unique moral or ideological position—or contend with the main character’s perspectives and actions—aren’t worth focusing on. They can be cut or relegated to the narrative’s background.

I had accidentally written a foil, Evan, who was very comparable to one of the main characters, Reggie. They’re friends. They support each other, they like the same things, they have similar opinions about the world… I liked the two of them together. But without realizing it, I’d thematically positioned Evan as “who the main character Reggie ought to become.”

That’s not great. It’s boring for character growth to be nothing more than “that guy is great, just be that guy” without adding any other complications. I want my characters to grow into new realizations, new selves, not simply subsume themselves into each other.

Spatially, I think of it like this; I’m starting with four characters as four different dots, laid out in a rough square. Their positions around the square represent their opinions about the world and their places in it, as well as their disagreements with each other. As these characters interact with each other over the course of the story, I want them to push and pull and bounce off each other and slowly shift their positions over time. With this group of heroes, I want everyone to shift (some more, some less) into a new position. Everyone is influenced by everyone else, everyone grows. 

I don’t want one of the characters to shift all the way over to merge with another stationary one. I don’t want them to become indistinguishable without there being plenty of movement from both. I’m sure I could write a story where a main character changes a lot to match a foil (who doesn’t move at all), but that feels wrong here. I’m sure that’s the right structure for some stories, but I think that structure would be most likely in propaganda, polemic, or tragedy (or all three, see Schnee’s take on Hero), and that’s not what I’m trying to write here.

This solution I found—rewriting Evan instead of cutting him out—is both painful and exciting. My solution is to make him more prickly, less considerate, less empathetic, more judgmental, cynical, cold, blunt, and logical… and still Reggie’s good friend. It’s painful because, darn it, I liked Evan as he was. He was easier to sympathize with. It’s exciting because, well, this Evan feels more real. Plus, I don’t need more characters who are easy to sympathize with. I need characters who will drive conflict, or debate, or offer competing and contrary views of the world. Ideally, I want all that plus having them still be on the same team.

This seems obvious in retrospect. Just look at the cast of Baldur’s Gate 3.

Having found this solution, I need to go through the other characters again. Because they all exist in relation to each other (Truby likes the term ‘character web’) changing one means that I’ve changed the relationships between all of them. I want to bring a comparable depth to all of them and I need to make sure the others hold thematic positions that will create interesting conflict and opportunities for conversation and change. 

All of which is to say, I’ve successfully done some prep work and now I need to do more prep work.