5 Tips for Creating Compelling Ensemble Casts
What’s more fun than one lovable main character?
Five or six lovable main characters!
Of course, with each additional main character you add to your narrative, you’re adding another layer of complexity to your writing process. You don’t want to have extra characters just to have them, after all—each character needs to be unique, compelling, and contribute a story worth telling to the narrative as a whole.
Easier said than done, I know, I know. But that’s why I’ve written this post!
My fantasy heist duology, Among Thieves and Thick as Thieves, features a whole host of main characters. I had so much fun building them and helping them find their place in my story world. So, this post is going to cover the five tricks I discovered while writing these books. Hopefully, you can use these tips to craft compelling ensemble casts in your own stories!
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Tip 1: Interview Your Characters
Building unique characters is hard. Understatement of the year, I know! If you’re stuck trying to create characters for your latest project, or if you have the basics down but you need a little push to help them feel like real, fully fleshed-out people, I have a trick!
Character interviews!
What’s a character interview? It’s exactly what it sounds like: You’re going to sit down and pretend like you’re speaking to your characters. Is it a news interview? A gossip rag interview? A police interrogation? That’s all up to you. The questions you ask? Also up to you! The only important thing is that you answer each question as your character.
For example, if I were to ask, “What’s your full name?” you don’t need to simply write down the character’s name and move on. Consider how they would truly answer that question. Would they lie? Would they give their name up freely? Would they greet that question with another question, like “Who’s asking?”
When I interview my characters, I like to ask a mix of serious questions that will help me build up the character’s history, attitude, and world outlook, and some fun questions that help me get a sense of who they are as a person.
Is it relevant to the story world of Among Thieves that, were Ryia Cautella to walk into a Starbucks (somehow), she would order a dead eye (a black coffee with three shots of espresso)? Absolutely not. However, does that give me, as the writer, a little wink into who Ryia is and make me feel more like she’s a real, full human? Absolutely.
Tip 2: Mix and Match On-Page Pairings
When you have an ensemble cast, some characters will inevitably spend more time with each other than others! For example, in the 90s show Friends, Rachel and Monica spend a lot more one-on-one time together than Rachel and Chandler do.
But you know what is always fun? Those random episodes where Rachel and Chandler do get paired up. (Hello, the episode where they’re eating cheesecake off the apartment hallway floor).
When you mix and match your on-page pairings, you give the audience a few things. First, you give them a switch-up—something unexpected and, hopefully, enjoyable to read: a change of pace. Secondly, you give yourself the opportunity to explore parts of your characters that you might not have explored previously.
After all, every relationship brings new opportunities to compare and contrast your character’s personality and outlook. Don’t be afraid to change things up as you’re writing and see what comes out of it!
Tip 3: Back Your Characters Into a Corner
Like tip number one, I think this tip is a great one for character creation in general, not just ensemble casts. However, it offers a few benefits to ensemble casts in particular. First, though, let me explain what I mean.
What I mean is, be as brutal to your characters as possible. Sounds awful, I know! But if your plot isn’t testing the character, pushing them to their absolute limit, whether that’s physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, you’re not getting the most out of your characters!
For better or for worse, people show their truest colors when their back is against the wall. Backing your character into a corner is a convenient way to show your audience exactly what your character is made of. Your readers are also going to be more willing to readily sympathize with a character when they’re in a pickle.
This is where your ensemble cast magic comes into play!
Getting a reader to sympathize with one main character is hard. Getting them to sympathize with three, four, or five main characters? WHOOF. When you put every single one of your characters in a seemingly inescapable situation, you give yourself a better chance of getting readers to connect with your characters, put themselves in their shoes, and really feel for them.
Tip 4: Voice Is King (or Queen)
Crafting compelling characters is one thing… but you can have the most interesting characters in all of literature and they won’t ring true if you skip this step: creating unique character voices. If you skip this step, you’ll find that every member of your ensemble cast will sound the same. And they’ll all sound an awful lot like you!
Each character should have a unique way of speaking. This will show up not only in the words they say, but in the things they say, and, by extension, the thought process behind their words. Best case scenario: it should be obvious without dialogue tags which character is speaking.
You can start crafting character voice in your character interviews! But to make sure the voice is consistent throughout your draft, I’d recommend reading your manuscript aloud during the editing process!
Personally, I like to have a little fun with it and put a literal different voice on for each character as I’m reading their dialogue or POV chapters. That way, I can ensure that each line of dialogue and snippet of prose in their point of view sounds and feels unique to that character.
Tip 5: Build Interconnecting Character Arcs
Last but not least, if you want to build compelling characters, they need to grow and change throughout the story. Similarly, if you want to create compelling ensemble casts, they need to grow and change together as the story goes on.
The people we surround ourselves with influence us, for better or for worse. Your characters should be no different! Your characters should all impact one another in some way. Are they helping one another grow? Are they bad influences, bringing one another to regress? The choice is yours!
Just remember, the power of the ensemble cast is like Voltron: The combined robot is far more powerful than the five adjoining robots on their own. Cheesy comparison? MAYBE. But it’s true. Only when your characters come together to impact one another deeply and profoundly will you be able to impact your audience in that same way with your ensemble cast as a whole!
If you love to write and have a story you want to tell, the only thing that can stand between you and the success you’re seeking isn’t craft, or a good agent, or enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but fear. Fear that you aren’t good enough, or fear the market is too crowded, or fear no one wants to hear from you.Fortunately, you can’t write while being in the flow and be afraid simultaneously. The question is whether you will write fearlessly.