Welcome to day 10 of PREPTOBER! This is a series of daily questions and prompts to help you prepare for this year’s upcoming NaNoWriMo!
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Today’s question is:
Who are your side characters?
Feel free to share your answer in the comments! I would love to hear your response!
Last time, we talked about the relationship between your Protagonist’s fears and your Antagonist’s motivation.
Today, we are going to go over all the other characters that make up your book’s cast.
Most stories have side or secondary characters that either help or hinder your Protagonist. But the tendency that we writers have is to add way, way, way too many side characters.
So we are going to do some exercises to help you cut down on your list.
I want you to think of a rubber ball that’s bisected down the middle to create two hemispheres. One hemisphere is the “good” side that helps your protagonist, the other is the “bad” side that hurts your protagonist.
For every character you have on one side of the ball, you should consider having an equally balanced character on the other side. This doesn’t have to be precise, but your goal should be balance amongst your cast.
Let’s take a look at Mean Girls.
If you don’t know, then Mean Girls is the story of Cady who transfers to a new school that has a bunch of cliques. Struggling to fit in, Cady finally finds her people, outcasts Janice and Damien.
But they have a problem. They have been bullied by the Queen Bees of the school, The Plastics.
Cady then works with her friends to ruin the lives of the Plastics, but Cady ends up losing herself in the process.
If we take a look at the symmetry of the cast, we can see that we have an even 3 vs. 3 match in this story: Cady, Janice and Damien versus Regina, Gretchen, and Karen.
We can also see that of those groups Cady and Regina are at the top of the pecking order as the primary Protagonist and Antagonist.
But this post is about side characters. What you will also notice is that for every ally that Regina has, Cady has one two. This creates a balance.
Even when you introduce Aaron, who is the boy both Cady and Regina want to date, he is in the middle of these two warring forces, creating a perfect axis.
The story would be too cumbersome if Regina had an entire legion of girls at her back. Likewise, if Cady was truly alone she would be helpless in the story.
To create a balance of energy between Protagonists and Antagonistic forces, you want to aim for symmetry on both sides.
How does this help you with creating endless side characters? Well, take a look at your cast list and see if maybe one side is a little too over powered. Remember, when the hero meets the villain it’s like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. There is conflict because both sides are relatively similar in power.
Remember, there is a *reason* why the antagonist doesn’t win right away.
This may seem contrary to what you may think, but we want our story to exist in a sphere of believability. It needs to be both believable that the Protagonist is being oppressed by the Protagonist, and believable that the Protagonist can reasonably grow to become more powerful that their enemy.
One way to do that is to balance your team rosters. Create symmetry amongst your cast, give your side characters varying strengths and weaknesses that make them both vulnerable and strong in the presence of the opposition.
So, Who are your side characters?
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