Writing Skillet #6 - Learning About Side Characters From Laini Taylor

Good morning everyone, we're back on Writing Skillet for more breakfast and more shop talk! Today's breakfast is taco salad... sometimes I'll do that occasionally, have leftovers for breakfast, and today on this beautiful spring morning nothing sounded better or easier than heating up some taco meat to throw on top of lettuce, cheese, salsa and cilantro. I used to do this thing where I would try to eat a vegetable at every meal, and I’m going to try and resurrecting that. This was an easy way to do it.

On to my Camp Nano update, which ties into my topic for today – I’m currently about 4,000 words behind toward my goal of 30,000 words this month. I only have two chapters written of this book and it was feeling very flat. I realized that’s because I haven’t done enough (read: any) work to prepare myself to write these characters. DOOR EVERGREEN follows one family with five siblings, and they’ve all been raised the same, they’re all very...the same… and I need to figure out a way to make them all their own people despite their pretty sheltered background. The book is supposed to be pretty character-centered, so if I lose that, I lose the book entirely. I decided to begin working through these characters and writing about them while I get to know them, and I decided that I would count these words toward my overall word count, since the point is to work on my novel and plot it out anyway. I am using Lisa Cron’s book, “Story Genius” to try and hammer out every aspect of my book so I don’t, as the cover says, “waste three years writing 327 pages that go nowhere.” Why is that so relatable?

I also happen to be 200 pages from the end of Laini Taylor's “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” trilogy, and it's making me think even more about side characters because she's so darn good at writing them. If you don't know what these books are about, essentially we start out with a young art student in Prague who is an has a very strange side job of collecting teeth for a group of monsters. The first book is essentially her figuring out who she really is. Self-discovery paired with actual “I don’t know who I am, how did I get here and why am I doing this job.” This self-discovery begins when a stranger spots her in Marrakesh and is unexplainably drawn to her. This leads us to what becomes a war between seraphim and chimaera, as well as their relation to the human world and Karou’s evolving identity in that war.

There are some truly excellent side characters in this trilogy... and it got me thinking about how I could emulate what Laini Taylor does SO WELL. Here are some things I want to practice....

1. Don’t just think about who your side characters are. Think about how they relate to your protagonist and how they move the protagonists’ story, whether it be through conflict or cooperation. I had the epiphany last year that a good story is not just people doing things; it is people reacting to people doing things. One of the best characters in Laini Taylor’s trilogy is Ziri. He is not the love interest, but he has had somewhat of a crush on our protagonist, Karou, since he was a young boy and that comes into play during a time where Karou really needs someone. He performs a sacrificial act that gives him a very crucial role in his army’s survival. I love his character because while he annoyed me a little at first, everything made sense soon after that and while he doesn’t overshadow Karou in the slightest, he’s very, very important.

2. Think about how you’re going to draw your side characters’ threads through the whole story. Sometimes it’s too obvious when a side character only serves one purpose and then falls off the face of the earth for the rest of the book, or loses their arc. I have a character like that who appears at the very beginning of QUEEN OF THE EXILES, only to vanish completely through the last half of the book. His purpose was originally to be a foil, to show readers how bitchy my protagonist is. But that role shrunk as I refined my drafts and I don’t know if his purpose is big enough to justify keeping him in the story. An example from Laini Taylor’s books, one of my favorites, is Zuzana, Karou’s best friend from the human world. Sometimes it’s a little too obvious how much Laini Taylor loves Zuzana, but to be honest, we don’t really care because we love Zuzana too. She’s a side character, and yet, when Karou disappears into this world of monsters, taking the readers with her and leaving her human friends behind, book two in the series begins with Zuzana going to get her friend. She sends a bunch of emails which are never answered, and after that, she leaves. She does the good friend thing and goes to make sure this girl is all right. Also, Zuzana’s arc is incredible, I love it so much.

3. Remember everyone is the protagonist of their own story. I’m going through “Story Genius” by Lisa Cron right now, as I mentioned previously. The third thing I want to incorporate into my character research is very insightful – Lisa reminds her readers that every person is the protagonist of their own story, so each side character is going to view themselves that way. To make them seem like complex characters, you need to know their past, their goals, their motivations, all that stuff, but still somehow make all that facilitate your main character’s life. Now, Laini Taylor does this thing where in every book of her trilogy, she brings in one or two very random POVs that in some cases, we never anticipated, we have no idea who these people are, or why they matter. But somehow, Laini Taylor makes that work. It adds to the expansive feel of the world she’s created. I don’t think this necessarily a good practice for just anyone, like I think if I tried to do that it would bug me for just feeling disorganized… but somehow she makes it work, and in the last book there is a girl named Eliza who kind of has a journey like Story Genius suggests. I definitely saw Eliza as the hero of her own story and yet she owned just a smidgen of that last book. I have no doubt she will serve Karou though by the end of the story.

There we have it - any more tips on secondary characters for me? Please SHARE! So I can use them before Camp Nano is over!