The Lockdown Creative Writing Challenge: Casting your story

Christopher Mlalazi

We have, of late, been discussing “characters” in a story, and how to construct their various attributes that can make a reader visualise them as tangible objects, or real people, within your story world.

Today again we will touch on another aspect about characters — but now how to use them as a population within the architecture, which took me a while to grasp.

When creating your characters, always imagine yourself as the master puppeteer.

You are a creator, the characters are your creations, and you are in charge of what they do, how they behave, talk, and generally go about living their lives in your imaginary universe.

Imagine this scenario; you are at an event — let’s say you are teaching a class. You are standing in front of it, explaining a concept. The class has a hundred students.

Now imagine this other scenario. You are in another class, again teaching the same concept, and this class has 10 students.

Now, in which of these two would you feel more connected to the students — the one with a hundred students, or the other with 10?

Common sense says the one with 10, as less numbers mean you are able to individually connect with them, and the other with a hundred is a crowd and connecting with individuals in it is near impossible.

In the crowd you feel swallowed up, and you can also go away at the end of the lesson without even knowing the name of any student.

But in the class with 10 students, you can go away knowing the names of up to three or four students, if you set your mind to it.

This is the concept of casting your story, the less characters you have, the more the reader will remember names, and remembering the names in a story is part of a fulfilling experience for the reader.

It’s very difficult to read a book with too many characters, as names can be easily forgotten, and it’s equally frustrating trying to go back in the story to look for a name and how it is related to the storyline.

But when we are still beginning to write, most of us are not consciously aware of this, we want to pile in aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and friends of the protagonist, because we are over excited that we have the ability to do that.

Some of the characters will appear once in the story, some twice, and you never hear about them again, almost as if they dropped off the face of the earth.

But story casting — which is the act of assigning characters, is not done like that. Characters have to be remembered by the reader, and more so by the writer too while you are writing, and so the less you have of them, the more you avoid confusion about the story.

The trick is to keep the characters around both the protagonist and the antagonist minimal, that way you don’t take concentration away from these two, and you are also able to fully develop this minimal cast around them so they don’t appear as flat as an ironing board.

Developing a character is going deep into their individual personalities and portraying that so that the reader sees them almost in three dimension, and doing that for a cast with ten or more people is a super tough feat to achieve.

But this is not to say that one cannot have as many characters in the story as they like, for as we always say, there are no formula to storytelling.

But, that said, it is also sometimes important to observe some tried and tested methods, as they assist in carrying the aspiring writer and their story endeavour through.

For example, when I was beginning to write plays, I used to like using a big cast, but I quickly began to realise that in this potpourri of many characters, sometimes I would lose track of the main story line, as the more characters you have, the more subplots begin to pop up, and eventually confusion.

The reader has to be able to keep track of the main storyline too, and this is easier achieved with the minimal cast, as everything is concentrated and not too spread out.

So if you are working to establish characters in your story, always remember this golden rule, “less means more”.

We will make this golden rule our subject in the next installment of this column on another aspect of creative writing.

Stay writing, stay safe, till next time!