Bite-Sized Editing Tip: Peopling Your World

 This is a concept I've talked about briefly but not with much detail.

Often in romance fiction genres, but others as well, the author might find themselves hyperfocusing on the male and female leads, while leaving the other characters as cardboard cutouts. They're around just to root on the protagonists and have no lives of their own. It's serviceable for a novella or a sitcom, but this doesn't make the characters distinct.

This occurred to me as I was reading Emily Wilde's Map to the Otherlands. The main couple, and the only main characters carried over from the first book Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries grow closer in the second book. The stakes for their relationship and frankly their lives have increased, and I'd argue that structurally, it's a stronger book for having this focus. 

I loved the first book, of course. I was prone to love it thanks to the scholarly bent of the prose, the focus on fairies, and Emily's absolute nerdery and awkwardness. But talking about how much you love a protagonist is for another day. What Heather Fawcett does in addition to having a pairing I actually like is add side characters who can fill out the world in addition to Emily and Wendell.

In the first book, this role was taken up by the townspeople, and it flowed alongside the episodic nature of Emily's research. She's simply trying to gather information about the types of fairies seen in a Scandinavian town. This means the bulk of her interactions, and hurdles, come from the various denizens of Ljosland before Wendell even shows up. Emily's brusque, professional personality puts the people of Ljosland off at first, leaving her without their help in an extremely unforgiving environment. There are plenty of saves in the novel, but the biggest one has to be when Wendell is able to help her get along with the townspeople better thanks to both his charm and inadvertently getting injured and causing her to beg for their help. Life gets so much easier afterward.

Notables here include Aud, the leader of the village that Emily offends on day one. Also Thora, who is an elder who doesn't mince words, which makes her the easiest person for Emily to get along with. Additionally we have patient and woodchopping Lilja, who Emily takes to help save her fiancé Margret from the faeries. A major shoutout has to go to Poe, though, a tree-dwelling brownie who Emily befriends early on and who proves to be incredibly helpful to this Noser asking him all these questions.

I have to love Poe. It's a testament to her worldbuilding that Fawcett can indicate both the ethereal beauty of the fairies as well as describe ones like the brownie as so ugly to our eyes they might be cute. And DANGEROUS. Even the tiny Poe has sharp, needle-like fingers. I cannot tell you my delight when he showed up again in the next book. I hope he continues doing so.

Since Emily is a researcher, our next book demands a different setting, first in Cambridge and then off to their next research location, which appears to be also cold, but not nearly as cozy as Ljosland since Emily and Wendell don't bond with the locals as well as they did before. This leaves us with a new cast to fill out, lest the interactions only develop between Wendell and Emily, and as entertaining as they are, it would get one-note before we can reach the resolution. Thus, we are introduced to Ariadne, Emily's niece, and the head of her department, Farris Rose. 

Ariadne is a great foil for Emily, possessing the single-minded scholarly obsession but with a youth and cheerfulness that makes her almost an annoyance to Emily more than anything else. Since Emily is so bad at social interactions, Ariadne gets along better with Wendell, actually. Rose, on the other hand, provides another type of conflict: he's older and has more authority in the department. He's introduced wanting to fire both Emily and Wendell, but then worms his way into their expedition because he's as ambitious as she is. Unfortunately, his methods are a bit... dated. 

These new characters provide Emily people to bounce off of who aren't just... there. They challenge her, frustrate her. Part of her arc in this book comes to learning to deal with the other scholar and her niece. This is on top of the problems she already has. 

What we an learn from these uses of additional characters is thus:

1) Take your time. Rose and Ariadne are influential and important characters, and they don't even show up in the first book.

2) Allow secondary characters to connect to your characters' backgrounds. Ariadne's existence perpetually reminds us of Emily's social difficulties and enables us to think of her in a more complex way than a disembodied scholar or love interest. 

3) Repeat when necessary. I was overjoyed for Poe to come back. He's not the only lesser fairy that Emily interacts with. She finds one of the creepy, carnivorous fox fairies to help her return to Ljosland briefly so she can meet with Poe. This fairy comes back around later on to help them. 

4) Piggybacking off #3: These secondary characters have their own goals and motivations. With the fairies, it's helpful that Emily as a scholar understands their rules more so than with the people. The fox fairy (who she names Snowbell) follows them just because he's curious, but that doesn't mean that he cares about the quest itself. He's perfectly happy for Emily to be eaten if he can continue the quest with Ariadne. 

But then you have the human characters and their motivations are clear enough, since both are scholars and would want the chance to observe what Emily is finding. Still, Rose manages to be more of a hinderance at times, and Emily becomes conflicted about Ariadne's presence because it is dangerous to seek fairy doors in the way they are. 

Each character always has their own point of existing outside of the protagonists. But at the same time, they provides ways to stymie or push your character forward. It's complex, but the longer your series goes on, the more people there will make the world feel full and real. Try to consider both as you add secondary characters to your world. Who are they? What do they want? Need? Fear? Test them as much as you test your protagonists. We need them to hold up their end of the plot.

Bite-Sized Editing Tip: I Want an Ending

 Someone, somewhere is out there plotting against me.

And they're plotting to make sure I tear my hair out and throw a book across the room.

Unfortunately, they're not plotting their own book. I don't know who is giving out the advice to stop books in the middle of a scene to increase "readthrough," but this is terrible advice for a couple of reasons. It destroys the pacing beyond recognition of any regular beats that a reader might expect. Since I see this primarily in genre fiction wherein the readers expect to have some familiarity with the pacing and not say, experimental literary forms, it ends up disrupting any enjoyment you might get.

I'm even going to be so bold as to say that these books are doing are NOT cliffhangers, really. I'd forgive you a cliffhanger in a second or third book. Once you've already secured an audience, you can fuck with them a bit. However, you can't do it before you've proven to them that you can write ONE fully realized narrative.

I just call this a Drop-Off Ending. Some of the problems can be enumerated thusly:

1) For some writers, they think it's easier to just write ONE BIG BOOK instead of three and then chop it into parts. After said dismemberment, they toss it out like chum to the water. 

The problem with the dismemberment technique is that any changes that you need to make to the first third should impact the second and third installment of the series. 

Are you going to be okay with substantially revising each book because you chose to write it this way Or are you going to give your dev editor a thumbs up and send them the next one? Since writers often do this to beat the algorithm and have books come out, they are less inclined to put out their best product and do the revisions necessary between books.

It just seems like a terrible waste of resources in the name of speed. If your first book isn't very good, why do I want to keep reading? You get very few chances as an author to make a first impression on your audience.

2) A number of those books are written as though they don't have any plot to sustain them at all. The author draws out what little plot there is, having the characters piss around, describe the act of walking around a car in minute detail, and eat pancakes multiple times. As a result, very little happens until the end, when a plot FINALLY emerges, picks up, and then ends without any resolution.

This is the most annoying, unsatisfying way to conduct the plot. Moreover, readers can see this behavior as a cash-grab. If you don't want to progress the characters too far because you're working on a slow burn, fine. But why is there no movement on the plot until the end? And then there's no end?

If I'm meant to wait two more books to find out whether you can write a satisfying resolution, I'll just opt out. I can't trust you to end a book, how can I trust you to end a series?

3) It doesn't necessarily have to be this way, but in books like these, I often find serious problems with character progression and development. How does this inhibit character progression? 

The characters are overly reflective, meditating on events, repeating their emotional reactions ad nauseum... until the last 20 minutes when actions start to happen, but then... it's over. So when the Book Two picks up, we're back to the reflecting and thinking and eating pancakes. The character is a bump on a log, waiting for their cue to do something.

These leaves the characters flat and passive and their revelations repetitive. 

4) The last option is the worst to me. What if you had great characters and great character progression? What if I couldn't put it down until the very last page? 

In that case, I'd be even angrier that the author didn't see fit to offer a semblance of an ending. It casts a pall over the previous pages, one that I can't necessarily go back to enjoy again because I'm pissed I spent money on a book you didn't see fit to finish.

Some might be complaining at this point that their readers don't mind. You can't read the review of the person who dropped you a low-star review and noped out on your work forever. Regardless, I've seen one-stars on books specifically because of this "strategy." You don't want that.

Consider, instead, that while you don't have to resolve the Big Plot, you need to consider what the first arc of your series needs to be. What point does each main character need to reach by the end? How far should the main couple have progressed? What is resolved by the end?

After that, what unresolved elements lead into the larger plot? How much farther does the protagonist need to go before they can face the final obstacle? You can look to a number of popular series to recognize how authors will open and close various threads throughout their series. Katniss wins the titular Hunger Games, but the Capitol is still in charge. In V.E. Schwab's A Darker Shade of Magic, Kell and Delilah save the prince and stop the magical takeover of Red London. Some bad guys are killed, and some will rise in the sequels. 

That's the tension you need to get to the next book. Not "what will happen at the end of this battle I just stopped writing" but "how will my characters resolve their larger internal and external conflicts?"

I'm not going into more detail here because these posts are meant to be short. We might pick up other pacing issues on another day. However, my partner is doing a workshop later in the summer that deals with pacing and plot. It's called Pancakes are Not Plot and will address how to keep tension going throughout.