Exchange of Realities

This is another of those topics that branches from the idea that no two people are the same. Yes, this should be obvious, but it often gets lost in the rush when people are trying to juggle large casts of characters, and what results is oversimplified reactions. Perhaps an entire group worth of people are all reacting to one character the exact same way. Or everybody’s reactions to people seem to divide into “Like!” and “Hate!” This gets boring, and should be avoided if possible.

There are two approaches to non-uniform reactions—looking at the differences between the people reacting to one person, and the differences between the people being reacted to from the point of view of a single person reacting. I’m going to start with the differences between the people reacting: if you’ve got a single character (for this article, the focus character) standing there, and a bunch of people who’ve never shown up for more than cameos in the narrative whose reactions to her you’re going to have to figure out, where do you start?

Many differences go without saying. A person’s friends will generally have a different attitude towards her than her enemies will. People who are too different tend to have trouble getting along; so do people who are almost completely similar but with key differences in particularly important aspects of their personalities. Those who have things they value in common are likelier to get along… usually. Begin with generalities; sort these other characters out depending on how they relate to her, and assign them a general class of impression, something that can be summed up in one emotion word. Try to avoid just a loving/loathing dichotomy; look more for things like respect, envy, pride, disdain, you get the idea. This is a base reaction: how might each character view your focus character if they’ve only heard about her and never actually met?

Next, think about the general effects of whatever impact the focus character might have had on each reacting character’s history. You can still be vague here, but this makes your groups smaller, further differentiating them. Logically, this is where the time the two characters have interacted with or directly affected each other comes into play—wrongs or rights done, shared experiences, the like. But don’t forget indirect effects, where something the focus character did or was in turn did something that affected a situation involving one or more of the reacting characters.

Doing the above two steps is going to get you some pretty small groups. At this point, look at the people in the groups and try to find things that give them different versions of the same sort of reaction. Let’s say there was a grand courtly party, one of those things where everyone who is anyone is there, and your focus character is a relative newcomer trying to shoot to the top. You’ve got four people, all of whom considered her annoying even before the party, and who after that disgraceful mess involving the Earl of Chevar’s son and the punchbowl, now have no respect for her whatsoever. Here, you might decide that one had been dragooned into trying to teach her her way around the court, but the incident was in direct opposition to his helpful suggestions. Another just plain can’t take people who fly off the handle that easily seriously. A third deplores the waste of perfectly good punch, particularly since she hadn’t gotten a chance to have any of it and was about to when the incident took place. And the last didn’t mind any of those factors too much, but considers people who can’t insult with finesse to be below his notice. All the same general class of reaction, but all different flavors and thus likelier to react differently.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at it from trying to give one character multiple reactions.