Making Distinctions
by Evan Shultz
Okay, quick quiz question for all you Firefly fans: Aside from Inara and Shepherd Book, who both left the ship at some point or another, how many characters call Serenity their home? Can you name them?
While you’re thinking about that, let me tell you about a problem I’ve run into lately. It’s about giving elements in your story distinction. Usually for a writer, that means distinct characters. Your readers should spot that the man who just walked into the room is Johnny and not Joey as soon as you give them any description or dialogue at all — the way he walks, the way he dresses, the way he says what he says should all be signature. There are entire tomes about how to do this.
But there is very little on how to apply these techniques to other elements, or even why it might be important. For example: Let’s say that you are writing a political drama set at a peace conference in a neutral city. There will be eight ambassadors, two from each of the major factions, along with their attendants and guards. You’ll want to make each ambassador his own fully-developed character, and probably a few of the attendants and guards you’ll see enough of. But unless you’re trying to emphasize the uniformity of the establishment or something arch like that, you should give each faction its own recognizable character, so that your audience can spot whether those four guards heading straight for the protagonist are English or Russian just by the look on their faces as they march. Likewise, if your story centers around one or more objects, you might consider giving those their own characters, too. Suppose you’re planning a horror western novel called A Tale of Two Guns, about a good gun and a bad gun seeking out champions to wield them. The evil revolver is possessed by an Aztec god of death: I might give it a hammer that sounds like a tomb door slamming when it cocks. The good revolver that was forged from Excalibur would be gilded like a sword; maybe it would seem to glow, too. I would probably make it lightweight to contrast the evil gun’s heaviness—but that’s me.
Very few books discuss this. Which is only natural — once you can make your characters distinct, it’s easy to give places and things character.
Time’s up… how many crew members did you come up with? Maybe you named all seven: Mal, Zoe, Wash, Kaylee, Jayne, Simon, and River. But I’ll bet that at first one of them slipped your mind, and you had trouble working out who you were forgetting.
I know I did. Twice.
They are incredibly deep, well-developed characters, some of the best I’ve ever seen. Yet as soon as they exit the scene they’re gone from my mind. On the other hand, I have no trouble remembering all six teenagers from Saved by the Bell, a fact which shames me to no end. That’s the problem I started exploring a few days ago — why I can remember one cast and not another — which exploded into three pages of revelations. How many people or places or things can the audience keep in mind at once? What effect does this have on a story or series of stories? How can you increase or decrease this limit? I think I have a few answers. I hope to share them with you soon.
