Write Your Novel Step by Step (24) "Selecting Your Cast"

Congratulations! Over the last few steps you’ve learned a tremendous amount of information about your characters’ attributes, self-image, outlook, and personal issues.

With all the work you’ve done, you probably have more characters than you need or want. Still, by keeping them around, you have had the opportunity to inject new blood into old stereotypes. As a result, your potential cast represents a healthy mix of interesting people.

The task at hand is to pare down this list by selecting only those characters you really want or actually need in your story.

To begin, make three categories, either as columns on a page or piles of index cards: one for obvious rejects, one for maybes, and one for the characters you are absolutely certain you want in your novel.

Put into the Keeper pile every character that is essential to your plot, contributes extraordinary passion, or is just so original and intriguing you can wait to write about them.

In the Not Sure pile, place all the characters who have some function (though they aren’t the only one who could perform it), have some passionate contribution (but it seems more peripheral than central), or are mildly interesting but not all-consuming fascinating.

In the No Way! Pile, place all the characters who don’t have a function, don’t contribute to the passionate side of your story and rub you the wrong way.

After distributing all your characters into these three categories, leaf through the “maybe” category, character by character, to see if any of them would fit will and without redundancy in the cast you’ve already selected.

If any would uniquely bring something worthwhile to your story that couldn’t be contributed by a keeper character, add them to your cast for now. If they would not, add them to the rejects.

Finally, look through the rejects for any individual attributes that you are sorry to see go – character traits you’d like to explore in your novel, even if you are sure you don’t want the whole character.

If there are any, distribute those attributes among your chosen characters as long as they don’t conflict with or lessen their existing quality and power. In this way, you will infuse your cast with the most potent elements possible.

You now have your initial cast of characters for your novel. In the actual writing to come, you may determine that certain characters are not playing out as well as expected. At that time, you can always cut them from your cast and redistribute any desirable attributes among your other characters.

Or, you may discover there are some essential jobs left undone, and you’ll need to create one or more additional characters to fill that gap.

But, for now, you have finally arrived at your initial cast – the folks who will populate your story’s world, drive the action, consider the issues, and involve your readers.

In the next step, we’ll explore the nature of your Main Character before turning our attention to your story’s theme.

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Character Exercise: 108 Year Old Film Clip

Narrative isn't everything.  Many experiences in fiction and real life have no narrative at all.  While movies are often thought to be one of the most story-oriented media, here is a film clip that has no story, yet has tremendous meaning.  It was shot in San Francisco in 1906, just six days before the Great Earthquake.  Though there is no narrative, we cannot help but wonder what stories unfolded for the people we see just one week later.

As a good writer's exercise, pick a person or two that you see in the clip and write a short article that might have been published in the newspaper a week after the quake about their experiences.

Write Your Novel Step by Step (22) "Character Points of View"

Now that you know something about the personalities of your potential cast members, it is time to find out how they see your story.

In this step, you’ll have each character write another paragraph from their point of view, but this time describing the basic plot of your story as it appear to them.

This will make your story more realistic by helping you understand and describe how each character sees and feels about the events unfolding around them.

Some characters may be integral to the plot. Others may simply be interesting folk who populate your story’s world. Be sure each character includes how they see their role (if any) in the events, or if they seem themselves as just an observer or bystander. If they are involved in the plot, outline the nature of their participation as they see it.

Again, you don’t want to go into great detail at this time. What you want is just an idea of how your story looks through each character’s eyes. This will help you later on not only to decide which characters you want in your story, but how you might employ them as well.

In the next step we’ll get to know your characters even better by investigating any personal and/or moral issues with which they grapple.

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Write Your Novel Step by Step (20) "Character Trait Swap Meet"

In the last step you made sure each of your potential characters had a vocation, name, gender, age and perhaps additional personal attributes.

In this step we’re going to swap around some of those traits to make your list of potential characters even more original, interesting and memorable than before.

Our creative minds tend to fall into the same patterns over and over again. As a result, our characters run the risk of becoming overused stereotypes. By exchanging traits, we can create characters that transcend our inspirational ruts and become far more interesting and memorable.

Don’t feel pressured to alter the original collection of attributes you had assigned to any given character if you are truly happy and comfortable with it. Still, mixing things up a bit just to see what happens can’t hurt and just might just turn out to build an even more intriguing character.

Task One: Swapping Jobs

In this section rearrange your characters' jobs until you have created a new cast list with all the same information except different vocations for each.

For example, a Mercenary named Killer and a Seamstress named Jane are inherently less interesting that Seamstress named Killer and a Mercenary named Jane.

Swap jobs around a few times, locking in the combinations you like and reverting to the original arrangement of attributes for those you don’t. Then, move on to Task Two….

Task Two: Swapping Genders

Every culture has preconceptions of the kinds of vocations appropriate to each sex. Adhering to these expectations makes characters familiar but also makes them predictable and ordinary.

By changing the gender of at least some of your less interesting characters, you can breathe new life into them.

For example, a male Mercenary is typical, a female Mercenary is not. A character called "John's Wife" does not necessarily have to be female, especially in this day and age.

Referring to your revised cast list including the new vocations, swap gender assignments among your characters to create even more interesting cominbations.

Task Three: Swapping Ages

We tend to write about characters our own age, or to assume a particular age by virtue of vocation. For example, an action character such as a Bush Pilot, or Spy is usually set as ranging between 25 and 50. An elementary school student is usually 5 to 12.

But what if you had a Bush Pilot in the range of 5 to 12 and an elementary school student of 25 to 50? In fact, these characters are not only more interesting, but easier to write, simply because the contrasts they express spur all kinds of creative inspirations.

Referring to your newly revised cast list from Task Two, swap the ages around to create a new list with these additional changes.

Task Four: Swapping Additional Attributes

Just as you have done with jobs, genders and ages, swap around any additional attributes you may have assigned to your characters to see if they make your potential cast members even more interesting.

When you have settled on the best possible combinations of attributes for each character, move on to the next step to audition these people for a role in your novel.

This article is drawn from:

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Write Your Novel Step by Step (17) "Gender Specific"

It's time to start listing some of your characters' attributes. One of the most fundamental is their gender.

For every character you are going to want to check the gender box on their interview sheet: Male, Female or Undecided.

Most characters will have an obvious gender, though some (like a shark or the wind) might be neuter or indeterminate. Usually, a gender helps the reader know how to relate to a character, as it is one of the first things humans instinctively try to determine, right after friend or foe.

Gender alters our entire sense of a person, critter or entity, so note one for every character in your list, if you can.  Don't be afraid to experiment with assigning a gender other than your original intention, but don’t overthink the plumbing, as it were. For now, just go with the obvious choice if you like and we’ll mix things up a bit later on.

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