Building Out Characters in a different way (Bite Sized Method)
Earlier this year I made a plan to piece together a collection (or two) of thematically coherent short stories with an end goal of publishing them all as a single book.
After diving into this project, the idea built on itself and I decided to include threads that carry from one story to the next. Shared themes, characters that recur and settings that echo throughout the collection. Think Tim O’Brian’s The Things they Carried. Technically a short story collection, but closer to fragmented novella in practice.
While the force-feeding of Marvel movies has tainted the concept of a shared universe a bit, I’ll admit there is something addictive about leveraging the world-building that I’ve already invested and using it to inform an entirely separate story. While I’m not quite finished, the collection has really built on itself and is feeling less like a compilation of disconnected stories and more like a Middle-Marchian tapestry. If I pull this off the way I hope to, there should be moments sprinkled throughout where connections fall into place and instil the overall collection with a different type of reward for a reader.
This happy accident organically emerged out of the writing process and is opening my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about character. By starting from a self contained premise and identifying which of my existing cast of characters might feature, I’m less boxed in by the trap of contriving character arcs from scratch—I’m also saving myself some of the leg work of setting up backstory.
This lets me track the cause and effect from a different angle than I typically would while writing a conventional storyline. By popping in to glimpse vignettes from different stages of a character’s life, I’m able to give each section its own internal pacing which in my opinion makes for a more varied and novel reading experience.
It also lends itself to retroactive editing opportunities where the later story informs the first and I’ll go back and edit to make the two stories more internally coherent. This is the approach that makes some authors appear like outright masterminds. “How did they think of everything right from the start?”
They didn’t. They just noticed it in post and went back to plant the necessary seeds.
I was vaguely aware of authors like Philip Roth and Kurt Vonnegut featuring recurring characters across their novels, but it never occurred to attempt it myself until now.
The results are interesting. This new approach definitely contains the ingredients to teach me a thing or two about how to write an effective novel. It’s made me
It remains to be seen how effectively I’ll adopt this as an approach moving forward, but it’s always good to stumble across new tools to throw in the box for later on.
PS.
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