Adding Supporting Characters to Your Story: 10 Tips

[Music] hey there everybody it's Mark Crilley I'm back with another video today we're gonna be talking about supporting characters this is my latest video on a series in which I offer all my best advice on writing and the creative process and as you can see I've decided to do a little drawing of Jesse from Toy Story 2 and 3 a very good example of a supporting character I believe and as I work on this I'm going to go ahead and give you 10 different pieces of advice so let's go ahead and get into it this first one is number one it is extremely hard to tell a story with no supporting characters since your main character is left with no one to talk to this conversation partner role is a crucial part of the supporting characters job so yes if you look back through the history of great stories very few of them have just a single character I would say Tom Hanks in the movie castaway it's the first example that comes to mind but even in that movie you see that he starts talking to a soccer ball Wilson and that is in a way I think an acknowledgement of the importance of supporting characters and I didn't really think about it until I got older but the it is a lot of it is about just giving the character someone to have a conversation with and during these conversations a lot of important information comes out and just makes the story more fun so most people I think have an instinct for adding supporting characters but I think once you're aware of this conversational role it maybe will help you in the way that you deploy these characters in the story let's move on to number 2 if you introduce a supporting character early in the story and then never bring them back the audience may feel that you forgot about them the more supporting characters you introduce the harder it becomes to keep giving them all something to do in the story so yeah that is there is sort of an expectation of once you introduce a character that you will bring them back and not just have them be isolated in that first scene or second scene or wherever you had them this does not apply to minor characters and I may do a separate video that's about truly minor characters who can indeed just sort of pop in for one brief little scene and be gone but just another thing to be aware of if you introduce a character especially introduce them with a certain amount of fanfare and then you leave them out of the rest of the plot just because you have become distracted or more interested in some other character than that one that you introduced to the readers may sort of begin to wonder what happened was it a mistake and why did you not bring that character back so something to keep in mind let's move on to number three a supporting character can be an important source of information allowing you to inform the reader of backstory etc but you should make sure that they are more than just an exposition mouthpiece I always like to quickly explain what the word exposition means for anyone who doesn't know it's that's when you're really just giving information straight to the audience in a very direct way of someone just standing there and telling you something about the backstory or about a character and generally speaking you should avoid prolonged moments of exposition you want to sort of gracefully get information to the audience without you know beating them over the head with it you want them to be able to put two and two together stuff like that and sometimes a character a supporting character it becomes all too clear that the only reason there and the story is to provide this backstory or to do this long speech in which they explain the rules of the world or whatever be cautious about that supporting characters are great for getting exposition into your story in a graceful way but it has to be graceful and you have also you know have them actually doing things in the story and have them you don't want them to just to be accorded a sort of a mouthpiece someone who gives information and does nothing else that's central to the plot I haven't it's gonna take a long time to draw all these little strands of hair what was I thinking why did I choose Jessie oh right that's because she's a great supporting character she really is and hopefully she'll come up as an example later on let's go on to number four here if the supporting character is a sidekick for the main character you may want to think of them more as a co-lead they should have their own backstory and be fully integrated into the plot so yeah the whole the idea of a side carrot a sidekick character I think is an elevated form of supporting character and they have to be treated with more I don't say more respect but you have to just give them more to do you have to really weave them into the story I think in my case as an example I would say Brody's ghost hang on a second I'll show what I'm talking about here in Brody's ghost Brody is the main character this guy here but his so-called ghost attalia is I would say a kind of a sidekick character once she's introduced in this first scene in the story she's never far from the plot I mean she's she's at his side for many of the key scenes and I would say she's you know almost a co-lead in that regard so when you decide to have a character that's gonna be a sidekick sort of like Watson to Sherlock Holmes or that kind of thing you have to really you know think about their backstory make sure they've got a defined personality because you know you've given them extra responsibilities by giving them that sidekick role let's move to the next one number five supporting characters generally have a personality that contrasts with the main character so definitely in the case of Brody's ghost I did that for sure this Talia character is very sort of sassy and kind of she's got a lot of irreverent you know she's always saying a lot of things that are sort of actually kind of hard-hearted or she just seems to view the world in a more callous way than Brody does and definitely you don't want to have the main character and the supporting characters be too similar and indeed sometimes what you're going for is a deliberately contrasting drastically different oil and water kind of comparison between the two characters which can you know result in comedy and so forth just makes everything more interesting so if you've got supporting characters that are quite similar to your main character you may want to revisit that and decision and see if you can make them a little more different one way or another from the main character number six introducing a new supporting character midway through the tail can be a good way of injecting new energy into a story that has become more of the same so yeah that's an interesting thing that you see happen sometimes and I think Jessi actually is a pretty good example of that if you you know you kind of have to think of the Toy Story movies as well those first three is one huge story altogether and if that is the case then Jessi becomes this new character that comes along halfway through and makes things more interesting and indeed she is she has a very thoroughly worked out back story doesn't she they went they made sure with that song in Toy Story 2 that we find out what she went through what motivates her her point of view on all this stuff and definitely I think yeah brings a new energy to Toy Story if you imagine Toy Story 2 not having had Jesse or bullseye or stinky Pete's then you you're looking at a less interesting movie I mean that's it was you could almost feel this breath of fresh air come into the Toy Story universe as soon as we got these three new characters added in so if you're telling a story and you feel like it's kind of losing gas consider working in a fresh new character halfway through in a way just that position of them having not been there from the beginning automatically gives them that sort of energy injected property something to keep in mind let's move on to number seven if I can pick up the piece of paper and it says you can get away with a supporting character being a little one-dimensional but the longer they remain in the story the more you'll need to flesh them out so yeah in my case I in the past have had characters that were fairly one-dimensional in my akiko comic book story we you know there were worse there was this kind of team of Spuckler the the wild cowboy character who just did whatever he felt like doing and you need used poor grammar and so forth and then we had mr. Biba who was much more straight-laced and the two of them you know they fought with one another and so forth but they were kind of one-dimensional you know you when you first met them you thought oh this is the librarian character this is the kind of rough wild adventure type character but as I continued to tell more and more stories that involved these guys I did have to flush them out more it did not it would not be satisfying to have them remain these sort of one characters so in a way I think it is related to the length of time that we have these characters around the degree to which it becomes too important to show some other side to that character and not have them just be a kind of a stereotype or a cliche let's move on now to number eight if you're not careful your supporting characters can end up being more interesting and popular than your main character trying to turn them into the new main character is a very hard trick to pull off I think one that immediately comes to mind is the Jack Sparrow character in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies you know you he was a side character in the first one and he became very popular people really reacted to that character and the producers of the film clearly could not resist going back to the well and indeed transforming him into the kind of the main character it can be very tricky you know I haven't seen so many of those movies but I have certainly heard that a lot of people have problems with that Jack Sparrow character being becoming the main character back when I was a kid and this is showing how old I am really that they have this Happy Days TV show and a character named the Fonz who was again he was the supporting character but he became so popular that again they kept sticking him in and turning him into the main character it's a hard thing to do I think it's in a way best to leave these supporting characters as the supporting characters they were always meant to be and not to try to milk them for all they're worth so anyway something to keep in mind and in a way it may if you have a supporting character that's way more interesting than your main character that's maybe a sign that you need to work on your main character and make them a little more interesting and it's not so much a problem with your you know supporting character is too interesting is that your main character isn't interesting enough to hold their own but I do think there's a tradition of the main care not being too flashing if you look at the Wizard of Oz for example Dorothy is sort of an every girl character and we leave it to the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and all these other ones to be the colorful wild interesting you know visually dazzling characters no one would say any of that about Dorothy that's not sometimes the main character is meant to be a little more subdued well I am coming down to my last two two pieces of advice advice but as always I'd like to finish up my drawing a little more before I end of the video so give me just a moment I'm gonna use a little time-lapse to finish up this drawing of Jesse and then we'll be back with advice 9 and 10 all right well I think we've got enough of the drawing done that we can move on to these last two pieces of advice and number nine is this in stories oh joy she always has to get into these videos now something she must have seen a squirrel number nine and stories that are super serious a supporting character can be a good source of comic relief beware though of these characters turning out to be annoying rather than funny so supporting character is very often used as comic relief even in stories that aren't super serious they sort of designate this is the comic relief character and I've just noticed as a consumer of entertainment you got to be real careful with these so-called comic relief characters because it can really backfire badly if the character is not genuinely funny and there's a thing with comedy we would go very quickly from thinking something as funny to thinking it's annoying and you be real cautious about that I prefer to have all of the characters have humorous aspects to them and not to have a single character be the obvious attempt at a comic relief character but in any case something to focus on if you've got a really heavy story maybe you do need one or two characters in there that can lighten things up a little bit and now we move on to the tenth and final piece of advice here a friendly supporting character can be a good disguise for the secret villain of the story be careful though that you've given them a good reason for betraying the protagonist and that you aren't just throwing in a twist for the sake of it so yeah in terms of having a surprise oh that was the bad guy type of a moment generally speaking you can hide that character in among one of these seemingly friendly supportive characters but it really does require thinking it through and figuring out what is it that caused this character to want to turn against their friend and that be just requires a lot of thought on your part almost before you even write the story what could they have done you know the main character that was perceived by this other character as something that wronged them or Gotham angry enough that they were pretend to be the friend and then later on turn out to be the villain of the piece so yeah that's it it can be a good technique but it does require I think a careful planning now before I end the video I want to announce the name of my very next book coming out in September it is called the two pencil method and I'm going to go ahead and do the reveal of the front cover right now all right so there you see it's the two pencil method and it's even got my dog enjoy the Corgi right there on the front cover as the title suggests it's all about my two pencil method of making pencil drawings starting with an ordinary number two sort of writing pencil finishing things off with a black colored pencil onyx is going to cover all sorts of pencil drawing topics I'll be talking more about that and of course giving a full reveal of the interior of the book once I get one of my complimentary copies but for now let me go ahead and lay down this pencil I want to say thanks to all of you who watched this video I really hope you enjoyed it and I'll be back with another one real soon [Music] you

Channel: markcrilley

Views: 37,034

Keywords: Mark Crilley, manga, anime, how to, draw, drawing, tutorial, supporting characters, side characters, inventing characters, storytelling, writing tips, minor characters, how to write a story, jessie from Toy Story, pencil drawing

Id: KaVuGqcXb14

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2018