When Unnamed Characters Speak

Jenny asks,

Sorry to interrupt a very interesting thread--I swear I read a post here once about handling dialogue when we don't know the names of the speakers. As in someone listening in on a conversation, say, between two women and a man. Like the first time one speaks you could say, "the man with the ill-fitting suit" but when that person speaks again, how would you identify him in a non-cumbersome way? That kind of a thing.

But I can't find the post. If it rings a bell would you mind directing me?

Jenny, I couldn't find such a post. Maybe we did write it and our Super Deluxe Sidebar Labeling System (tm) has failed again. Someday, I swear, I am going to sort out our labels. (Stop laughing.)

So, let's start by setting some parameters. You're writing a secondary character important enough to speak but not important enough to identify by name. (Or perhaps there is some other reason for hiding the name.) That secondary character doesn't fall into a neat character type, so you can't just write, the waiter said, after his lines.

Here's a handy two-step process for making this easy.

Step One.
Pick an active identifier that gives you room to play.

You offer an ill-fitting suit. This is a good choice, much better than a static cue or a common trait. Here's why--

Step Two.
Use beats to draw the reader's attention back to that active identifier.

Let's use your example of the man in the ill-fitting suit. The first time he speaks, you can identify him as just that, the man in the ill-fitting suit.

Now let's brainstorm some actions taken by a man who wears that ill-fitting suit. Does he tug the cuffs? Play with the tight buttons? Hike his pants up repeatedly? Shrug his shoulders when things feel tight?

Use these things as beats in that character's dialogue. It will cue "ill-fitting suit" without being repetitive.

---

"I never saw that woman before she turned up in the diner." The man tugged his frayed cuffs down. "She sat by herself and didn't talk to anyone."

Detective Jones made a note on his pad. "So why did you remember her? You identified her body in the alley."

He popped open a too-tight button. "Kinda hard not to notice a soaking wet, barefoot woman who comes into a diner and orders pie. And pays all in dimes. You remember a thing like that."

----

You see? If you had tagged the nameless character with something more ordinary or static -- "the tall blond," for example -- you wouldn't have all these options for beats. Well, maybe you could have him run his hands through his blond curls. That's a common move, so common the reader might yawn through it. Plus, there might be many blond men in your book. So this might not be unique enough to help the reader keep things straight.

Maybe you could have him bend to get through the doorway, but how many doorways will he walk through in the course of the conversation? You need an identifier that gives you options, that's vivid, and that is unique enough to relate back to only one character.

Theresa

Paging Dr. Cannon

We've taken a look deep inside Drago and Johnny, our primary characters, and have constructed some complex characters with a lot going on inside and outside. We've constructed backstories, analyzed emotional needs, examined needs in conflict, and predicted behavior based on all these factors.

Do you want to do this for every single character in your story?

You can if you want to, and it might (might!) make your story richer. It sure would be a lot of fun, too, because let's face it, this stuff is fun.

But it would be awfully time-consuming to have to build every character in this complex and nuanced manner. For characters that play minor roles, that appear only in one or two scenes, there are other ways to make them vivid without writing dozens of pages of backstory and filling in detailed charts and questionnaires.

Think about this. You're attending a business function with a friend, say an awards dinner. The friend knows everyone, but you don't know anyone but your friend. You walk in, and your friend introduces you to someone right away, before you've even taken the lay of the land.

Immediately, you will begin to take in information about this new person to help you understand what kind of person he or she is. Clothing, hairstyle, smile, mannerisms, how loudly or softly they speak, even word choices -- thousands of cues that all mount up to create an impression of character. Some of these cues are large and some are small, but each plays a role in helpin gyo to understand what kind of person you've just met.

Here's what you don't get with your new acquaintance: details of their childhood, parents, siblings, education, and all the other backstory; goals, dreams, plans and other details related to external motivation; emotional weaknesses, core needs, emotional strengths, secrets, obsessions, and other things related to the deeper psyche; and, indeed, anything not appropriate for chat at a business cocktail party or dinner.

Yet you can still draw some conclusions about this character, can't you? He's bossy. She's needy. He's a really warm-hearted guy. She's the class clown. His conversation is limited. And you can use those conclusions to begin to predict character behavior. You begin to understand how that particular character would behave in a different setting even though you might not know every detail of their childhoods.

You do it all by staying in the present and analyzing only the information available at this moment and in these circumstances.

And now you're going to do it for Dr. Cannon. She's our pal, the interviewer surgeon on staff at a prestigious city hospital and involved in MSF. That's all we know about her so far.

Now, keeping in mind that every detail you choose must be evocative of a consistent character type, I want you to:

-- Pick out Dr. Cannon's clothing.

-- Give her a physical description.

-- Describe the meal she orders and how she orders it.

-- Describe her manner of interacting with Johnny and Drago.

That's it. In essence, you will build a character by analyzing her appearance and behavior in a given setting. Go!

Theresa

Susan's question

Susan asks:

I'm wrestling with my WIP and realized I have a character who's important because of who she is (family member) but has no real wants/needs in the book. Is this a necessary ingredient, or can she earn her spot in the story if she's there as merely an enabler to the other characters? (and now you see why I've been absent from the comments of late!) Thanks... Susan Helene Gottfried http://westofmars.com

Actually, you probably want to limit the number of characters who have goals and journeys in the book. Yeah, yeah, we're all human, and we're all important, and we all have needs-- but think about real life. I have no doubt that bank teller has problems and goals and a whole life, but I just want her to give me money. She's got a role to play, and her goals and needs just aren't important to me. Sorry. (But if she were to burst into tears, I'd be drawn in and suddenly care. Fortunately, she just cashes my check.)

Who is your protagonist? Okay, now what is this person's relationship or role in relation to the protagonist? If all she does is enable, that's fine. It might be boring, it might not. But if she's distracting us from the protagonist because, I don't know, her newborn needs a donor heart, well, that's a problem. She's not a major character, right? She's there to further the plot in some way. She doesn't even have to be interesting, actually, if her role is limited. For example, say she's the sister-in-law who calls to tell Joe that his father has died, and there's going to be a dispute about the will because dad's trophy wife has vowed to get every penny. Maybe that's the end of her role-- just messenger. But maybe not. If she's married to Joe's brother, obviously she has an interest in the will too. If so, go with it. Is she greedy too? Or is she heartsick for her husband, who is going to lose so much? Or what?

That is, you don't have to invent goals and conflicts. The role will have them sort of pre-ordained for you. If you give a plausible sense of that, you don't really need (probably) this person to have purely personal (not connected with protagonist) goals. Or at least, you don't need to show them usually. So think about who this person is and what her role is. It's probably (in relation to pro) one of these:
1) A motivation (she's his grandmother and he owes her everything and all she wants before she dies is to see his college graduation)
2) A conflict (she's his ex-wife, and they still own a business together, and it's hard to operate a business when there's so much emotional tension)
3) A foil (she's his sister, and they're a lot alike, but she's gone the conventional route and we can see by looking at her how far he's strayed from his affluent roots).

Make sure that you can figure out the naturally occurring conflicts and goals that come with the role. Show that role in operation. That is, don't have her as some business rival (that is, with a built-in conflict) who generously shares with him the information he needs-- she should only do that if it furthers her role as rival somehow (like they form an alliance). IF there's more to it-- like she's fallen in love with him and is betraying her own interests for him-- then she's become more than a roleplayer and yeah, you might need to flesh out her part and make her a major character. If you don't want to do that, go back to the role, and think about what that is, and give her plausible goals and needs and conflicts -- but all within the story. Make her real, but don't make her important.

Alicia

Secondary characters who do too much

This is the advice that gets the most squawks. Let me say first that some stories have a bigger scope than others. If this story is about how a town reacts to a mini-epidemic, then profiling several or even a dozen characters might work just great. (Just make sure each character gives the reader a different perspective on the events… combine characters who are quite similar, like the two elderly men who lose their wives can become one elderly man with one lost wife.) But if you're writing a book not about an ensemble cast, but rather tightly focused on one character or a couple or a protagonist or antagonist, look closely at the scenes involving secondary characters. The secondary-character-who-acts-like-a-primary is, I have to say, all too common in manuscripts, perhaps a holdover from the days when books weren't so narrowly focused. But this kind of character treatment not only takes up space, it makes the protagonist less of a protagonist when someone else commits too many major actions in the plot.

Again, plenty of books have ensemble casts where several characters have near-equal status-- say, four members of a punk band, each with his own journey to make. And if your book is like that, great—just cut down on the OTHER characters' passages. But if your book has one or two central characters, he/she/they should probably be causing most of the plot action. (When it comes to plot-development, the antagonist is often one of the two-three central characters, even if we are never in that viewpoint.) If, for example, the protagonist doesn't confront the external conflict, make mistakes, fix those mistakes, take action, change the course of the plot – at nearly every juncture—is that really a protagonist? Rule of thumb here—the turning point scenes should almost always either result from protagonist action or cause protagonist reaction.

But all too often I see a secondary character, most often the hero's best friend, interestingly enough, doing too much of the protagonist's job. And almost invariably when I point out, oh, that the best friend needs to be throttled down a few notches (during the whole climax, the supposed hero is unconscious, and his wisecracking best friend has to save the busful of schoolchildren, rescue the heroine from the villains, and bring the mayor to justice), the writer will react angrily (my reactions to that reaction in parens):

It has to be this way because the hero gets knocked out (so the god who decided that—the writer—can decide to wake him up).

This is part of the hero's journey, because he has to learn to ask for help (he's not asking for help—he's abandoned the duties of a protagonist).

This is part of the heroine's journey, because she has to learn not to depend on the hero (okay with me, because he's obviously a loser—she should run off with his oh-so-effective best friend, who is the one who has really earned a happy ending).

This is part of the best friend's journey (oh, I'm sorry! I thought this book was about the hero! Let me run off and change the jacket copy to make clear it's about the best friend's journey!).

I have to set up the sequel, where the best friend is going to be the protagonist (and exactly what are you going to do with him in his own book, since he's already done most of the work of the protagonist in THIS book?).

This conception of books as having central characters who do most of the acting and changing is … is too restrictive! (Wait, I have to go email Aristotle and Shakespeare and tell them they got it all wrong.)

You know what the real problem is? The writer loves the secondary character too much, and the main character too little. Yep. Hey, I've been there. I've learned from painful experience that hero's best friend is incredibly seductive and can run off with the book if you let him. Two words for you: Han Solo. And that's fine if the book isn't tightly focused on the hero, and/or if you don't mind demoting the hero (Luke Who?). But be careful of plot incoherence, where the position of Luke indicates he is supposed to be the protagonist, but the plot development actually leads to Han's growing centrality.

Just decide what your book is, and be true to that. If it is a story about the friendship between these two guys, okay, maybe best friend can be a sub-hero. But if it's about the hero overcoming his conflicts, the best friend really can't do that for him. And popular fiction is about internal conflicts being played out in the external realm—that is, the hero can only confront and overcome his conflicts (in pop fiction, not, thank goodness, in real life) by confronting and overcoming some external conflict… and he cannot delegate that duty.

Special note to romance writers and erotica writers: Two men can be lovers. They can even get married now! (Yay, Massachusetts Supreme Court!)

But if this is a romance or an erotic romance between the hero and heroine, make the great love blossom between them. Make their interaction help them together resolve the plot. Too often when there's a hero's-best-friend in there, that becomes the primary love relationship. I've even seen supposedly hetero-romance manuscripts where the hero chooses his best friend over the heroine in some fundamental "love" way (though never, damnit, an INTERESTING way). Male bonding is really intriguing to us ladies (I have never understood how you guys can love each other and insult each other so badly—really, if MY friend called me lardbutt, she would not be my friend for long!), but determine what your central relationship is and focus on that. The hero can certainly, in the start of a romance, trust his best friend more than his lady, but if at the end of the book, the best friend is still taking precedence, methinks the romance has sputtered out somewhere. Or maybe the hero is sublimating his homoerotic affections, and really, that's fine! This is the 21^st Century! Come out of the closet and declare your love, guys… just don't tell me that your real love is the heroine sitting there all dejected and rejected.

(Not all male bonding is homoerotic, but careful—men tend not to comment too much on other men's physical attributes, except, as above, in an insulting fashion. If your hero and his best friend are really just friends, how can you show that without making me think that they want to be more?)

Anyway, whenever (just about always) I tell a writer that the secondary characters are too prominent, I get bristled at. For some reason, this is a very delicate issue for many writers. Could that delicacy be an indication that these characters are getting a bit too much love from you? Taking some of your attention off the main characters?

Now, as I said, there are plenty of books with multiple protagonists, group protagonists, ensemble casts. But if you have a tightly focused story type, try being ruthless here. Look at the actions of the secondary characters. Can any of them be transferred to one of the main characters? Can something that is passive for the protagonist be made active? For example, I have seen secondary characters discover a clue and deliver it to the protagonist. Does the protagonist really EARN that clue, if it's just handed over?

I know I wrote an article about this... it had a cool title. Lemme see if I can find it. Ah, yes, buttinskis.

Alicia