Building a Story – Part 3: The Support Character and Plot Happens

The Support Character and Plot Happens

Disclaimer
The framework built within this multi-part blog is for educational purposes only. It is presented only as an example. All rights are reserved (of course), but the author does grant permission for others to use it as an outline for practice and creation of derivative unpublished works in all media.The person who they hire to work as an artist at the kiosk, for some reason, I’ve always thought of as an Indian (American variety). I’ve even been calling him Johnny Silverhands in my head. Who am I to argue with inspiration?

I will confess, that this is where things, for me, get a little sticky. With the development of the main characters, we were pretty free to ignore nasty little things like plot and genre. With this character, that now comes into play. Since he isn’t our main character (for the sake of simplicity, we can think of the sisters together as the main character), who he is will be informed by the story. Our main character, will both act upon and react to events thrown in their way. This supporting character will be a catalyst or prosecutor of those events. So, some new decisions have to be made that will fundamentally effect and affect the story.

If we make Johnny a time traveller trying to get back to his own time (using his artistic craftsmanship as a cover for being able to make the things he needs) then we have an SF story. Perhaps the sisters get sucked into his time or his time comes to them. We don’t have to settle that now.

What if instead we make Johnny be a drifter…? He has a fiancee and a baby, and makes a wedding ring and a silver spoon on the sly. Turns out that his fiancee is a sociopath and tries to wreck their wedding.

Or, what if Johnny is a mythical being (angel/elf/whatever) who is simply around to help the girls, not only in business, but in life? Thing is, he doesn’t really know what he’s doing or why.

Maybe Johnny is involved with the fight between good an evil, and needs to make weapons out of precious metals for the fight — but he can only do that while undercover.

Then again we could…. well, you get the point. How we define this particular character colors the entire story. Now, we don’t necessarily have to make him a major character. We might rather have some other antagonist in mind. The thing is, regardless of his prominence in the text, his presence is the thing that makes the story go. It wasn’t planned. The process itself has led us here.

Isn’t this cool?!

It’s almost magical when stuff like this happens. If you approach a story without any grandiose plans and start working out characters from a simple premise, you will almost always be presented with a gift. The key to the writing of a story. You don’t have to force it. Just going through with the process itself, employing one of the basic and important tools of the writing craft, the critical piece of the puzzle just dropped into our lap. We have only one decision to make. Who is Johnny? When we commit to answering that question, the rest of the story will just fall into our laps.

So, who is Johnny Silverhands? Let’s try making him a time traveler. He’s from the future. Since he wants to do as little as possible to alter the events between now and his time, he tries to say as little as possible. For this reason he interacts with people very little. Let’s have this go against his nature. In his own time, he’s a very friendly and gregarious fellow. It’s just that he’s on a mission. A mission only he can do.

Here’s the tricky part — one which forces the writer to make a story-altering decision. If we go with the time traveler scenario, then we are sort of forced to make Johnny the main character. We don’t have to. It is our story, after all. However, if we do decide to keep the sisters as the main character, then we have a difficult plotting problem. By necessity, stories are supposed to be about the most important event in the main character’s life. That said, if Johnny is a time traveler, how do we make the sisters’ contribution to the plot even bigger? Remember, too, that to have strong characters they need to not be reacting to problems, but instead acting on them.

What this means is that in order to keep Johnny a time-travelling supporting character, we’ll need to pump up the sisters (or at least Mel, who we’ve decided to make the MAIN main character). We can certainly do that. It’s what all this development stuff is all about.

Instead, I think it might be better to tone down Johnny a tad. The time-traveler bit… gone. He’s just a guy. Let’s try a different character development method. Let’s just assemble him out of random elements and see where that takes us in terms of story. I’m going to go to my tried and true method for assembling characters from archetypes: I grab a deck of tarot cards and use them to assemble some traits. (NOTE: This could just as easily be a computer program with traits programmed in