Angela Flournoy Transcript

>> Hi everyone, my name is Angela Flournoy and I'm here to talk to you about how to manage a

large a cast of characters in a narrative. Basically how to have multiple points of view in one novel,

or one narrative. If one character is like an engine for a novel, then if you have a multi-POV

narrative, you have multiple engines.

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They all perform a different function kind of like the four stomachs of a cow. Each of them should

be bringing something different to the narrative, and a goal for you is to figure out a way to have

them all move the narrative forward each time you sort of jump from one to the other.

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I guess some writers might wonder what's the point of dealing with so many POVs, when many

successful novels don't. For me, the benefit is that the writer can provide the reader with multiple

sides of the same story. These different view points can shed a light on aspects of character's

personalities that may be hidden or they may be able to give you different perspectives on some sort

of aspect of community.

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For my novel in particular, The Turner House, the aspect of community was a family, and it was

also a city. So, because I wanted to get a lot of different viewpoints, I needed to get into the head of

a lot of different characters. Having grown up in a family with a lot of people, it may have been

easier for me than other writers to figure out a way to prioritize them.

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So, one thing you learn when you grow up in a big family is who's important? Who especially as your

younger, who's concerns need to be met immediately? Who's sort of discipline is kind of more

pressing that you sort of are concerned about? Those are all things that very young you sort of learn
how to prioritize.

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The challenge for writers when you're dealing with multiple POVs is to figure out similarly how to

prioritize your characters so that your readers understand who's the most important. Who am I

following sort of the closest? And who is sort of bringing color to the narrative, but I won't die if I

forget a detail of their life.

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I'll still be able to enjoy this narrative and feel like I understand what's happening in the story. So the

question becomes, how do you figure that out? How do you figure out how to make a hierarchy?

For me the first thing I did was decide who was important.

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Because mine was a family story, the easiest thing to do was to make a family tree. If you're doing a

story that's based on a group of friends or maybe even a story that is based on a group of people

who don't know each other. You have to figure out who's the character that's the most important to

you and then you transfer that to the reader.

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That might be the character that came to you first. That might be the character that you think you

have the most sort of narrative potential. You see the most narrative potential there like they are

gonna drive the plot forward the most. Or they have, if you think on a thematic level, which I

usually don't do until like very sort of late in the vision, but if you are someone who thinks on the

thematic level early it might be the person who sort of embodies whatever capital T themes that you

want to pull out.

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So that person is sort of at the top of the family tree even if they're not the father or the mother.
They're sort of the top, and then everyone else's relationship can be mapped out in relationship to

them because, as we'll see in a minute, that's sort of how you can organize what happens when, and

who interacts with whom, in the novel.

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So after you make a map, if you're like me what you do is you read a whole bunch of books that do

what you wanna do right. So a lot of time that I spent working on this novel in the beginning, when

I was thinking about structure, was just trying to figure out what other novels had I read that had a

big cast of characters and moved the plot forward in a way that I wasn't sort of skipping past the

boring guys.

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Like, oh this person's chapter, I hate this person, and so I'm just reading it really quickly. That's not

what you want. So there were a few novels that stood out for me when I was thinking about this

idea for today. One of them is Zadie Smith's On Beauty.

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Another one is Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. And then another is one of my all time

favorites novels Edward P Jones' The Known World. All of them have a sort of third person

omniscient narrative, but they get close to several different POVs. Some of these novels, it's sort of

a pattern and it's like every few chapters you have the same character again who is leading you

through the chapter.

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But some of them you only see the character once, the character never comes back. But you're in his

or her POV for maybe 15 pages. And you don't feel like it's random or that that person doesn't

belong. So, today I'd like to focus on the example of Zadie Smith's On Beauty because I think that it

has a large cast of characters, but not so large that it's something that it's something that is kind of

hard to break down into it's parts.

It's very easy to see the way that she created a hierarchy between All of these people. Zeta Smith's

novel employs that third person narration style that's similar to what John Gardner in the Art of

Fiction calls the town point of view. The town point of view is one in which the story is told by

some unnamed spokesperson for the community.

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Among the most famous examples is Faulkner's A Rose for Emily. That storytelling style might have

the immediate effect of for grounding the story's controlling idea. Conflicting community values,

versus personal values. So, in the town point of view, that collective voice might be the only voice

you get in the story.

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But, on beauty what happens is a town point of view sort of opens the story, and comes in at

various points throughout the story. But each character gets their own sort of moment to shine in

various chapters. And there's not really a town in her novel, instead it's a family, it's the Belsey

family.

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By focusing on different parts of the family she can look at what does it feel like to be in this family?

What does it mean to be a part of that family? And what are sort of the pressures? In the very

beginning she pinpoints the two parents, the Belsy parents as the main characters.

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And their children are the secondary characters. So that's a total of about five POVs already. You

have the two parents and then you have their three kids. So one of the ways that she prioritizes them

is through interiority. There's two big ways that I wanna talk to you guys today about how to

prioritize your characters, one is.

Interiority, which means, basically, how deep you get into your characters' minds. So, if you're in

their POV, what sort of information is coming directly through them, and how is that sort of

influencing how close we feel to the character? And the second way is just the quality of the sort of

conflicts that they get into.

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Like, what are their desires? What are their goals? Are they huge or are they small? So, in On Beauty

the two main characters are afforded interiority that encompasses thoughts about other characters as

well as thoughts about themselves. And it dips into their past memories, and then you just get

information that helps you understand what sort of person they are.

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Like, what color car they prefer, what is their taste in music and art and all sorts of things. So that's

what the main characters are afforded. For instance, in Howard's POV, Howard's POV is the first

distinct POV we get in the novel, and it establishes one with the ability to think in depth, not only

about the current action, but also about Howard sees other characters and Howard's thoughts about

his past.

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The thoughts about the past don't always even relate to the immediate conflict, they just serve to

sort of round out his character. So, here's an example of Howard talking with his son, Levi.

Remember his son is one of the secondary characters. Levi has problems with his boss and Howard

offers to go to Levi's job and talk to the boss.

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Levi's embarrassed and like "Dad no, I don't want you to go." So this is what we go in terms of

interiority from Howard. Howard assumes his son was embarrassed by him. Shame seemed to be
the male inheritance of the line. How excruciating Howard had found his own father at the same

age.

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He had wished for someone other than a butcher, or someone who had used his brain at work,

rather than knives and scales. Someone more like the man Howard was today. So from this little

instance of, oh son, can I go talk to your boss? You get all of this information about Howard's

history with father son relationships.

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Also kind of what he values as far as what sort of work he values. He doesn't think a butcher is as

great of a job as he's a professor. So you get a lot of information that doesn't have to do with the

immediate interaction that you see him in.

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We can contrast that to another scene with a secondary character. Another one of the kids, Zora, his

daughter. It's a similar sort of situation where it's through her POV but we don't get any information

that's outside of what is happening at that moment. You get very little information.

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Let me just read it for you. 15 minutes later, Zora peeled her clothes all off again in the women's

locker room of Wellington's college pool. This was part of the new Zora improvement program for

the fall. Wake early. Swim. Class. Light lunch. Class. Library. Home. She crushed her hat into the

locker and pulled her bathing cap down low over her ears.

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So the interiority sort of remains at the surface level. We don't get information about Zora's past.

We don't get any information as to why she needs a self-improvement program. We just get enough

to know that she's insecure, vaguely, and that she wants to fix it. We never really in the novel get
more information.

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We don't get a flashback like you get with Howard. Immediately you have this image of him as a

butcher's son, having kind of angst. You don't get that. You just know. And it's enough to put in

your pocket for Zora. This is Zora's character and she has insecurity and she's trying to fix these

things about herself.

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And then you move on. For tertiary characters, which are a few, you don't really get any interiority

about them. Not even things kind of to put in your pocket, like one defining thing that doesn't

directly relate to the main characters. So, for instance, there's one of Howard's assistants at the

college he teaches at.

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He has interactions with other family members throughout the book. And some of those are told

through his POV. But in all of those POVs, all we are getting are his observations about the person

he is talking to. If he is talking to Howard, we're not getting flashbacks about the assistant's life.

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We're only getting information about Howard. If he's talking to Zora, we're not getting flashbacks

about anyone else but Zora. It's a way for us to sort of add layers to the character that are important,

but you still get a view of them from the outside world, a view you wouldn't be able to get.

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Howard doesn't, there's no way he can know how his employee feels about him, that's just not

possible. He can guess but he can't know. So if you put it in that other person's POV, now we know.

But we don't know anything about that employee really, we just know his relationship to Howard.
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So after you've decided who is entitled to what level of interiority, the next big challenge is to assign

the appropriate levels of conflict depending on how important each of those characters is to the

narrative. The conflicts that surround the two most important characters in On Beauty are not easy

to resolve.

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They're open ended and, basically, existential in nature. They're these sort of big problems. They're

problems about who am I, how do I fit in with the world, how am I living my life. They're not ones

that you would expect sort of a packed conclusion to and you would just trust that if the writer gave

you a very easy epiphany, especially before the book was completely done, you would distrust that.

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The big problems, or the big conflicts, for your most important characters, they're going to be

introduced in the first, I would say, maybe, quarter of the book, but the reader fully expects for the

entire book to kind of reflect those issues and reflect those questions that those most important

characters have.

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In On Beauty, some of Howard's big issues are, what is the role of religion in my life? How do I feel

about art theory? How do I feel about art theory? How do I feel about romantic love? How do I feel

about this marriage that I've been in for most of my adult life?

[00:13:49]

How do I feel about being a British man living in the States? He has these big issues that is not

gonna be just sort of one run in he has that makes him change his mind. By contrast, his kids have

moments of interiority that helps us understand that they're important, but their conflicts are the

sort that one or two well-crafted scenes can make come to a conclusion, or help you feel it, at least.
[00:14:16]

Obviously we know it's just, you know, it's fiction so it's like the artifice of a conclusion more than

how it happens in real life. But for a reader, you'll be satisfied. Okay, this person is on the right

track. This person is doing the right thing. For instance, the daughter Zora who I used in example

earlier, she's insecure and she's overly ambitious and she's hurtful to others.

[00:14:37]

Those are the things that she does in the book. They're not very existential, especially considering

her age. Everybody is a little insecure at that age. One can arguably see a scene where you can get

over that. You might be able to pinpoint yourself and you're thinking about your sort of younger

years, what was the thing that helped you sort of make you feel like you came into your own, what

was that instance?

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And then On Beauty, there is a scene where at a party, where she has this crush who she's also been

sort of hurtful to at the same time. And he kind of calls her out her behavior. And after that scene,

we feel as if her issues have been resolved.

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And now we're sort of only waiting for the big guns, the two most important characters, their issues

to be resolve. For the tertiary characters, like Howard's assistant, we get enough information about

him that we assume he does have personal, sort of existential issues, but the reader is under sort of

no expectation that they'll be solved.

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The only things that need to be solved are any sort of conflicts or open ended issues he has with the

main characters. It sounds kind of cruel but if he has personal issues, that's not for this book. That's

a different book. You don't have to worry about that.

The biggest thing to keep in mind when managing a large cast of characters is that every single time

we see a character. Is a chance to make them feel differentiated. You want markers for those

characters that helps your readers sort of store them in the back of their mind and carry them.

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So that if they don't see them for another 30 pages, all you have to do is sort of pull out that marker

again and they'll remember who this person is and what they want, and what their relationship is to

the bigger characters. That can be as easy as if you have a character, for instance, In On Beauty,

Howard's assistant that I mentioned, he has a southern accent.

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So he's the only character in the book with an accent that's rendered in dialect in the text, srt of to

that extreme. But it's not done, really, in a character way but it's done in enough of a way that we

immediately know, okay this is this guy, this what he thinks about Howard, this is where he is in the

story.

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So language is a good way, sort of dialect is a good way to do that, but there's also ways you can do

that, just as far as how they treat your main characters. How does your main character feel as soon

as that person steps in the room? That may be the way that that person is always differentiated.

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I can imagine if it's sort of a YA story and you have the bully. Even if it's a bully who's not very

present in the story, as soon as he walks in the room we remember him because of his relationship

to the other people in the room and how he makes them sort of tense up.

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It could also be done through clothing, which is, I think, a little bit maybe, depending on how much
time you have. In a short story, clothing might be, might be fine enough. In a longer narrative, you

wanna do something that's a little bit more tied to the person than just, sort of, what they have on.

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But once you figure out sort of what that marker could be, you want to solidify it and reinforce it

often. Not so much that it's a gimmick, but so much that every time I see that person, everything I

need to know about that person, it's like instant recall, I remember all of it.

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And that will help you not have do that work of recreating them later in the stories. Specificity is

really key. So basically, sort of to conclude, I would say that the most important thing is that before

you start mapping out something with a large cast of characters, ask yourself why [LAUGH] you

wanna have so many people in your narrative.

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It's not necessarily more work for me, there was no other way that I could write this story. It sort of

came organically. But you want to make sure that they're all sort of reflecting some other point

you're trying to get across. It might be the town point of view, you want everyone's, sort of, opinion

about a similar element of their life.

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Whether it's where they live, or what part of a group they are in, or even the age or generation

they're a part of. But you wanna figure out why that is. Because that helps you figure out who's the

most important, who's sort of second line in importance, and who's tertiary.

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And is only there to kind of add layers and texture to those other characters. Thank you.