Speaker 1: Hey everyone. Welcome back to my channel. It's your girl, Amanda, the author, and thanks for tuning in. Today I'm going to be talking about how to write an ensemble cast slash a book with a larger cast of characters where you have one main character and a bunch of secondary characters or an ensemble cast where you don't really have a main character but you have a lot of people. I'm really excited about this topic because that's basically all I do in my book series and in the book I just finished writing, In the House of Transcendence, I have a central main character surrounded by a lot of friends and family and I had to make each character stand out and be distinctive. So these are the tips that I've used and hopefully they can help you. But before I get started, if you're an author looking for tips on all aspects of the authoring game from book writing to marketing to how to have the right author mindset, then I'd love if you could go ahead and subscribe to my channel and kick it with me every week. Additionally, if you're interested in finding out where you can get my books or subscribe to my newsletter or just generally keep up with me outside of these YouTube streets on my other socials, then you can find those links in the description. So without further blabbing from me, let's get started. Now before I get into these tips, I want to talk a little bit about the different types of larger cast ensemble casts and I'm sure you've heard of at least one of these, the first being the five-person band. Often you'll hear titled five-man band, but I'm not using that gendered language, so five-person band. And this is where you have a group of five characters who fall into archetypes and these archetypes each complement each other. So I'm going to run through these different archetypes really quickly. So firstly you have the leader, which is your main character or the hero. They're the ones who are given the call to adventure and often they are charismatic, ambitious, level-headed. And then you have the what's known as the lancer or the anti-hero and they're essentially the antithesis of your hero. So if your hero is ambitious and charismatic and level-headed, as I mentioned, your anti-hero is going to mirror those traits and be the opposite. Or if your hero is self-conscious and anxious and doubtful, then your anti-hero is going to be boastful and gregarious and they're going to have all the confidence in the world. They're going to use confidence. Then you have what's known as the smart one, right? This is the person who is the brains of the outfit and, you know, generally what they lack in physical strength they make up for in the ability to scheme and plot and think of ways to get out of tricky situations. And they're highly intelligent, often humorous, usually they have those witty one-liners. Often they are the youngest, so let's say if we're talking Umbrella Academy 5 is kind of quite literally the smart one. Then you have the big one. So this is somebody who's very opposite of the smart one. They are the brawn of the outfit. They're usually bigger, taller, stronger, faster. And this character often a pretty close bond with a smart one. Maybe after some initial banter and discord between them, they become really close. And finally, in this five-person band lineup, you have the heart of the group. And this is the person who is the peacekeeper, they're the nurturer, and this character may also be the voice of reason. So there you have it. You have your hero, your anti-hero, the smart one, the brawny strong one, and then the heart. When we expand this to a group of seven, as in the Magnificent Seven, which is inspired by Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes. And you can see this in the Seven Samurai films and also the movies Magnificent Seven, both the original and the remake. So you have all of the ones I just described, plus you have the grizzled veteran who's been doing this for way too long. You then have the funny ones. So the smart one is just smart, and then they have a separate character who is funny. And maybe they're also good at something else, but generally they're the comedic relief. And then you have the young one who's the youngest of the group, and maybe they're very inexperienced, potentially very boastful and cocky, as in the case of Jim Beckworth in The Harder They Fall. Another type of ensemble cast, or larger cast here, will be the three amigos. And you might be thinking, wait, that's only three people? But this is still a dynamic that you want to make sure that you're treating appropriately. So with the three amigos, all of those types of archetypes are weaved into just three characters instead of five or seven. Lastly, there are the group of misfits. They're made up of any kind of combination of the archetypes I've mentioned. They're made up of any kind of combination of size. And usually these are people who maybe don't know each other initially, and then they're thrust into this situation. However, there's usually always a leader. So a couple examples of good ensemble casts include The Harder They Fall, Raybearer, Sailor Moon, Game of Thrones, and All of Us Villains. Alright, so now I'm going to move into my tips, and I have five of them, as I usually do. And the first one is give a shit about your characters. You might think that this is a little wild, because of course you should care about your characters, but I mean all of your characters, even the villain, even the problematic one, whatever. If you don't care about your characters, why should your reader? So it's important to understand who these people are and understand why you have them in the story. And don't just include a large cast of characters just because you think that's what's fitting for the genre. A lot of fantasy has large, large casts of characters, right? Like Game of Thrones has so many different characters and alternating points of view. But just because that's kind of what you can expect to see in a lot of genre books, even Six of Crows and Leigh Bardugo's work in that epic fantasy sphere has a lot of characters, just because that's typical for these types of books, epic fantasy, does not mean that you need to have that in your epic fantasy. So think about if your story really needs to have a large cast of characters or if you can tell what you're trying to tell with a smaller group. And that leads me to point number two, which is to know who each character is in relation to your main character, if applicable. So again, if you have a situation like the book All of Us Villains, where there are four viewpoints plus other crucial characters, then it's important that we understand who these characters are to each other and to the story and to the plot. And if you do have a situation where you have a main character and multiple other characters, like in the case of my series To A Stare With Love, where my main character is Mercury and he's surrounded by Sloane, Griffin, Joelle, and Alice, who are his friends, as well as his father Atlas, his brother Troian, his aunt Oleana, his cousin Fagin, and also in the second book a reporter named Valeria, it's important that you understand how these characters interact with each other, how they know each other, and whatnot, and all of their motivations and needs. And this comes with putting together character profiles. So each character needs to have their own motivation, backstory, they need to have their own needs and a distinct way of being, even your villain. And if you'd like some tips on how to write a villain, you can catch my recent video, How to Write a Villain, where I discuss that in more depth. But here are a few questions that you can ask yourself as you're putting together your character profiles. And look, talking to my panthers out there, I know that you just want to get into the story and just start writing and not necessarily outline or whatever, but I do think it's important if you have a large cast of characters that you do take some time to do a little prep work before you get into writing it and put together some character profiles. It could be like a page, doesn't have to be extensive. But here are a few questions you should ask yourself when you're putting together your character profile. Who are they in relation to your main character or to each other? Are they strangers? Are they related? Are they in romantic relationships? Whatever. This will help automatically set your reader's expectations of the kind of relationship they have, where, you know, two strangers, they might feel one way about it, but if they're siblings, right, like in Haunting of Hill House, where all of these characters are siblings, we kind of expect that there's a lot of history and there's a lot of in things that they know about each other and potentially some tension, because if you have a lot of siblings, like I do, I'm one of six, you know somebody's always mad at somebody. Question number two is what does each character want? Closely followed by question number three, what does each character need? Now, I'm sure that you know that often what the character wants is not always the same as what they need. Your character could want a lot of money and to be rich, but probably what they need is to be happy with the things that they have. So answering those two questions can help solidify their character arc and maybe by the end of the story they realize that what they want is not what they need. Or they get what they want and it is exactly what they need, right? Like let's say that they're wanting a family and they get a found family versus like a blood family, right? Number three, what is their arc? And I think even your secondary characters, so not your main character, but your secondary character should have some kind of arc. So whether that's a positive, a negative, or a flat arc. I'm not going to go too too into character arcs. I think Jenna Moresi has a video that she does really well in diving deep into these, but just kind of surface level. Your character arc is basically their arc and how they get from one point from the beginning of the book to the end of the book or series. And there's three main types of arcs, a positive, negative, and flat. Positive being that they turn their life around, their arc ends in a positive way. Negative being they descend into darkness or whatever that might be for them. And then flat is when they don't change at all, but maybe the world around them is changed. So that's kind of just a brief overview. Like I said, even if you have secondary characters, do kind of explore what those arcs are, especially your villain because they need to be having their own arc. Because as I mentioned in my video, How to Write Villains, your villains are the protagonists of their own story with your main character being their villain. So keep that in mind because your villains need to be fully fleshed out in the same way your main character is and all of your characters do. Next question that has helped me when I'm writing my character profiles is how do people see them? Now I'm not talking about personality, I'm talking about how are they perceived by people. What's the worst thing that they've ever done? This is a good one to help get your mind thinking about their backstory and the things that they've done in the past. Or you could say what is the worst thing that they will do if you have a character who's maybe going on a revenge spree or something. And finally, you should definitely be asking yourself what are their weaknesses? Answering these questions not just about your main character and not just about your villain, but also about those secondary characters that we see popping up a lot in your books. Help flesh your characters out, make sure that they're fully realized and make sure that your readers can distinguish who they are and understand who these people are and root for them or maybe hate read them. Who knows? Have some kind of emotional response when they're interacting with these characters. Tip number three is show these characters together and not just with your main character. So this one applies a little bit more to situations where you have a main character and then you have supporting characters, but it's still important regardless of that because you want to see these characters in different combinations with each other interacting because that helps to show us their personality. It helps to show how they interact with each other and make things fully realized. Tip number four is to introduce your characters slowly. Now you might do this in the setup phase, which is the part of the book that's right before the call to adventure where your readers are learning who your main character is or main characters are and how they interact with the world around them. Maybe we're seeing what kind of job they have, what their family's like, blah blah blah. So it's good to introduce your main character and then slowly introduce these other characters. Maybe in smaller groups of two or three instead of introducing them all at once. And another way to do this is what I call an assemble your crew moment, which happens in movies like Armageddon, Magnificent Seven, even kind of Lord of the Rings where the hero goes to all of these different people and is like, I need your help solving this thing. And also gone in 60 seconds, right? Not just to keep it in like fantasy. Armageddon's not fantasy, but you get what I'm saying, right? Where you have this hero who's given a call to adventure and then they assemble their crew, they go to their friends, they go to people they know, they find talent, and then the story occurs. And finally, tip number five is to ask your beta readers what they think about your characters. I've been thinking about doing a whole video talking about what you should do in the beta reading phase, how to properly navigate it, what to ask your beta readers for, what not to, all of that. So if you're curious and you'd like to learn a little bit more, then go ahead and leave a comment on this video. But basically, one thing that I do when I get to the beta reading phase is I provide my beta readers with a list of kind of things I'd like them to look for. It's not super exhaustive, maybe five to seven things. Generally, it's like, hey, here's pacing, this is super magical, so let me know what you think about the magic system and if I need to ramp it up or maybe there's inconsistencies there. Specifically in the House of Transcendence, there is a mystery element, so I made sure to ask my beta readers to let me know if that mystery element was done well, if they vibed with it, if they were able to clock who the person who done it was within the first five pages or not. But because I always have a larger cast of characters, I'm also always asking for feedback on making sure that the characters feel distinct and feel like their own characters. Now, if your beta readers say that they had trouble distinguishing between a couple of characters, there are a few things you should do. Firstly, you should see how many beta readers feel this way. Generally, if you have maybe one person who feels like there's confusion between characters, you can kind of consider leaving it as is. But if you have a couple beta readers that say the same thing, then I would consider going back to the drawing board and either do the work to distinguish these two characters or combine the characters. And I know that you might not want to combine characters, which is why the alternative is to do the work to distinguish the characters. Either way, if you have multiple people reading this first draft telling you that they couldn't distinguish between character A and character B, you should probably address that. And here's a bonus tip, and this one's a fun one. No matter what phase you're in, and let's say you're prepping to write this book or maybe you're in the rewrite phase after being told that your characters are similar, one thing that I do is I like to create Pinterest boards for each of my books. And if I need to, create a Pinterest board for each character. This might sound like a lot of extra prep work or a lot of work in general. Trust me when I say it can help you really be able to distinguish your characters and have them in your mind's eye as separate. Putting together an aesthetic board of their style, what they look like, of maybe songs that they'd like to listen to, movies they'd like, food that they like, and drinks and all of this stuff, maybe even a different perfume. I find really thinking about the the perfume or the scent or the smell goods that my characters would wear really helps to inform their personality and what they gravitate towards. That's also something you can do as well, think about what kind of perfume or cologne that they'd wear. Putting us all together in separate Pinterest boards for these characters can help you further to distinguish them. If you've made it this far, thank you so much and I hope you like this video. And if you did, please leave a thumbs up because that helps the algorithm gods shine favorably upon this baby YouTuber. And also tell a friend. Do you have any author friends who haven't checked me out yet and you think they could benefit from some of the advice that I give? Go ahead and share this video and let them know. I do have a whole playlist dedicated to writing advice as well as a marketing playlist and one dedicated to Lit Bitches, which is a five-monthly show that I do with two other indie authors, Katrina N. Lewis and Kyla Gentle, and we talk about all aspects of authoring and a lot of industry drama. So if you want to hear some tea, go ahead and cycle through some of those videos. You can find them on my channel as well. And as I mentioned up top, you can find links to my books, you can find the link to subscribe to my newsletter where I share book recommendations, book reviews, and spoilers and sneak peeks on my works, and also links to my socials in the description. I hope you found this video helpful and if there's any other writing topics you'd like to hear about, go ahead and leave a comment below or just go ahead and say hi. I'd like to hear from you. So have a great day and I'll catch y'all later. Bye.