The Shared WIP Tag 4- Side Characters and Worldbuilding

Oh, joy! Oh, happy day! I have now lured you into a post about my excessive number of side characters! You'll regret you ever came! So let's get started before you come to your senses!

But first a related tweet:

Me: *decides I want a small cast of characters this time, only two or three major characters*

3 scenes later: *my cast now includes 1875763982 characters*#writerslife #writinglife #writerproblems #writinghumor

— Scribbled Fiction (@ScribbldFiction) March 13, 2019

Now on to it!

Who is the SC that is the closest to your MC?

Welllllll, technically Abby, but I don't really think of Abby as a side character. I feel like she's on a completely different plane of existence. So after her, I'm gonna say Alf, because he's there for most of the story, and he's very helpful.

For your enjoyment, here is a brief and non-exhaustive list of the SC's in Crash and Burn(more or less in order respective to the amount of page time they get):

Abby (cousin, sweetest human being to walk the Earth)

Alf (Hispanic, skater kid, very cool)

Carl (another astronaut like Abby, a very nice guy)

Gakushi (Japanese gamer kid, cute)

Lexie's Dad

Lexie's Mom

How do your SC’s act around people they don’t know?

Abby is the complete opposite of Lexie. If there are new people, people she doesn't know, just people, she's like 'yes bring the people. these people are now my new friends.' (can you tell she's like extremely friendly?)

Alf is more. . . I dunno. He's not super antisocial, but he doesn't leap at the chance to meet new people, either. He has his circle of friends, and he mainly stays to his circle of friends. He talks to the people because he's like the Mouth of Lexie some days, but it's not like he'd say hi to a stranger on purpose or anything.

What conflict do they add to the story (disagreeing with the MC, perhaps)?

Because Lexie makes a lot of, let's say, questionable decisions in this novel, there's a lot of disagreeing going on here, so yes, I would say my SC's add some tension and conflict to the story.

Alf especially makes Lexie rethink her, repeat, questionable decisions, sometimes to a fault. On occasion, he'll even question her good decisions. But really, he just doesn't want his good friend to get in more trouble than she's prepared for.

Would your MC die for any of them?  What about vice versa?

Yes. It is made enormously clear in this novel that Lexie would die for Abby, and vice versa. These two are so close it hurts my heart. Actually, my little cinnamon roll Lexie would probably die for just about anybody she cares about (loyalty at 1000%)

If you were writing books about your SCs, what might the books be like?

I would write a book for Carl. I would so write a book for Carl. I should write at least a short story for Carl. I need this now. *committed*

I would also write a book for Gakushi. He doesn't get a lot of page time, admittedly, but because of that, I feel like there's a lot of his character left to explore! I need now to also write a short story at least for him. Wow, what is this tag doing to me?? *writes a book of short stories*

But I feel like I have good reason. Seriously, just read their character descriptions in the list I put up there. Who would not want to read a book about those?

What is your favorite part about the setting?

Stalking Rocky Hill on Google Earth for sure. I made myself a complete map of it to put in my writing folder. *nods wisely* I'm not creepy or anything.

Me stalking some random town on Google Earth

What was the hardest part about coming up with the setting?

Uh, not a lot, but I did spend a lot of time googling 'smallest towns in New Jersey' because for some reason I wanted Lexie to live in New Jersey? So I went through lists of small towns in New Jersey and settled on Rocky Hill, from there drawing up a map for myself. My tale is complete.

Is there anything about the setting that produced a major change in your character throughout the story?

The biggest thing about the setting that affects Lexie is the people that are in it. As you may have guessed from my *ahem* dryly humorous Villains post prior to this, People are a small antagonist of the story, especially the people in Lexie's town, where basically everyone hates her. This causes her to get more and more into the mindset of 'nobody cares about me', and she slowly has to learn that their opinions of her don't matter as much as her opinion of her.

That was a very confusing paragraph, but I can't think of a better way to put it, so hopefully everyone could understand it.

Talk to me! How's your writing going? Do your side characters steal the spotlight as often as mine? Drop me a comment, I'm dying to talk to you!

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