on making every character matter

so i have dreamt a little and pushed everyone else out of my brain and discarded everyone’s editing advice and now i’m writing again.

here’s the thing: i don’t know how to edit, and edit is what I thought I had to do. I know that one day I must learn to edit without rewriting but for now, that knowledge is elusive and mysterious, and attempting to edit was making me feel terrible.

what I do know how to do is write. and once i saw the (now obvious) solution to one of the problems in my book, i couldn’t help myself, and I sat down almost immediately and banged out a new first chapter, one that I think introduces the main story problem more clearly and sets up the main tensions in an easier-to-digest way.

the solution was deleting more beloved characters.

as I was rereading draft 5 and making a reverse outline i realized that I had scaled back certain characters so much that they no longer filled any obvious purpose in the story. i knew that this was a problem even when I sent the book to beta, and in fact had a conversation my CP/BFF sometime in the summer where I considered combining several characters in order to make their function more clear. but when I tried to write that, it felt all wrong and I eventually gave up on it and let them be, even though I knew it was a problem.

i had a similar problem with another cut character earlier in my writing process, and I’m coming to see that the fixes to these problems sometimes come in steps. at least for me, accepting that something needed to change was easier than accepting these characters needed to go entirely, and in this case attempting to combine them was only a stepping stone to the real solution.

let me zoom out a little. the characters i’m currently talking about have existed since summer 2012. i began writing this book smack in the middle of the story, and i had questions like, “who lives in this world?” and “who took care of Nell when she had no memory?” and even, to a degree, “how do they feel about the main conflict,” but that last question is a bit of an interesting point because part of why I’m cutting them now is that they don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to the main conflict — at least, not at much as someone else does.

back then, i used these characters to have long conversations with my protagonist in which I was able to explore her feelings and ideas. this was important to do because i didn’t have a plot, and the main conflict was actually something that had already happened and everyone was just trying to figure out how to live with it. that’s not great storytelling, i know, but all of the characters i invented then had something interesting to say because it affected their lives.

as the story changed and became more about Nell’s actions in the present, their opinions on past events mattered less and less, and their usefulness in demonstrating Nell’s state of mind also diminished. what i realized, finally, was that they were crowding out the beginning of the story, a place my beta readers told me (and I agreed) needed both higher tension and clearer explanation of character motivations.

so who am I replacing those characters with? a characters whose motivations matter, of course. it’s actually so obvious now that I’m mad I never thought of it before — though, I’ll be honest, the reason I never thought of it was that I wasn’t emotionally prepared to rewrite my beginning in this new way.

when Nell begins her journey, she is memoryless and temporarily rather dependent on the people around her. in draft 5, the people filling that caretaking role are those aforementioned characters, the ones I invented to be kind and parental. now, the person filling that role is someone who stands to materially gain from Nell, a character who my beta readers agreed didn’t get enough screen time: the queen of the dragon clan.

i kept trying to figure out how to make the dragon queen’s motivations more clear, how to spend more time with her without making my book even longer, and when the answer hit me I felt like, oh, duh. she should be the one Nell is spending time with while dazed and confused, she should be someone Nell comes to see as reliable and trustworthy; this makes their eventual conflict much more high-stakes, because their relationship is personal and it matters.

there’s another really important reason to make this change, and that’s character foils.

i have a little theory, one i’m going to put to the test now: every character should have something meaningful to say about the main tension. they should have a clear and decided opinion about it, and their opinion should matter in some tangible way. characters that are similar in some way (like their relationship to the protagonist) but on opposite sides of the tension divide are interesting foils. this is why i invented a secondary love interest and created a love triangle in my book: i needed a person to represent Nell’s choices.

in this case, i had assumed that the dragon queen was some kind of foil for the human queen, the major antagonist (who also doesn’t get enough screen time*). and, it’s true that the dragon queen and human queen fall on opposite sides of the main tension, but not in a way that’s very clear or legible. in fact it’s hard to explain how they have anything to do with each other.

but the dragon queen makes an excellent foil for Nell’s own mother, in a way that I think will actually heighten the tension in that relationship essentially for free. recall that the main tension of my book is essentially: will Nell break the magical bond between her dragon and herself? Nell’s mother wishes Nell was born with the chance to choose. you might think this means that Nell and her mom get along great since they are on the same side of the debate, but actually no, they have issues: because Nell perceives her mother’s opinion as meaning that something inherent to herself is wrong and in need of change, and she rails against this even as she seeks to change that inherent thing herself.

the dragon queen, on the other hand, firmly believes that being born a dragon-soulmate is good. in fact she will do anything it takes to keep the status quo as it is. and that means convincing a memoryless but willful young woman that she can accept the way she is, actually, and live a peaceful life without disrupting the dragon’s way of life.

personally, I think that’s a lot more interesting.

* this is a major problem; i’ll write a different post about how i want to solve it, but not right now.