A few items from the narrative toolbox that came up for me over the weekend.
Kim Stanley Robinson on 'actants':
I start with a situation, usually. Say I want to write about terraforming Mars—then I need a terraformer, a person opposed to terraforming, a political radical, a Machiavel, a builder, a psychologist, etc. The French structuralists spoke of characters as actants, as the action-doers who make the plot happen. A single character could cover a couple of actants at once, or an actant could be split between a few characters. This I’ve found useful in clarifying things to myself as I get started. Therefore, characters are, at first, kind of just positions, or needed operators of the plot. But this is just the start.
Mountain Song, Claudia La Rocco via BookForum
And something from the Failbetter Games blog (and I have no inside insight on this; I read this blog post before I started at the company and it's stuck with me):
One of the first things we did during narrative pre-production was invent the ensemble cast for Mask of the Rose.
...
To arrive at those different types, we asked ourselves questions like these: Whose hopes, goals, and ambitions would be advanced by a fall to the Neath? Whose would be thwarted?
...
Drawing from the lore, we asked ourselves, What lore mysteries might this character help us illuminate? What common Neath activities would have been different just after the fall? Would this character still be in Fallen London three decades from now, and what would they be doing there? Are they anyone we already know?
Designing Characters for Mask of the Rose, Emily Short via Failbetter Games blog
(And to reiterate for the avoidance of doubt: the opinions and assertions here are my own and not related to my work for Failbetter Games.)
The connection point across both of these for me (and this was in the context of digging around for tools to help me with my own short story problems) is the conscious casting of characters with reference to the story you're trying to tell. There's a version of this which is very 'mechanistic' -- seeing the characters as nothing more that little plot devices. But I think to view it that way misses the point. The power is in using this as a lens, filter, or razor to tie characters into the story world.
I think this is most pressing in the development stage if you're trying to go from a raw concept into interesting characters whose own arcs will help you uncover aspects of the story world for the audience or help you explore your intended premise better. Obviously it's possible to start the other way round -- with a stronger handle on a character or few -- and I think this tool plays a bigger role in genre fiction or in forms that aren't, say, a literary novel.
One of the reasons these quotes stuck out to me enough to record them was that they were congruent with a previous thought I'd had along the same lines -- an explicit step during story development where you work through the process of relating character (certainly the MC) to the core concepts with which you're working. If you're exploring a premise, fictional world, theme, or question (which, I mean, most stories are doing more than one of those things...), I'd say it's vital to think explicitly about how your characters relate to those things so you can lean into or away from them. Or, more pragmatically, if a character's own story is going to be about something that feels largely unrelated to the central premise+, you need to be okay with that and make sure the form in which you're working can actually support that without it undermining your intended effect.
(If nothing else, if you think that your story DOESN'T have some central concept like those I describe above, that's usually a sign for me that I need to deeper my understanding of what the story's trying to be about (which may be different from my starting point), certainly in the forms in which I work.)
Likely no posts Thursday, Friday, or Monday.