groups and backgrounds
May. 14th, 2020 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marycatelliWhen making a group of characters to lead your story -- when this group has all major if not main characters -- and giving them backgrounds --
It's probably wise to make them, while interesting, not quite so interesting as you could get away with a main character. Lower than "escapes Mary Sue level" even.
It helps if it is, in fact, the same background. But if significant parts of it are separate, it helps to lay heavy emphasis on whatever it was that drew them together. Despite their unique and unusual childhoods, they all spent four years together at the academy and were assigned as a team. Or despite their interesting and differing crimes, they landed in the same prison to be offered a pardon by the king for team work. Let the backgrounds trickle out later.
This is to get the reason they are all working together front and center before the reader starts to think about remarkable coincidences. (It can help to have threads through the origin stories that tie them together in minor ways. But that can seemed contrived, too.)
It's probably wise to make them, while interesting, not quite so interesting as you could get away with a main character. Lower than "escapes Mary Sue level" even.
It helps if it is, in fact, the same background. But if significant parts of it are separate, it helps to lay heavy emphasis on whatever it was that drew them together. Despite their unique and unusual childhoods, they all spent four years together at the academy and were assigned as a team. Or despite their interesting and differing crimes, they landed in the same prison to be offered a pardon by the king for team work. Let the backgrounds trickle out later.
This is to get the reason they are all working together front and center before the reader starts to think about remarkable coincidences. (It can help to have threads through the origin stories that tie them together in minor ways. But that can seemed contrived, too.)