The main character is the major focus of any story, but they rarely walk their world alone. And even if they do, they still cross paths with others along the way. Even Aron Ralston came across a pair of hikers at the beginning of Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Very few characters walk through their stories in utter isolation. Which brings us to the character web.
If you haven’t read John Truby’s The Anatomy Story, stop here and go get it. This post will still be around when you finish. It’s one of my top three writing craft books and taught me so much during my DIY MFA journey, including the concept of a character web.
The premise? Your novel doesn’t contain a cast of separate, individual characters. It contains a character web, where each character serves a purpose to the main character or the story. Or both.
As usual, let’s use my WIP Baggage as an example. My main character, Ainsley, wants to live her life on her own terms. To do so, she must break ties from the toxic relationships that chain her down. Relationships mean other characters, which means my character web. The two toxic people in her life are her mother and her ex-fiancé. They both are alike in this purpose: to continue to make Ainsley believe The Lie she’s told herself. But they come at the problem from two different angles, as all characters should. If they approached the same problem with the same solution, they’d be redundant and one wouldn’t be needed in the story.
For Ainsley’s entire life, her mother has taught her that love is the effect of doing things for others, that love is earned and comes at a cost. Her ex-fiancé taught her to be happy for what she has, that she isn’t worthy of more, that she should be grateful for what he’s given her. Both these characters drive Ainsley’s character arc and put pressure on The Want, The Need, The Ghost, and The Lie.
Enter Fiona, Ainsley’s sister and another key player in Ainsley’s web. Fiona has always been Ainsley’s provider and protector, the one Ainsley could count on when their mother let them down. Fiona shows that love is conditional—she cut their mother off years ago—something that is earned, but something Ainsley is worthy of. She provides a landing pad for Ainsley, a safe place she can escape to when she flees her life with her ex. While Fiona ties into the theme of love, she is also a driver of plot. As a newlywed, Fiona wants to start her own family, a life that doesn’t include her thirty-year-old sister crashing on her couch. She informs Ainsley she is moving to Seattle, and that baby bird Ainsley must jump from the nest and take flight.
Fiona is my tough love character, the older sibling who loves her sister to pieces but is tired of taking care of her adult sibling. Enter Brandon, stage left. He’s the foil to Fiona’s push, the supportive sidekick who gently helps Ainsley learn how to form healthy relationships as she strikes out on her own and decides what she wants for her life. He’s a gentleman who shows her time and time again that being herself is enough. She is enough, something she never heard from her ex or her mother (see how all the characters are connecting with purpose?)
Eunice, Ainsley’s frumpy, grumpy coworker, is a mirror into the future, a look at how she will end up if she continues to date losers like her ex. Eunice is a cautionary tale, but she’s also a lesson in how what we perceive isn’t always the truth—or, at least, isn’t the whole story. An important lesson for our heroine as she dips her toe in the dating pool again with Cash.
Cash is a great example of keeping the character web right. The more characters you have, the more the reader has to remember and the harder the writer has to work to make each character unique with a specific purpose. I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy and adhere to the KISS model: Kiss It Simple, Stupid.
In the first draft of my outline, I wanted to play with the stereotypes and tropes of romance novels. I wanted to put Ainsley in a love triangle between a smoking hot, uber-loaded, cocky asshole and a down-to-earth, humble family oriented mechanic. Then, surprise, she doesn’t end up with either! Instead, she chooses door number three: staying single to grieve the end of her engagement while learning how to love herself.
The problem? I now had a Cash, a Miguel, and a Brandon, and critique partners had a difficult time distinguishing between the three. So I took the family aspects from Miguel, dialed down the assholery to 25% on Cash, and merged the two together. After all, their purpose to the story was the same: to teach Ainsley that in order to love someone else, she first has to learn to love herself (and that first impressions can be deceiving.) They both also teach her that to move on from her gaslighting ex, she needs to take some time to get over that relationship and the damage it caused her. While the pair came at the problem in different ways, Miguel’s approach was similar to Brandon’s, so I didn’t need them both. And since Brandon is my new book boyfriend, poor Miguel got the ole boot to the butt, and I merged him with Cash.
Another example of tightening a character web up to strengthen a story (and, if you overwrite like me, to help cut words in revisions) came with my DIY MFA thesis. Originally, I had five Andersen siblings: Aimee, Andrea, Alexis, Andy, and (Ale)Xander. Yes, too many A’s, I know. That was part of the reason behind condensing them down. The youngest, Xander, I repurposed. He became Andrea’s young son, and a reminder to Alexis (my MC) how much of life she missed by avoiding her hometown and her entire family. Older brother Andy, though? He and his long-term girlfriend got the axe. Why? Because when it came down to it, they didn’t teach Alexis anything about life or herself that she wasn’t already learning somewhere else, and they had no unique purpose to the story. They didn’t pass the requirements for the character web, so off they went.
I’ve covered it without naming it, so let’s name it now. Truby mentions that the character web serves purpose, and one way to do that is through character roles. Here’s a brief run through of the typical story roles:
- Hero: the main character with the problem and a character arc to follow (either a growth or a downfall.) That’s Ainsley, my klutzy obliger who has to learn to live for herself and choose her own destiny she controls.
- Opponent: the character who most wants to keep the hero from achieving their goal. Sadly for Ainsley, that’s her mother. For if Ainsley lives her life for herself, she will no longer fund her mother’s misbehaviors and continue to let her mother passive-aggressively guilt trip her into doing her mother’s biddings.
- Ally: the hero’s helper, the trusty sidekick. This is Brandon, who is more than happy to help Ainsley explore what she wants from life and where she wants to go next. He has a shared problem as Ainsley, which is common for allies: he’s spent his entire career following in his father’s footsteps, and isn’t sure he has the passion he should for it. But he doesn’t know where to go next. Ainsley tackles the same problem from the other side: she hates her job that doesn’t afford her the salary to live on her own or escape her ex (did I mention I made him her supervisor to tighten the character web more?), but doesn’t know what she wants from a career, what she’d enjoy doing.
- Fake-ally opponent: this is a character who appears to be the main character’s friend, but ends up working against them by the end, the old wolf in sheep’s clothing. Ainsley doesn’t have one of these, but my MC from my MFA thesis, Alexis, does. Conor, a driver on her team, ends up an opponent in two different aspects, throwing Alexis into chaos when she’s just stabilized at the midpoint.
- Fake-opponent ally: this is a character who seems at odds with the hero but ends up being a friend. Remember Eunice above? Eunice starts out in competition with Ainsley over extra shifts/money at work, but in the end, Ainsley realizes Eunice needs a friend as much as Ainsley needs new friends, and they bond other shared trauma/backstory.
- Subplot character: a subplot character is someone who deals with the same problem as the hero, but in a different way. Fiona is a subplot character; she has a different way of tackling their mother. And Ainsley’s aunt is a subplot character as well. They both have lost family and want to be closer to the family they have, but come at it from different perspectives and tactics. Cash is also a subplot character. Like Ainsley, he wants to get over a past relationship ending badly.
The key to these different character types? They all serve the main character and the plot in one way, shape, or form. And, just as importantly, they do it uniquely.
If you really want to nerd out over the character web, I refer you back to The Anatomy of Story. Truby does a dive into character archetypes and how they relate to the character web, but I come at archetypes organically and don’t spend a lot of my writing process focused on them, so we’ll skip them here. Until next time, my friends. Happy writing!