Teams and Teamwork

A fair number of novels have a team instead of a single protagonist, or else have a protagonist who is greatly aided by a variety of helpers. In the latter situation, the hero will often be a (comparatively) likeable, middle-of-the-road person, surrounded by specialists.

A lot of epic fantasies work this way, and it is perhaps because of this need to fit into a team that creatures like elves and dwarves only tend to ever do the stereotypical elf or dwarf thing. Similarly, you see this sort of technique in ensemble police dramas, where a group of experts investigates a case, or military stories where each character has a particular function (stealth man, tech expert, wacky comic relief and so on).

Such as these guys, who I think were in Ally McBeal

Series also tend to slowly work themselves in this direction. The second American Pie film (I told you this was a highbrow blog) is basically a "refinement" of the first: it contains more of what was entertaining in the first film and less of the boring stuff, so that more eccentric characters - who by definition tend to do one crazy thing - get more screen time. Inevitably, this has a caricaturing effect on a story, as more and more space is given to wacky characters behaving in a way that's been proven to entertain the crowd while the "normal" ones get increasingly sidelined. (It certainly moved American Pie 2 away from both Shakespearean technique and the Aristotelian unities, that's for sure).

Introducing the team

Setting up any group of more than three characters at once is tricky. Three is a natural number for comparisons, thanks to "more than" and "less than". With three people, it's easy to say "This person is X, this person is X plus one, and this person is X minus one". With four or more, there's a risk of confusion if you don't use enough description, and infodump if you use too much.

The first Dragonlance novel (another highbrow reference) deals with this rather well. In true Dungeons And Dragons style, a group of characters agree to meet at an inn. The book starts by describing different characters getting to the inn. Once a couple are there, the others arrive in ones and twos, so that there's no need to describe them all at once. They then hear some bad news and nearly get into a fight, giving them all the chance to show how they behave.

"We have a big tent."

Another good way of introducing a group is to show each of them using their skills to the benefit of the team. I've mentioned before that Pixar likes to introduce each lead character by showing him doing what he does best. Similarly, a group of spies could be introduced by showing them working on a job: one is installing a listening device, another is guarding the door, and a third is controlling the operation from afar. Note that the reader will expect that this is how they operate, and will be surprised if they don't take these roles again.

Numbers

Four and seven seem to be good numbers for teams. I don't know why this should be, but with four characters it's easy to see who does what, whilst keeping enough room for arguments, tension, splitting up and so on. Space Captain Smith and its sequels have four core characters, because no matter who is talking, they can clearly disagree with someone else.

Seven is also a good number. Within that number, you can still have clearly defined personalities and roles ("He was our clown", one of the Seven Samurai remarks when a comrade dies) but you can have more subtlety and overlap. In Alien, Parker and Brett are both engineers, but they have different roles (and look very different, too). Similarly, Aliens quickly whittles its team of around 20 soldiers down to a core group of about seven. Of course, with more characters comes the option to divide the group - especially useful if exploring a haunted house, it seems.

 Getting people to do things

It can be satisfying to make characters more accomplished as the story goes on, or just to make their lives easier, but each solution to a problem removes another reason for the reader to read on. This is also true about teams of characters: where you have a group, you have skills that can be pooled and (quite an important thing, I think) it's much harder for a character to feel lonely or isolated.

One way of getting around this is to give one of the characters a secret agenda. Perhaps they are being blackmailed into leading the others into a trap, or perhaps they are only allied with these guys out of necessity. Either way, it's easy to see how this could make a character feel alone, which is a good way of generating sympathy (don't overdo it, though) or creating tension as the moment as the moment of separation or betrayal approaches.

There's plenty more to say about this (I didn't even get started on my dislike of River Tam from Firefly, which I could talk about for ages). Character dynamics are important, and there's a fine balance to be had between over-emotive teams who start to resemble a support group, and a bunch of characterless chess pieces. I suspect, as with so much about writing, it's the balance that matters, and that practice makes perfect.

Successful Books That You Think Are Rubbish

A while back, someone pointed me towards a new novel. It had rave reviews from the critics and was considered an important addition to its genre. "Just read the first page," they said. "The prose is amazing."

It was crap. The prose was like bad poetry. It recited a string of cliches. It was mannered and unconvincing in what it sought to portray. The best thing I could think of was that old line attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "People who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing that they like".

So what do you do when you see something like this: when you feel that it's a ragingly obvious case of the Emperor's New Clothes? I can't say for sure. I can't give you a pep talk or cheer you up just like that, but here are some thoughts.


1. Luck. There is a lot of luck in this game, a horrendous, depressing amount of luck. In some ways, it's luck that got me published: although I maximised my chances by writing a good book, if I'd been truly unlucky, it would still be a good book that nobody would publish. Which isn't immediately a cheering thought, but it does mean that you may not be doing anything wrong.

I'll say it again: all you can do is maximise your chances of success.


2. This bad author isn't in direct competition with you. It's not the case that fans read three fantasy novels a year and then stop. Consider those streets in any big town where you get five or six restaurants in a row. Why are they close together like that? It's probably because one strengthens another: the presence of several restaurants makes people see that street as a place to go. It benefits all the restaurants to create that atmosphere. In the same way, the presence of several novels of the same sort, even the bad ones, gives the feeling of a healthy genre that is worth investigating.

Of course, the fact that Bad Book X got a vast advance isn't cheering. But then, nor is the fact that I didn't win the lottery this week.


3. If this book is massively promoted, it probably doesn't matter whether  it's good or bad. Fifty Shades of Grey, for instance, is generally recognised to be awful in every respect. But it was sold well to an audience who would buy it. Where huge advances and the lifestyles of the rich and famous are concerned, the stories we hear probably aren't very much like real life for even successful authors.


4. This book might not actually be as bad as you think. People's tastes vary, and just because they like one book that you don't, it doesn't mean that they'll never read anything that you think is decent (such as yours). There are people out there who think Cormac McCarthy is an amazing prose writer, after all. Horses for courses or, as Cormac would probably say, "God's own steeds throbbing with the fierce wordless love of brute fury for courses". And I'm sure the author or whatever it is you dislike actually worked at this thing just as much as you.


5. You have to keep on. That's all there is to it, really. You have to keep going and learn to shrug this stuff off. Yes, it's galling, but what else is there to do but continue? I'm sorry if that isn't the world's most inspiring thing to hear, but let's be realistic. You have to decide whether you are going to do this or not. And if you are going to, that means sitting down and getting on. You have to keep learning, keep practising, keep putting out work and learning how to make it better.

And then, when you do succeed, you can annoy everyone by pretending it was a doddle all along.