Anchoring Character(s) in a Series
Writing a series is a massive undertaking. It requires a lot of time and even more commitment. Think hard before you take it on. But writing a series can be magical, fun, and exciting. It can feel like home because you get to play around a world of your own making. Even more so, when you’ve successfully introduced a character or characters who resonate with the readers and can serve as anchors throughout the series, the time and energy you spend will be worth the sweat and tears (yes, there will be tears) it takes to write the series.
There are two things that keep the reader coming back to a series: the characters and the author. If we’re talking about a series like R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps, readers return for the various stories and the author’s style because the characters may or may not return in a future book. But, in most other cases, the reader returns to a series because of the anchor characters.
Creating a character strong enough to support a series doesn’t mean they will be super strong or heroic throughout. It means building a layered character who will last through each book, with the character feeling refreshed or new to the reader rather than stale and stagnant. It can be difficult writing a series that remains new to the reader so a way to do so is through our characters. How can we create characters who will live up to the challenge of carrying a series on their shoulders while staying true to themselves?
You might wonder about the secret to keeping readers invested in you and returning to your work when a new book comes out. There are a number of things that must come together to make a book series successful. But what has kept my readers enthralled is my anchor character Nena Knight from Her Name Is Knight and the trilogy. It’s definitely what keeps me coming back for more.
COMPELLING CHARACTERS
According to Dictionary.com, compelling is to “force or push toward a course of action; overpowering, having a powerful or irresistible effect.” Compelling is fascinating, gripping, persuasive, captivating, enthralling, absorbing, undeniable, forceful … undeniable. Compelling is a lasting, lingering effect on your reader.
Your characters should force the reader to turn the pages and find out what happens to them, how they get through whatever adversity is thrown their way. Anchor characters should be so captivating that whatever it was about them settles down deep into the minds and soul of the reader and don’t leave easily long after the book is finished, leaving the reader to anxiously wait for the next installment.
Regardless of if you consider your book plot-driven or character-driven, the characters in your story are who drive the plot. Writers will tell you to throw everything you’ve got (if it makes sense for your story, of course) at your characters. How they come out on the other end of all that mess that is the draw. Your characters are the most essential aspect of the book. If they are static, underdeveloped, or not developed at all, your story may fall flat. What will keep the reader there if there is a boring character with no substance trying to solve the conflict? Take a moment to answer that. I’ll wait …
Anchor characters, or characters who will hold down the story throughout the series, shouldn’t be all good or all bad. We’ll talk about this more later. The characters must be fully developed and compelling. They must anger the reader, pull at heartstrings, make readers swoon, repulsed, or scream at the pages or into the car as readers listen to the audiobook.
Knowing Your Characters Well
Do you know your characters well enough to know what will work for them and what won’t? When I’m hashing out a character, I think an inordinate amount about what they’re doing and how they’ll handle it. I put myself in their shoes and I remind myself that they’re human and therefore their behavior needs to align as such. Even characters that aren’t human will have humanistic qualities so it’s important to keep that in mind when writing them.
Think about what your characters will be doing in the book and the series and how they will go about achieving their goals or taking care of whatever you’ve thrown at them. What are your characters missing in their personality or in their life that needs to be explored? Who can you put in their lives to either fill what they’re missing or take that thing away? How will your character manage that gain or loss? What are their beliefs? What drives them? What scares them?
When you’ve answered questions like these about your anchor characters, you begin to ground your readers in your characters and their world. The reader will stay on for your character’s complexity. Their good and their bad. Their indecisiveness and insecurities. Their heart and loves. Their hate and devastation. Their feelings of inadequacy. Sound like you and me? Absolutely!
In my experience writing the Nena Knight trilogy, my series about an elite Ghanaian lady-assassin working for a secret organization called the Tribe to take out anyone trying to undermine the advancement of the African diaspora, I had a challenge. My protagonist was an assassin. We’re not supposed to root for assassins who kill others on order. So, I challenged myself to create a character who doesn’t have a job the reader can like but has a personality, rationale, and motivation the reader could relate to and root for. In the end, the reader wants Nena to win. The reader may even want to help Nena take out a mark or two.
Writing Nena in a way that was compelling to readers did not come easy (see my earlier remark about sweat and tears … many). Writing her and the other characters was something I had to learn and through my experience, I figured out a few things that helped me create anchor characters who remained true to themselves, the reader, and me throughout the series.
Character Traits, Quirks, and Tics
Assign your staple characters a super trait or trademark that is only theirs and thread that throughout. Your readers will love to learn a character’s tell at the start of the series and then recognize those tells throughout the series. They will feel as if they know the character personally, and it helps the character to resonate with the reader. One exercise I like to do is observation. I people-watch and ear-hustle all the time. I listen to how people around me speak, move, react. I watch their faces and bodies for how they move when they’re speaking about certain things. I take their tics and quirks, for example, the way one might hum quietly when thinking of the best way to give a response to a tricky question, and then if it fits with one of my characters, that character may also hum before answering.
The good thing about writing a series is that you have time to pace and develop your characters, and create deeper and more nuanced characters, the readers can invest in. Your series can give background knowledge into the behavior of your anchor character and provide readers with special insight into what makes the character tick. No characterization of anchor characters is too big or too small and the more you invest in them, the more the reader feels like part of the family.
Where They Start and Where They End
While you may not have every single trait about the character ironed out at the start of your series, you’ll likely discover new things about them as you write the series. The character will and must evolve or devolve depending on your story. But as long as the character’s change is gradual and makes sense to the reader, meaning there are indicators placed throughout that this change was imminent, your character changing is a normal and expected progression that should happen.
A clear and obvious change must happen from how they began at the beginning of the series and how they end in the last book. Remember earlier when I said your character can’t be all good or bad? Consider it. Is there anyone you know who is entirely good? Are you? Probably not. And so, your characters can’t be either, especially if readers are going to engage with these over and over in multiple books.
Their Highs and Lows
Characters who win all the time are boring. Characters who lose all the time are pitiful and depressing. No one wants that. So, it’s important to incorporate many pitfalls and successes for your characters of varying degrees of difficulty and turmoil. Think of your own life and the ups and downs you’ve had. The goals you started with and the way you felt about life when you were younger are different than what you believe and feel now, right? You’ve lived life and those experiences have sculpted you to what you are today. Your characters need the same sculpting throughout your series, or they won’t feel real to your readers. In life, we all come up against detours that prolong what we want and expect. There are reversals that change things entirely. Your anchor characters should experience those during the series. A second-chance love in book two is a breakup of epic proportions in book three when a third party slides in, only for the couple to find their way back to one another again by the end of the series. In a reversal, a character who’d lived by a particular belief for a long time suddenly has their belief system upended when what they thought was the truth turns out to be a lie. Suddenly their life and the world as they know it reverses, and they must rebuild and learn again from scratch.
Reader Expectations
In a series, there are certain things about the anchor characters that readers will learn at the beginning and with each subsequent book—you’re adding layer upon layer to what the reader already knows. Don’t break those expectations, but rather build upon them. If, in the beginning, your character is annoying and selfish because they’ve been betrayed by their childhood friend, then in book two, we’d explore those feelings of betrayal in other forms. We’d meet someone who makes the character consider changing. In the next book, the character is trying this new friendship, and something takes that person away, but now instead of becoming a worse person, that character makes a change—they go save the person. They don’t blame and become selfish again. They’re evolving. Remember, readers come to the series to be on the journey with those characters as the characters work through the plot and conflict.
Accessible Characters
What does it mean to have accessible characters? It means that the reader has a shared experience, motivation, or emotion with these characters. There is a relatability, connection, recognition, or commonality between the reader and character that, in some way, anchors the character. The character becomes accessible and not too big for the reader.
In life, we fail. Your character must succeed in the end (or maybe not if you’re making it twisty) but they must fail and fail plenty at other things before they get to that success. Those failures can trickle into the subsequent books that can either be turned into success by the end of the series, or it can be a failure that the character must learn to reconcile themselves with, which is basically a success in itself—acceptance.
For example, Batman is inaccessible. Superman too. They’re bigger than life. Batman is ridiculously rich, dark, and has gadgets and fancy cars I could never afford. Superman is the model of perfection. He’s not even from the planet, he comes equipped with the strength of many people, and he flies. I mean, his name says it all, does it not? He’s not even of this world. But Aquaman likes beer. He’s laid back and his style casual and personable. He likes to swim with the dolphins (who doesn’t?). Did I mention he likes beer? That’s accessible. Those are characteristics I can relate to and can see in my daily life to connect me to that character. It creates empathy for them because what they’re going through, I have also experienced. Batman and Superman? Eh, not so much.
But if we delve deeper into the backstory of Batman and Superman, we find that even they have experiences we can share. Gradually, the idea of them becomes more accessible. Batman lost his parents right in front of him. He’s driven by grief, dedicating himself and his resources to taking out the bad guys, like the ones who killed his parents.
Those moments when Batman battles the ebbs and flows of grief over the loss of his parents, when he mentors others who have experienced loss due to violence, how he eventually turns the darkest moment of his life into an opportunity to help others and clean up Gotham, are very much relatable.
Superman, who is an alien, wants what we humans want: to be loved and accepted by people who are not like him. His struggles—his relationship with Lois Lane, the difficulty in hiding his true self from everyone, how his loved ones handle him going out to save the world (like our law enforcement and military), how he deals with the insurmountable responsibility of being on the hook to save the world all the time. It’s a job he chose, but even Superman can get tired and need a little time to recharge. Sounds like the life of an adult.
Even these once inaccessible characters have doubts and insecurities when we really think about it. Those are the things a writer can expound upon with their anchor characters.
WW___DoS?
A good way to stay true to your anchor characters is to ask yourself, “What would ____do or say” in this situation? Your reader will know when a character has changed quickly in a way that doesn’t make sense to that character. Above all, your character must stay true to themselves. Yes, everyone changes in life. How we start is not how we end, but how we end is gradual, not immediate. And how we end still recalls how we began. While your character should learn something new in every book of the series, their core values and motivation, the characteristics that elicited such emotion from the reader must remain. When you ask yourself what your character would do when faced with a messy situation, tackle that issue from their perspective. You’ll find new and refreshing ways to showcase those lovable (or despicable) characteristics. They are what will moor your readers to those characters.
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As always, I’ll remind you that what works for me may not work for everyone. All writing advice is subjective. Take what works for you and disregard what doesn’t. So, in no way am I saying that my view on how to create characters that have sustainability throughout a series is the absolute way to think. I’m saying this is the absolute way Yasmin thinks. I hope that if there is nothing else you come away with, you’ll take this advice: Have fun with your characters. Your readers will sense that and share in those feelings.
This live webinar will take a deeper look at subtext–how to build indirect but important meaning, foreshadowing, and imagery into your scenes. It will also look at the realm of indirect communication: body language, cryptic dialogue, and even thoughts to deepen characters and create tension. Jordan Rosenfeld brings her experience as a writing teacher and coach, and author of six books on the craft of writing and three novels, to show you how to infuse a richness of character and the right mood into your book.