Most of us are familiar with the idea that characters need to be multidimensional to be believable. E.M. Forster gave us terms for this discussion, ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters, but the term ‘well-rounded’ predates Forster by at least a century, and the discussion of emotional complexity is as old as history. People simply aren’t simple,
In part 1 of this article, I talked about what an ensemble cast involves and the times that writing one might be the best fit for your story. If that convinced you to embrace the ensemble (or if that’s what you wanted to do anyway), welcome to part 2, in which I’ll be talking about
Writing an ensemble cast is harder than writing a single protagonist for the same reason that catching five cats is harder than catching one: you’re trying to do the same difficult thing multiple times, and the fact that you’ve already succeeded once doesn’t necessarily make the next step any easier – in fact, it could
Sometimes, the thing that makes a story pop isn’t the exact events of the plot or the details of the characterisation, but the context in which the story is presented. Sometimes, it’s setting up a question or expectation with an unusual title, like in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and John
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