How many friends is too many friends?

For a long time, I thought it odd that fictional characters almost never have more than two friends. The main character in Vampire Diaries (I'm talking the novel, not the TV series) is supposed to be the most popular girl in the school, but from memory, she only has two friends, and one of those leaves her within the first few chapters.

I used to lament that this whole portrayal of friendship was horrendously unrealistic, and that not everyone only has one friend and never talks to anyone else in their class, surely. But then I read Louise Rennison's Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series, and I understood why. Georgia Nicolson has so many friends that I have only ever managed to get my head around two of them. (A little research reveals that Georgia Nicholson only actually has five friends. Which just goes to show how few fictional characters I can cope with.)

The problem here is not actually with the number of characters in the work, but the number of characters who serve the same purpose. All of them just blur into one 'friend'. I'm sure they have distinguishing traits, but they don't really have distinguishing effects on the plot. I've been facing a similar problem while editing recently: not so much that I worry that readers will forget who my characters are, but that they will be bored by all the minor walk-on-walk-off characters, and although they might remember who they are, they won't actually care.

The answer to readers' lack of interest in who your myriad of characters are is, I believe, to merge them. And on that note, I offer some thoughts which will hopefully help you know when to start merging, and when to stop (before your work ends up with just one incredibly conflicted character).

• Label your characters with those horribly stifling labels such as 'protagonist' and 'comic relief'. Look at characters who share a label, and work out if they provide some sort of contrast or conflict to each other. If you have two protagonists who never argue, both strive for the same goal and have similar personalities - well, why do you have two protagonists?
• Find characters who serve the same purpose in terms of their actions within the story. If Alice and Bob are both there to provide support to the protagonist, although one does it in the role of love interest, and the other of comic relief, why not make the love interest more comic, and do away with Bob altogether?
• Do two of your characters always appear as a pair? And when I say 'always appear as a pair' I mean that they are literally never on screen (or page) alone, and that they may as well be conjoined twins.If there's no reason why you have two of them rather than one, it may be better to just have one.
• I often find myself with characters who are around for long enough that I start to feel awkward calling them 'the man in the hat', but not around for so long that I feel like I should give them a name and a backstory. If you have any characters that have reached this awkward stage, look out for characters who already have names and backstory, who aren't doing much at the moment and could fill their role instead.
• At the end of the day, some characters are just really boring. In the first draft that I am currently editing, I had a major character - possibly the third-main character - who I just found really, really dull. She was instrumental in driving the early plot, and she took an active role in it, but she was also incredibly boring. So I took her role, and gave it to a very minor character who I really liked for no good reason. I now I have a major character who I like with good reason. Everybody wins!

As I wrote those dot-points, I became more and more aware that I sound like I'm subscribing to the delete-everything school of editing. The school which suggests that you should have as few words, as few characters and as short sentences as you can. So I add a disclaimer: I'm not saying that you should delete and merge characters based solely on these thoughts, just that if you feel like you have too many characters, and that it might be hard to keep track, these are things to consider. I hope someone finds them useful.

How to Edit a Novel

After months of procrastination, I’ve finally decided to get back to editing my 100,000 word draft of what may one day become a legitimate novel. In honour of this venture, I’m writing a post on how I’ve been going about editing so far. The title is probably a misnomer, since I haven’t done enough to be sure if this is a definitive way to edit. I’ve also only covered how I’m going from draft one to draft two, which is very broad editing, rather than nit-picking prose. I figured I’d write down what I’ve done  anyway, in the hope that it will help someone out there to edit their own novel.

1. Read your novel

This step is deeply unnerving. It may make you cringe a lot. On the other hand, you’ll also hopefully discover your favourite parts of your novel, and remember what you like about it, in order to know what to keep. I also got my sister and a friend to read it and highlight the parts which they would be very sad if I deleted. I wrote a post a while ago about how I felt like in editing I was getting rid of all my favourite parts of the novel, so I thought this was a very important step to do. I also often feel like authors don’t realise what makes their work amazing, and so I think it’s good to get feedback on what you’re doing right before you change it.

2. List your scenes

This helps to get everything straight in your head, and to organise things on paper. I did it in an Excel spreadsheet under these headings:

• Scene number
• POV
• Setting
• Plot points (this one is good for pinpointing scenes that have no plot points, so you know to change them later)
• Characters (I gave each character their own column, so I could tick of what scenes they were in, and make it easier to sort the spreadsheet and do step three)

3. Streamline your plot

I did this first of all by writing out the plot, as simply as I could, from the perspective of each of the main characters, not including anything which didn’t have an effect later on in the book. Doing it separately by character probably isn’t necessary for everyone, but I was writing a novel which was based on who knew what, and when, and it was getting horrendously inconsistent. It’s also handy for making sure your characters all have motivation.

After that, I wove together all my streamlined character-plots into one logical, coherent plot.

4. Write a new scene list

This step is pretty self explanatory. I modified my scene list to include the new scenes I needed to make the plot make sense, cut the old ones that weren’t relevant, and modified which needed modification. I was pretty harsh with cutting at this point, only keeping scenes in my list which were absolutely necessary. I think I came out with about a third of the scenes I originally had, but I’ve been adding more scenes in as I go along. At this step, though, I wanted it to be as clear and concise as possible.

5. Open a blank document

Copy in the scenes from your first draft that just need a bit of tweaking. Write in the new scenes that you need. These are the difficult part, on which I offer no advice. Good luck.

An Extra Post on Editing

I've been trying to keep to a schedule of posting every Tuesday, and I do recognise that today is Wednesday, but I found something that I thought was interesting, especially in light of yesterday's post. Nick Hornby, writer of many novels which I have never read, has this to say about editing:

And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words—entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, backbreaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers—treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!

I don't have any comments to make on this, really, just that it's good to hear that the 'kill everything that doesn't further the plot' argument isn't universally accepted just yet.

The Woes of Editing

Since some time mid-last year, I have been pretending to edit a 100,000 word monstrosity that I wrote with absolutely no planning – where by ‘pretending to edit’ I mean that after over a year I am currently up to scene… six? I was reading around writing blogs recently, and I found an author who said something along the lines of “I like writing, but I love editing.” To which I said, “Oh God, why?” I thought this great disparity of opinion warranted a blog post on editing, in the hope of answering some questions.

I started editing by listing my scenes in a table with columns for POV, setting, key events and characters present. That gave me a chance to read of my novel and have happy thoughts like, “This is actually not bad,” and also, “What word was I even trying to write there?”

Next, I tried to write down the plot from the point of view of each key character, so I could understand what each character knew, and when. This was kind of important because the novel is a kind of spies-and-international-intrigue thing, and the lack of planning meant people were spouting pieces of information, and then being horrified to discover the same information four chapters later.

So this was all going well and good. I got a handle on my plot, and then wrote down a revised list of scenes, and got to work cutting the scenes I didn’t need, and revising the ones I did. Before I even started the revising part, I had cut about half of my manuscript, including some of my favourite characters. It made me sad. But I have told myself I shall bring them back, and I suppose at least if I completely cut a character, I can transport them to a new story of their very own.

Then I got to the part that made me sad – revising scenes. I ended up deleting whole chunks of things that were not only my favourite parts, but also the favourite parts of the two people who have read my novel for me. I did this because I figured that not only were they not doing anything for the plot, but also because they were always the things that were just a little bit ridiculous, like the sinister criminal mastermind speaking in code with phrases such as “The orange walrus howls at the hour of darkness,” an extended joke about the colour of the protagonists underwear (because I am classy like this).

I deleted all these ridiculous bits, and then I realised that the reason I had liked the start of this story was because it was just a little bit ridiculous, and the characters were kind of odd. But all the editing advice I had read – even from the very first writing book I had ever discovered, while I was still at primary school – had told me that there was a ‘making it thin’ stage, where you got rid of everything that wasn’t strictly necessary.

In order to procrastinate from this task, which was sucking my happiness like Dementor, I went online to read what other writers had said about editing. I found a piece of cheery warning, formatted thusly:

THINGS YOU LOVE WILL DIE.

So that was heartening. Feeling a sense of solidarity – at least I wasn’t the only one deleting things I loved – I went back to editing, and managed to get through several scenes feeling gradually more enthusiastic about the whole affair. But it has left me wondering – is it really necessary for things you love to die? (That sentence came out way more deep-sounding than I intended.) Am I just a wuss who doesn't like deleting things? I mean sure, some things might not aid a streamlined plot, but does that actually make them bad? Chances are, if you love something, there’s a reason. And if your readers love it too, then why should you delete it? After all, if you’re not writing to please yourself and your readers… well, I don’t know what you’re doing.