“Ensemble is [about] people [placed] into the lives of other people. But it’s also [about] the sense of community and friendship — how we don’t have to be alone anymore.” —Parini Shroff
How can we as writers best reflect back the real world, in all its infinite contradictions and interactions, within our work? This Third Thursday, WLT’s very own Program Director, Sarah Renee Beach, explored this question with Parini Shroff (The Bandit Queens), Annalee Newitz (Automatic Noodle), and Sherry Thomas (The Librarians). Together they discussed how vibrant ensemble casts can work in different types of writing projects, as well as the benefits, the challenges, and the crafting tricks to an ensemble.
Kicking off the panel, Parini Shroff highlighted the unique ability for an ensemble cast to “let some air in the room” and prevent claustrophobia between chapters. While her novel Bandit Queens covers dark material like premeditated murder, her dynamic ensemble of women protagonists generates a humorous atmosphere within their rural village of present-day India. For Shroff, much of her world and plot emerged not from outlining but by developing the dialogue of her characters. From there, she was able to incorporate smells, sounds, physical images, and more in the editing process. Conversely, the greatest challenge she found with ensembles was blocking. There were so many different moving pieces Shroff had to consider: “What are they each doing? What are they each wearing? What are some cues? What’s the non-verbal communication in the background?” Post-it notes, Shroff said, were particularly useful in helping her track characters and their individual histories. By recording down when or where each character was born, she could then consider, for instance, what kind of slang they would have likely used and what important political movements were occurring throughout their lifetime.
For writers new to ensemble, she asked them to remember: “Is this satisfying?” To Shroff, ensemble presents a special management problem, where some “characters [might] serve a purpose and then they go away and that’s okay because nobody cares,” and other characters might need to be incorporated into the story and its themes more closely. From there, it’s a matter of understanding what elements need more and which ones need less — ultimately seeing how satisfying each plot point and theme can eventually be. She believed humor could also help circumvent the forgetting of a character; “if they made you laugh,” Shroff said, “there’s a chance that you [as a reader] might be interested in them.” Alternatively, she suggested having a character act in surprising ways to bring them to the foreground. This sliding scale of foregrounding and backgrounding action, as Beach added on, is all about allowing characters to introduce themselves in their own words and pique the readers’ interest. Shroff also emphasized actually figuring out what a story will become, even when going in unplanned; that, in turn, would shine light on what the story must center on, what valiant goal the characters can aim toward, and the true ending of the story. Finally, Shroff recommended writing diaries for each character to really flesh them out on the page.
Annalee Newitz stressed the importance of an ensemble cast in this day and age, particularly in providing community. “We are so interconnected,” they said, “and it’s nice to see that reflected in fiction.” For them, ensemble also allows both readers and writers to better understand other lives, even when located in an entirely different world and time. Newitz’s novella Automatic Noodle features a lively cast of four robots and one human figuring out how to run a restaurant in a post-war San Francisco. In the writing process, Newitz realized that fully understanding who their characters were and what made them unique helped prevent their ensemble cast from blending together. In Automatic Noodle, for instance, the octopus-robot Cayenne is obsessed with cryptocurrency and frequently suggests far-fetched schemes; any mention of “buttcoin” would then be immediately identifiable as their line. Yet Newitz also found that developing arcs for each character was quite challenging, especially within the shorter space of a novella. Though the scale of the emotional change could vary between characters, they wanted to show how the friendships in a character’s life have tangibly affected them. And they had to juggle many different questions to get at the heart of their story: “What are the things that they keep coming back to? [What are] the connections between the characters?” Like Shroff, Newitz also employed Post-it notes to organize their narrative, sequentially ripping them out once a plot point was finished and throwing it for their cats to play with. Because they handle a lot of fantastical and futuristic material, they’ve had to map and draw out places to better visualize their descriptions, as well as keep a running worldbuilding document to remember names and objects.
For burgeoning writers, Newitz asked: “Does every character get their time to have a moment?” Just as each character gets an individual feature in episodic television, so too does each written character need backstory, understanding, and empathy. Newitz questioned, though, if every detail needs to be included. “Instead of saying that [a character] had been doing it,” they said, “actually show the scene of them doing the thing.” And if a writer should ever realize that they might have too many characters to handle, Newitz’s solution was to combine them into one. They also recommended text groupchats as a fresh way for ensemble characters to interact as a larger group. Lastly, they suggested opening narratives with a stressful situation so readers could see immediately how the characters work together as a team, as well as each character’s emerging role. Even the initial choice to pitch in or not pitch in during a tough time, they said, is a critical character trait.
For Sherry Thomas, the most basic fact of a character is unchanged with ensemble casts. “[Know] what their essential fear is,” she shared, “[because] their essential fear is always caused by their essential pain.” In Thomas’ The Librarians, three librarians and a library clerk of Austin, Texas must solve the mysterious deaths of two patrons who are discovered right after the library staff’s inaugural murder mystery board game night. In her time across genres, Thomas realized that murder plots could actually yield the ripest character development results, as it truly peeled back characters to their deepest secrets and thrust them right into the open. Each of The Librarians characters, for instance, holds a secret or a trauma they aren’t willing to let out, and that tension spills into their relationships with others. Like Newitz, Thomas enjoyed building on a found family, finding that “ensemble is a such a great place to celebrate friendship.” Though contemporary mystery was often more plot-heavy than her home in historical romance, Thomas could still focus on character-building and interaction by using an ensemble cast. This is the beauty of ensemble, after all: “Everybody who [has] been leading these disparate lives [comes to find] out that they’ve all been somehow involved [and] almost linked cosmically by these events and happenstances and coincidence, and suddenly their lives are intertwined.” Thomas also agreed with Shroff on blocking, laughing at how time-consuming and demanding it could be when readers were often not paying attention themselves. And though Thomas does not commonly work with Post-it notes, she had briefly used them in the past to remind her of vital plot points.
If a writer felt stuck in their story, Thomas suggested moving on until they could find the emotional thread of their characters again. She also recommended entering characters in new ways than before to better understand each character. So if a character were to be from a time that spoke at a higher-level diction, then she, too, would pick that up in her own life. But don’t forget, she reminded, that your plot must be good first before you can fully explore the characters. Plot is, for Thomas, a powerful way to create momentum for characters and their emotional arcs. Ultimately, Sherry concluded that there is no manuscript in existence that couldn’t benefit from some more cutting. “Just be ruthless,” she said.
As a(n aspiring) writer, it was fascinating witnessing the backend of writing. There were many professional working parts I was not familiar with, such as how to typeset texting or what kind of software to use. Thomas disliked Scrivener, and Newitz begrudgingly used Trackbear. I personally struggle often with leaving my characters in dead water once they’ve served their purpose, so I loved hearing about the different innovative methods to “chug” a character back to life. From drawing out external elements through dialogue to springboarding a character to the foreground via an element of surprise (Shroff); from fusing characters that bleed too much into each other to ensuring connections among an ensemble are fully and distinctly fortified (Newitz); from pulling character development out of a well-flowing plot to just moving on when stuck on a plot point (Thomas) — there were so many tried-and-true methods the panelists offered for both the drafting and editing processes. I am furthermore excited to use the writing exercises proposed: Shroff enjoyed character diary entries, and Newitz sketched out maps. In fact, I’ve now started using Post-it notes again, in honor of the clearly universal writer instinct!
This panel has, for me, opened writing as not just a craft, but the ultimate medium of communication. From character to reader, reader to author, from author to community, from community to character, over and in between and all around again. It is through ensemble, after all, that we can begin to understand each other a little bit better.
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Continue to support our authors by purchasing their recent releases. You can check out Shroff’s The Bandit Queens, Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, and Thomas’ The Librarians here.
For more insight into writing and publishing, please join the Writers’ League of Texas in-person at BookPeople on October 16 for October Third Thursday: “Thrills, Chills, & Twists: Writing a Page-Turner.”