Building the Ensemble

(image courtesy of Joseph Redfield Nino via pixabay.com)

Very few stories have a single character without interaction. Even if the character remains solitary, nature, setting, other elements become additional characters in the story, in most cases. Books and stories completely inside a character’s head exist, but in most cases, there are other characters around the central protagonist.

There are usually friends, family or chosen family, co-workers, colleagues, and the people one interacts with regularly without knowing much about, such as at one’s regular grocery store, the post office, the library, etc. There are usually antagonists and irritants.

Each character serves a purpose to support or attempt to thwart the central protagonist’s arc (and central narrative drive of the story) while also being central to their own story. It is up to the author to choose how much of the ensemble’s story to reveal, and how much the reader needs to know to serve the overall story. The author should know as much as possible, and then choose the nuggets to feed the reader.

Some readers (and editors) like small casts. If the story supports that, great. But too often, something is set in place like Manhattan, and if there aren’t enough tertiary characters, even when those perform similar functions as background would on a film or television set, it throws off the tone.

As fiction exploring the pandemic experiences grows over the coming years, I’m sure there will be more stories about characters dealing with isolation and thereby the themes and plot and story of those pieces need fewer characters. Our lives changed, and the fiction will (and should) reflect those changes.

Then, of course, there are the so-called contemporary novels coming out that ignore the pandemic and pretend it never happened. That’s an entirely different conversation.

In one of my workshops, I asked the students to keep a notepad with them and make a scratch mark on it every time they encountered another human being in the course of their day. I was working in Manhattan and staying outside of the city itself, looking after a parent at the time, so I was caring/writing during the day, and commuting in via train to work Broadway shows at night.

Between all of that, I encountered over 500 people in a single day, between trains and the show (it can take as many as 100 people to make a large musical run) and to-ing and fro-ing. That’s too many individuals to fit into a typical piece, but one can still create a sense of crowded streets and lively vibrancy. If a piece is supposedly set in a busy metropolis, such as New York or Los Angeles or London or Tokyo, but there’s no sense of the teeming life of the place, I start to distrust the author. If I can’t trust the author on something as simple as how to people the environment, what else can’t I trust? It makes it impossible for me to suspend my disbelief.

Doing the same exercise after I moved to Cape Cod, several years later, I only encountered 37 people in a typical day. Here in the Berkshires, going into Year 4 of the pandemic and working completely remotely, it’s often fewer than 10, even though I live in a city now, rather than in a village (although summers in Cape villages got VERY crowded).

We’ll talk more about setting in a few weeks, but setting affects character indirectly in that it helps shape who will be in it.

Genre also has an impact on the ensemble, because different genres lean on different tropes, and readers want to see depictions of those tropes when they pick up a book in a particular genre. From there, it’s fun to delight them by doing something fresh with the trope that hits and then exceeds expectations.

A romance novel is going to have a somewhat different ensemble than a military thriller that doesn’t include any romantic elements in it. A cozy mystery with romantic elements in it may overlap some of the tropes with the romance. A mystery novel might even overlap some questing fantasy elements because the mystery could be considered a “quest” needing companions for the journey. There are so many wonderful genre mixes now, such as cozy fantasy and noir mystery fantasy that it gives room for more nuanced ensembles.  Urban fantasy usually has the urban, paranormal, fantasy, mystery, and romance tropes all bundled together. General fiction and literary fiction has people trying to make it day by day, and often reflects the time which it is written as much as the time in which the story itself is set.

Way back when I started my career, the loner was a popular protagonist. In film, in mystery, in westerns, in special ops, in literary fiction, pretty much across genre, the character was one who was forced into isolation for refusing to conform, an unmoored wanderer. I’ve seen several articles lately blaming the state of ridiculousness we live in on that trope, and I disagree.

While the loner protagonist was often a misfit and an outcast, over the course of whatever journey we took with them, they usually revealed a strong inner core of integrity and caring for others. They built community and found family, and the community they helped learned to accept them. In the case of the western, where the drifter comes in, cleans out the bad guys and moves on, it’s because the community NEEDS the drifter, but won’t necessarily accept said drifter on a daily basis unless they are willing to change – thereby muting the skills and characteristics that allowed them to save the town in the first place. The character knows this, and moves on. The loner character has an ensemble around them of other misfits, of people who could see the individual’s true value, of people with history, or who helped each other. It’s not the current politicized “rugged individualism” that the right extols, which is basically, “I get to be as big an asshole I want, and my right to be an asshole is more important than any of anyone else’s rights.” Which is simply not true.

A cozy mystery writer said, in an author talk last year, that the murder upsets the status quo of the community, and solving it returns the status quo. But that wasn’t always the case. Way back when I got fascinated by the genre, and women were fighting to publish more as women (not under male or androgynous pseudonyms), the way the genre evolved was different. The loner outcast who didn’t conform solved the murder anyway (thus helping/saving the community, as the characters mentioned above) and the community learned to accept her for who she was, not demand that she change to fit their prejudices. That is one of the things that I loved about the genre, and something that is, far too often, being lost in the genre as it takes harder and harder turns to the right, which it’s been doing since 9/11, and even more so since the 2016 election. Because, let’s face it, there are times when the community (and therefore, the status quo) is WRONG. Catching the murderer shouldn’t return the community to the status quo – it should make the community look at themselves and build a better community. “Returning to the status quo” lets the community off too easily and shifts blame entirely on an outside “evil” instead of making the community look at the cracks that allowed the evil to enter in the first place, and to heal that and do better.

Back to building an ensemble – how does one do it?

Here we go again, going back to character, and the central protagonist. The characters around the central protagonist, be they friend or foe, serve to reveal how the protagonist handles different relationships in their lives, especially under stress. How do the various interactions, with the close circle and the more tangential interactions reveal character, drive the narrative, and support the protagonist’s growth through the course of the book?

There are tropes for this, and genre expectations will determine, to a certain extent, Once the genre expectations are understood, they can be turned inside out, and that often makes for a richer book. Understanding genre expectations and turning them inside out is different than “not liking” them and choosing to ignore them. That, too, is a topic for another day.

A female protagonist often has two best friends, usually when the central narrative drive is that protagonist. In larger novels, the core friend group is often larger (four, five, maybe even more) and chapters are sometimes done in different POVs of the ensemble. But where the driving force is a single protagonist, she often has two best friends, and they will reflect qualities she lacks (positive or negative) and wishes she had, and often skills she needs and doesn’t yet have (or doesn’t choose to learn).

One of the friends is usually more interested in flirting or sex. Too often, it’s portrayed as  slut-shaming, rather than a character in charge of her own healthy sexuality. Too often, she’s punished for liking an active sex life (in mysteries, often with death or rape), with the undertone that she “deserved” it. That’s starting to shift a little, especially in work by women who are sick of the depiction of women being punished for taking charge of their sex lives. But publishing still pushes that trope, especially in mysteries, thrillers, etc.

Another friend is either shy and quiet and smart, or brittle and practical. The protagonists often wants more of the qualities of all her friends, while having an amalgamation of those qualities in her own core.

Something I notice in long-running series with the same protagonist throughout is that, after a couple of books, the character’s growth arc vastly slows down. In the best of these series, the character grows and changes in each book, even if it’s not as earth-shattering as the book which launched the series. In the ones that lose me, the character goes through the same motions in each book, with the same result, and little change or growth. The ensemble around shifts, except for the core best buddies,  and the conflict in that particular book is created because a new character comes in. But all that new character does is fulfill the same plot purpose that the same type of character in the previous book did – annoy the protagonist, put one of the protagonist’s friends under threat, create a conflict that often feels forced, and the protagonist takes all the same steps to the same result as in the dozen previous books. Those new characters coming in are flat tropes, or a barely changed stereotype with a different name and a few different physical characteristics.

Some readers find that soothing. They pick up the book or series because they want the reassurance of knowing it all comes out all right in the end. I think it’s more interesting when the situation/new conflicts force the protagonist to grow and change and learn something, at least a little bit, from book to book. When an entire series shows continuous growth (with some setbacks along the way) of all the core characters, then it’s the type of series I keep reading, and keep re-reading.

One of the best examples of ensemble growth, including the central protagonist, is Donna Andrews’s Meg Langslow series,  in over 30 books and counting. If you haven’t read them, the series is a master class in character growth and building an ensemble that the readers love following from book to book, because the characters grow, change, and become more and more themselves.

Since I often start from character (and usually the protagonist), information about the character spills out as I draft, and the initial ensemble rather organically springs up. Who is likely to be in the location? Work colleagues? Neighbors? Loves? Friends? Foes?

But then, the first draft is meant to be a mess, because drafting it means I’m finding out what the story is. What is the character trying to tell me? Why are we here with these people at this moment, and not six months ago or ten years into the future? What is it about the NOW that invites in the reader?

It’s tied in to plot, story, and theme, and it’s rather like making a stew, were you toss in a bunch of ingredients, and hope you don’t wind up with an inedible mess.

That’s where the Writer’s Rough Outline helps: as I work through plot points, and figure out how they create the overall arc and the smaller arcs, the ensemble starts shaping. As I write my way into the book, and those characters start speaking, I learn what structural and/or thematic purpose they serve in the book.

One of the things I’m struggling with in the 22-page outline/treatment for a script I wrote over last weekend (don’t ask, long story) is that the genre requires specific skills in certain ensemble characters. I want to hit those expectations, but also tweak them a little, because while I love the ensemble, I sometimes feel these expected characters are too similar too each other and not enough fully developed individuals. I know my central pair of protagonists, and some of the other supporting characters, but this core ensemble for a particular section are eluding me at the moment, in all but the broadest strokes. I may be stuck with broad strokes as I approach their section in the script, and hope I learn about them as I write the first draft.

Sometimes it means shifting characters. Sometimes, to serve the plot, they need a different position in the protagonist’s environment. If that particular character can’t serve that purpose and can’t earn a different purpose in the piece, they have to be cut. Sometimes, a pair of characters are facets of what could be a single character, and it makes sense to combine them.

In a long-running series, the ensemble will change, as characters’ lives change, and as people’s lives changes. Friendships will drift apart or have an unhealable rift. Characters will fall in love, fall out of love, marry, divorce, have children, choose not to have children, die, move away, change jobs.

As a writer, when I feel a character pulling toward a change, in an early draft, I allow it. Later, as I go through the rounds of revision, I analyze the why and where and how each change affects the central narrative drive and the overall arc of the story or series. And I make the changes necessary to serve the story I want to tell.

Later, when editors, etc. come into the mix and point out contradictions, or want changes to fit genre, I have to decide where their expertise makes it a better book in terms of story and salability, and if there is anything I feel deeply about and want to fight to keep. Even if I win some of those fights, I could decrease audience, and that possibility is something each author has to weigh for each book. Because publishing is a business, and if you don’t sell enough, you are no longer a viable business risk, and your publisher will drop you. So you have to decide where to make compromises for market, or not make the compromises in important thematic and story elements, and deal with the consequences.

There are times when a supporting character becomes more interesting and takes up more physical and emotional space in the story than the protagonist. Sometimes it’s an indication that the character you thought should be the protagonist is actually a supporting character, and the supporting character needs to move into the protagonist slot.

In other circumstances, that secondary character might be outgrowing the original world of the protagonist, and it might be time to spin that character out into their own story or series, where they are the central protagonist.

Ensembles are about:

--what connects them to the protagonist (positive and negative)?

--how do those connections, partnerships, and conflicts drive and support the story?

--do their interactions ring true, or do they read as forced?

Once you can answer those questions, you’ll see how each character fits into your protagonist’s ensemble, and where you need to remove or add others.