Mandyville vs Killing Your Darlings

Yesterday, I talked about not falling into the trap of sending your characters to Mandyville. It involves keeping a list, especially if you're writing a series, and how to mention them and so on. What we're going to talk about here is just letting them go versus killing them off. I touched on the idea of killing your darlings back in July and you can find that post here. Let's dive into the idea of just letting a character fade into the background or killing them off.

The idea of letting them fade into the background, like I said yesterday, is a bit of lazy writing. It's not horrible but sometimes people are going to want to know about secondary characters that you introduce. Yes, I know that people aren't going to think about secondary characters, but never underestimate what your readers might connect to. Especially if you're right in the fantasy genre and you have a bunch of secondary characters that, in their own way, become important. Think about Dumbledore's Army - that's a whole bunch of secondary characters that we continue to follow and learn about, even if it's only here or there. None of them fade into the background, even in Deathly Hallows, which is centered squarely on the trio.

There is another way to deal with secondary characters that you don't want to deal with. You can kill them off, but, like everything else in writing, you want to use it sparingly. If you kill off everyone without a good reason, then your readers might lose interest in the story because it's too dark. It's why I'm not reading A Song of Fire and Ice at the moment, even though a lot of other people love it, so it goes both ways. There's also the idea that he writes the character deaths so they fit perfectly into the plot but some of us readers don't want so much death. The gist of my rambling is to use it sparingly but keep it in your back pocket.

As always, there are middle areas in these two extremes. They could leave a note, there could be an email, a quick call, and so on. Just make sure that it fits into your plot and doesn't feel like it's a throwaway. Until next time, remember to back up your work and keep on writing!

Characters and Mandyville

If you're not familiar with Mandyville, then it is possible that you've never seen The West Wing. It is named after a character called Mandy who up and disappeared during the end of season 1 and the start of season 2. She went poof, no explanation, even though there was a bit of a story line for why, but it was like she never existed in the first place. This happened with secondary characters where they just disappeared into the ether.

The reason why I'm writing about it is that it is one of the traps we should try not to fall into as writers. It's more for people who are writing a series, but you should have a plan for what happens for your secondary characters. Maybe not that they have a full on scene, but that they're talked about a small bit. You might not like the character but you might have a reader or a fan who does. Maybe they want to know what happened or what they're doing and that will spin into fanfic. That fanfic might bring in more people who read the original material and so on.

The easiest way to make sure you don't fall into the trap is to write down your characters, all of them, and write down what they do. Keep a line below their name to write which books they've appeared in and which books they're talked about in. You can do this either physically writing it down or Google Docs or a spreadsheet. Then, if you have nothing for them to do in the book, just mention them in dialogue if you can. But try not to fall into the trap that your secondary characters go poof. It's lazy writing. Yes, I'm saying that about Aaron Sorkin of all people, but, honestly, connect your characters.

So, until next time, back up your work and keep on writing.