Join me for the last post concerning surprising secondary characters in SPFBO7 novels as author David Stephenson shares his thoughts about character development in his SPFBO7 entry Enemy Unknown. He confesses that if he hadn’t kept at least one secondary character under control, his book would have been “short, boring, and bloody.” Perhaps you have such a secondary character in your book as well?

Join me today in consoling and appreciating author Jon Ford (Jon Ford – Author.)  His SPFBO7 entry joined 289 other non-finalists a while back, although The Critiquing Chemist did say Hunters: The Ballad of the Songbird  “was hard to put down” adding that “Ford creates complex dimensionality … while still leaving enough mystery to keep the reader intrigued.”

I asked Jon about his writing and discovered that he is the second thorough plotter to participant in my survey of misbehaving secondary characters.  You’d think anyone as careful as him wouldn’t be surprised by his own creations, but, well, read on…

Hi everyone, I’m Jon and I’m a compulsive plotter. 

It’s a conversation I’ve had with many other writers, are we ‘Plotters’ (i.e. we meticulously plot our books to death!) or ‘Pantsers’ (I.e. we just write the book letting it unfold onto the page!)

I’m the former.

I have a huge spreadsheet (the ‘Spreadsheet of Doom’) where every book, every chapter and every character arc of my Songbird saga is laid out. Which is why it was surprising when a few characters decided – of their own accord! – that their role in the story simply wasn’t enough.

I have two types of these characters…

‘Supporting’ characters and ‘background’ characters.

To give you a couple of examples from HUNTERS.

I have a huge [cast] of characters. In that respect the book is kind of Game of Thrones-esque. Two of those characters are Lyssa Balthazaar (a Vampyrii, head of House Balthazaar) and Zarra Anderson (a bounty hunter). Both of these characters had sort of sidekick characters, both of whom demanded bigger roles than I originally conceived.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Lyssa’s lieutenant is her niece and best friend, Mercy balthazaar (that’s not a typo! Read HUNTERS to find out why it’s not capitalized!). I started writing Mercy as this bright and warm character, she had a real enthusiasm for the world. I fell in love with her. So much so, that I found myself wanting to write her in scenes that originally had been Lyssa’s.

For example, there’s a chapter where Lyssa would have traveled to meet one of the other main characters in the saga. That meeting would have been a serious meeting of peers, but I changed my immaculately plotted arc to let Mercy take that trip instead. The dynamic of that chapter plays out very differently now while also adding a really interesting sub plot to Lyssa’s arc. She and this character now don’t get to meet until book 2.

Another example is Zarra’s partner, Becka. When you first meet Zarra, she’s chasing down a rogue monster in the streets of Havana. Becka is the voice in her ear, giving advice. She’s the tech-girl behind their little bounty hunting operation and the two have this fun dynamic. Like bickering sisters. Texan born Zarra is older and more experienced, where Becka is a young Brit. The banterous interplay was such fun to write. Becka’s role is significantly expanded for Book 2 in the series (BLOOD TO EARTH – coming soon!) because I just simply wanted to write her more!

Moving on to the ‘background’ type of character that forced a bigger role, this was slightly different. I won’t spoil anything here, but the first one was a tiny background character in an early chapter of HUNTERS. This one grew in story significance purely because of something one of my Beta Readers said about her. The character now recurs in book 2 with a surprising new direction.

There’s also an entirely new unplanned character in book 2, which came about when I really enjoyed writing a certain chapter in book 1 and decided it was something I really wanted to explore more. 

Join me today in distracting author Jennifer Ross (Jen McIntosh) as she awaits a verdict from The Fantasy Inn on her #SPFBO7 novel Blood of Ravens.

Jen is a self-proclaimed plotter who is used to her characters behaving as expected. She blames her time as an Olympian athlete for Alexan’s unprecedented brashness. Read on to find out why.

An author saying they have a favourite character is a bit like a parent admitting they have a favourite child, so while I won’t go as far as to say that Alexan is my favourite character, he is definitely my favourite POV character to write.

Which is ironic, when I consider he started off life as a supporting character, and a disturbingly one-dimensional one at that. He served a purpose, and that purpose was to further the plot. But then he became a love interest and required further fleshing out and, over time, as I developed his backstory and explored his past, I began to realise that he had far more to give. To the point where he took over the narrative and became the POV character for that storyline.

I’ve seen other authors talk about characters who just insist on taking centre stage, which isn’t something I’m familiar with. I’m a plotter, through and through, so my characters tend to do as their told. But equally well, in my other line of work (high performance sport!) I’m used to constantly reviewing and challenging the status quo in pursuit of improvement and looking back on it now, it feels like Alexan took those opportunities to present his case. To explain to me why he was the better choice for narrating that storyline.

And, true to character, he wasn’t far wrong.

Because one of the things that fascinates me is perception, and how two people can be presented with the same information and come to two opposing conclusions. How we see the world is shaped by our experiences and how we process information through that lens is what shapes our reality. As I came to understand Alexan’s experiences and figure out how they informed his perceptions, I realised he presented me with a great opportunity to explore the other side of my world.

The fact is that nobody ever thinks they are the bad guy, and a good villain is one with a good motivation – and by that I mean clear and/or logical motivation, at least to their mind. I first started building this world in my mid-teens, when life was simple and conflict in books didn’t need to be any more complicated than good versus evil. But when I came to revisit this world nearly a decade down the line, my understanding had changed and I wanted that to be reflected in my writing. Alexan provided the perfect opportunity to do that. I love the complexity of his backstory and current predicament, and the nuance it offers me as a writer – but most of all, I just love spending time in his head. He’s a grumpy git with a big heart, and that’s a lot of fun to write.

Join me today in consoling and appreciating author Peter Blaisdell.  His SPFBO7 entry joined 289 other non-finalists a while back, although The Weatherwax Report did call The Lords of the Summer Season “one of the better written books in my batch” and added that it had “one of the most dramatic openings of the books in my pile.”

When asked to describe a secondary character in The Lords of the Summer Season who insisted on a larger role, Blaisdell offered a new twist. His upstart is an animal, and quite a ferocious one at that.

Join me today in distracting author Bjørn Larssen as he awaits a verdict from Lynn’s Books + The Critiquing Chemist on his #SPFBO7 novel Children.

When I asked Bjorn Larssen to do this guest post, his first question (actually his only question) was whether his character Ludo could say what he says at the end of this post.

Well,  there was only one reasonable answer to give him, so that is what I did.

Bjorn says … When I started working on Children, I just wanted to write a re-telling of selected Norse myths. One of the things that interested me were the parts between the stories – when King Thrymr acquired Thor’s hammer, how exactly did he get it? When Loki went to search all the Nine Worlds for the hammer, how did he know to go straight to an unimportant jötunn king? What happens before the myth in which Thor dons a wedding dress – and afterwards?

I already knew that the mythology was incoherent and sometimes self-contradictory, but I was surprised at how much time I spent writing those…connecting tissues, compared to actual myth re-tellings. One of the parts I had written was what I called “the outlaw section” and it wasn’t working. My character gets outlawed for questionable reasons, meets a bunch of outlaws, things happen for a while, then he is rescued and goes to meet the Gods and re-enact The Fortification of Ásgard. Excellent. I just needed to expand the section beyond “things happen for a while.”

I had The Evil One, The Strong One, The One With The Heart Of Gold, and then I had a Stick Figure Outlaw, because I needed them to vote whether to keep my character alive or kill him, and the result needed to be 2:2. So, I added a Generic Voting Outlaw and proceeded to outlining the things that were going to start happening. But the GVO kept disappearing, because I kept forgetting he existed – after all, he has fulfilled his task within the first five pages of this section. And then I saw this photo of Joel Kinnaman… 

…and Ludo was born. Born? He was alive, I could smell him (not recommended), tell you how he moved, how he spoke, how he laughed, where he came from, why he became an outlaw, but most of all he wanted to tell me that he was a fucking delight that came to rescue my book.

And he did. Speedy, wiry, his movements swift, voice high-pitched, words clipped. Quick to fight and quicker to laugh (his sense of humour may make Loki’s look reasonable, but still). Impressed by strength and courage, but not by unnecessary sadism. And – sad, so quietly that while everyone knows about it, everyone forgets – which is a mistake. 

“People shouldn’t own things when I’m around, it unsettles me,” Ludo says, when explaining “I got me outlawed for fun. I’m not good with laws and rules and property.” But there’s a broken note, as not all of that fun was equally funny… and all this came from one glance at the photo. Ludo kicked the door in rather than appeared, a complete, headache-inducing person, making my other characters seem flat. (Later I checked out the TV series the image comes from, The Killing, and I was surprised to discover no trace of Ludo in Kinnaman’s character. But once Children gets picked up by Netflix, I have words to say about the casting.)

I’ve been saying since then “…and the rest of the section wrote itself,” but I just began to suspect Ludo wrote it, just so that he could introduce himself: “I’m a fucking delight. The nicest man you’ll ever meet. Not an evil bone in my body.” And… you know what? It’s not really untrue.