Remembrance

 As writers, we get to create whole worlds.  Believe me, what you read in a book is only as small sliver of the world we’ve envisioned.

 

Of course, readers are interested in the story,  not the entire world.  Maybe there’s another story within that world that would interest the reader, and maybe there’s not, but readers want to be entertained with as great story.  The extraneous parts of the world you created mean little to them.

 

So why am I talking about those extraneous parts?  Because those worlds contain characters, and those characters wander in and out of our stories, much like people in the world wander in and out of our lives.  However, sometimes those characters wander away and don’t return, and audiences wonder where they went.

 

It’s a tricky thing writing characters into our stories.  How important are those characters?  Although a character’s importance may wane, rendering them less likely to appear in the story, that doesn’t mean that audiences don’t notice.  Sometimes they’ve come to care for these characters, and those characters mean more to the reader than we as authors intended(or noticed).  My own character Gary, from Salvation Day, comes to mind.

 

This is where care and mapping come in, along with multiple edits.  Removal of extraneous characters from the beginning is required, but what if the character plays an important role down the line, even if only for a page or two?  Maybe we need to go back in and give them a beefed up role once we notice their outsized impact.  It’s one thing to kill off characters to advance the plot, but forgetting them?  It leaves some without closure.