This post is about a lot of things. About the Bechdel Test, about killing your darlings, about disposable characters, about fridging a character’s partner, about running your story on a skeleton crew, and about how to navigate a cast of characters in a way that is optimal for the reader.

Let’s start with some definitions.

The Bechdel Test is a pop-culture guide designed to determine if a piece of writing or media has “significant” female characters or appropriate female representation. I’m neither here nor there on the applicability of this line of reasoning, but I understand the motivation behind it. For those of you who don’t know what the test questions are, they are as follows:

  • A piece of media or writing must FEATURE two female characters.
  • These two female characters must have at least one conversation with each other.
  • The conversation MUST NOT be about a man. (interpret: must not be about love interest)

Take from this what you will, but I want to highlight the fact that if you have added a girl best friend that exists solely for your other vanity character to talk about love with… maybe don’t. Maybe employ an internal monologue. A diary entry. A fight between the main character and said love interest. When a female character is added for what feels like the sole purpose of talking about another character… it’s sloppy. Find a different way.

Killing Your Darlings is a piece of writing advice where even though you LIKE having an element in the story, if it’s not adding to the story, take it out. Things that fall under this category are subplots, romantic partners, background characters, certain settings, or flowery descriptions. Ever read a “love triangle” where it’s really 2 characters that are into one another and then one sad sop you feel bad for because they are super in love with one of the other two and can’t catch a break or be included in anything plot-relevant? Take a GOOD. HARD. LOOK. Is this love triangle actually making your story better/more effective? Or do you just like it? Do you have a chapter where you explain a really cool magic tree, and you’re so proud of it, but it does nothing for the wider story? Maybe time to chop it down.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Disposable Characters fall into the category of “Killing Your Darlings” as well, but it is specifically about people you have written or created JUST to have them die and cause emotional levity in the story. Now, I’m not saying you should never kill your characters – but often if an author knows in advance a character isn’t going to make it through the whole story, that character isn’t as fleshed out as the rest of the cast and it’s really obvious.

Going hand in hand with Disposable Characters is the term “Fridging your Wives” which is a personal favourite of mine. I didn’t know the origin of the phrase until I was pulling articles/fact-checking myself for this post. If you’re curious, it’s from Green Lantern: A New Dawn when the antagonist shoves the dead body of the superhero’s love interest into a fridge for the hero to then discover later. It was to do emotional damage and propel the plot. The term “Fridge your Wife” now refers to when a character’s significant other is killed, hurt, maimed, assaulted, or otherwise traumatized to motivate another character. The issue with this is we’re not treating characters as people. We’re treating the person SOLELY as a plot device. It’s a lot of work to create a character simply simply to sacrifice them to get the hero off their butt. Think bigger. Think better.

The last definition before I talk about my point is Skeleton Crew. To keep it short and sweet, a Skeleton Crew is the minimum quantity of individuals required to successfully maintain an item or corporation.

So. The point of murder and skeleton crews is this: As writers, we are in charge of populating worlds and making them feel real. Lived in. Working. But this ultimately can bog down the progress of your story and confuse the reader. It’s exactly the same as writing dialogue. Real dialogue is filled with meandering, “um” and “wha-yeah-huh”s. But we don’t include that in novels. We want it to be clear and purposeful when a character speaks, while still maintaining that fascimile of reality. How many characters do you really need?

How many of you have read a fantasy novel where it felt damn near impossible to keep track of the characters because their names were unique in that fantasy-name kind of way? Or did you need to continually reference a list in the front of the book as to who was in which role? Or even worse, have you ever stopped reading and had to flip back a couple chapters because you have two characters mixed up?

All of these are symptoms of the same thing. Either the characters are so plentiful that you legitimately can’t keep track of who is who, or the characters are too similar to one another (or just don’t have a clear enough voice!).

Kill your darlings. Make a list of all the characters you make specific mention of in your work in progress. Divide them out into characters that are actually necessary, and characters that support the others. Find the fridged partners and the disposable characters, and try to figure out if there is a non-human way of motivating your protagonist or plot. If you can’t, that’s okay too, but think about it.

Something we did in theatre, was if there were not enough “background” actors to fill up the lines, we would just reassign lines to the background actors. The baker had the shopkeep’s lines, or the blacksmith became the general store so he could reference the price of apples. Townswoman 1 through 4 could be cut to two without it harming the clarity of the scene.

So look at your support character list again. How much of the information they provide to the protagonist can be delivered by someone else? How many of these roles can be combined to clean up this list – not only for yourself, but for your reader?

Now, obviously, if you have a sprawling space epic where your characters are going to multiple planets every chapter and are meeting with representatives from each of those planets, there’s no sensible way to combine roles. The places I’m asking you to target are the faces in the crowd, the people you have in your world that are just there to make it bigger.

In the space epic example, target the crew. How many crew members does the main character talk to and the audience are expected to keep track of and remember? Do we have to name your crewmembers and give them a backstory for them to show up on page and deliver bad news about the functioning of the ship? Or can the holoscreen flicker to life, the engineer sweating bullets as she tells the captain that the slipdrive is drifting and there’s nothing she can do? Can you decrease the size of the ship? Or is it important for it to feel busy and populated because you’re implying the military ship is heavily manned?

Does your story take place in a school? Can the school be smaller? How many professors do you need to actually make it operate? How many students would viably be accepted into the school at the same time? How much of this can you imply without directly mentioning and forcing the reader to keep track of your complicated roster?

Think about it, and take some names off your support character list, even if you like that character. Take some settings away if the same goal can be achieved by staying put. Take that cute subplot away that you worked on for a month, even though you love it. Kill your darlings. Strip your WIP back to a skeleton crew and press forward. Your story will be cleaner, easier to keep track of, and ultimately, the reader will thank you.

Everything you remove, put it in a file. Post it to your fanpages or your blog. Fans will find it if they want it. They’ll be delighted to see it exists, without the pressure of it being forced into the story.

References

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