Simple Supporters

Complications are for heroes. Most supporting players work better when they’re simple

Tension and Character Importance

Tension or suspense is what the audience feels. It is the balance between our hope that the tale will conclude happily, and our fear that it will not. This is a notion advanced by Frank Daniel, a Czech film theorist and instructor. He developed his ideas from reading about classical European drama, especially Lope de Vega and the French 19th century dramatists and critics such as Dumas fils and Sarde, the devotees of the “well-made play” or pièce bien faite. But this basic tension or balance of hope and fear was also an integral part of Stendhal’s idea of what made us fall in love. Stendhal worked out these ideas in his famous book De L’Amour — an excellent dissection of romantic love and foolishness that gave me great insight into how to make characters fall in and out of love, and the various types of love.

How the audience feels about the main characters or heroes is bound up with how we feel about the story as a whole. Often enough the desires of the heroes forms the basis of the story, and the story concerns itself with the question of whether the heroes will get their wish. So it makes sense to say that when the heroes experience internal conflicts, the audience will feel a heightened sense of suspense over the tale’s outcome. And therefore complicated heroes will increase our enjoyment in hearing a tale told to us.

The hero is of supreme importance to the tale, but the supporting character is of less importance. So supporting characters don’t have to be complicated. Sometimes it’s better when they are simple.

Middling Characters

Sometimes it’s better when supporting characters are complicated. An example would be when a hero needs, requires, assistance from a supporting character. Will he help or won’t he? Now the tension of this small step in the overall tale depends on the supporting character, and if he in turn has his reasons to want to help and other reasons not to help, this will increase our fear that he won’t help, and that the hero might fail at this step in his journey.

Such characters are not the least important characters, so I think of them as middling characters less important than the heroes but playing definite parts, with perhaps their own goals and confrontations and changes through the scenes in which they appear.

The internal conflicts of these middling characters can be just as deep as the internal conflicts of your heroes, but they must be resolved more quickly, within a single scene, perhaps. This resolution doesn’t have to be permanent, it only has to last long enough to advance your hero to the next step in his journey. In fact, a middling character can later come to regret his decision to help the hero, and aid the hero’s opponent in the next scene; or he can regret his decision to betray the hero and come to help him in the next scene.

The One-String Character

The One-String Character is another notion I learned from Frank Daniel. The metaphor is of a violin or guitar or other stringed instrument that has only one string, and so can only play one note. This character is defined by just one notion. It could be as minor as a mannerism or a saying the character repeats, or it could be more substantial, such as a dream the character has, or talent.

The One-String Character can be middling — he can even be a Sidekick. But in general, the more we audience members see of a character, the more variety we’d like to see in him. The one note the one-string character plays can get tiresome over dozens of scenes in a long tale such as a novel. So this type of character is best reserved for the most-minor characters in your cast.

But the One-String Character can be a lot of fun for the audience when we find them in such minor positions. They add to the texture or atmosphere or tone of the tale.

One-String Characters are defined externally by this one trait, and this type of characterization has fallen out of favor since literature began to remove itself from popular art. In “literary fiction” the audience feels no loss from the absence of One-String Characters, in fact they would mar the tales in the eyes of their intended audience. In the more popular-art genres however, this loss has been significant, and many’s the genre tale that would have been enlivened and improved by the addition of a few one-stringers.