Unlikely Masterclass: Making you Care
SPOILERS FOR STRANGER THINGS VOL. 4
Before we begin, do me a favor and watch these two videos.
I’ve been a fan of SungWon Cho’s videos and voice work since my Tumblr days. There is no one on the internet who can so precisely pinpoint the nuances of the anime and movie industry, and their respective writing.
For the uninitiated, anime, particularly slice of life anime (anime based in (more or less) reality), usually about mundane subjects, has a brilliant habit of making its audience also care about those mundane subjects. Maybe YOU never thought twice about being a patissier, or golf, or ballroom dancing, or camping, but here. Watch this group of people who have made it their WHOLE LIVES.
In these videos, we’re given exactly one minute of story, but already, I care more about this man and the pizza making career of his, and his brother’s dreams, than I have about anything else. It all comes together; reaching for the sky, the true meaning of pizza, their relationship, the loss that pushed Pizza Bro forward in life.
Parody it may be, that’s a story. Investment in under a minute.
Surely when you have a whole book to get people invested, it’s easier, right? I’m not so sure.
In my writing group this week, we talked about side characters, and how sometimes, they can unseat the protagonists as someone’s favorite part of the story. I’ve experienced this myself. After my first drafts of the Three Willows series were completed and my parents read them, because they are wonderful people, I asked them who their favorite characters were. And my dad’s honest answer was the saw blade salesman. A purely comic relief background character who gets no development. But here’s the thing: I get it! I love that guy, too! Why do you think I gave him another scene in the third book?
What is is about characters like this that have the potential to develop their own fandom to the levels of the Avatar Cabbage Guy?
I think this video explains it the best. There are some great tips in here for not only creating side characters the audience will care about, but also how to build up a character’s death if it happens early in the story.
In a show like Stranger Things, where the nerds and outcasts are the heroes, you wouldn’t think its audience would be very sympathetic to a typical popular girl cheerleader character. It feels even less likely that a show with an already huge cast would be able to bring in new faces for their fourth season and have people respond so favorably to their stories. But they did! Just like ProZD’s pizza bros, we got very little screen time with Chrissy, and every bit of it was used to make us care about her until the end. But the thing is, Chrissy’s death wasn’t the grand conclusion to a character, it was a device used to introduce audiences to the show’s villain. What’s masterful, is that it did both well.
Schnee explains a point very well. Because we don’t have many episodes to understand Chrissy, the writers fall back on character archetypes to get us to figure out who she is. And that’s not cliche, it’s a beautifully executed trope, and tropes are not bad. Readers/watchers/audiences are consumers of media, there are certain stories we already know and can understand quickly, spending more time on other details that can help develop something else. Side characters can and should be developed, but don’t lose sight of that development serving a function.
In my new WIP, I was working on a scene where I realized some things about the protagonist would be better demonstrated if they came out in conversation, but I hadn’t thought of a character who would also feasibly be in the scene, so I had to create one.
My mind went to these two guys from Castle in the Sky. Why was I thinking of them? What did I like about them? They’re big, strong, outwardly tough guys, who are actually very kind and comical. Strong Guy with a Heart of Gold is a solid archetype, and I latched onto it in the scene. I developed a set of twin brothers, in the same line of work as the protagonist, who are much older than her, but they’ve known each other since they were kids. Meaning, they’d know about her family situation. Meaning I can lay hints about her father, a much bigger driving point of the plot, in conversations with These Two Guys that will feel more organic, before he’s brought on page. It was easy to find their voices once I had their archetype and knew what I needed them to accomplish. The rest of the scene was flavor, and endearing them to myself as I wrote, and consequently finding other places in the outline where they could appear again.
Formulas like that are some of the cool parts about writing. I’m going to attempt to take what I’ve been learning about side characters, and work some of it into introducing main characters, too. The faster I can get you to care, the better. 🥰
