Family Therapy

Often when we get stalled in a story, it’s because we need to do a little more thinking about the characters and their relationships with each other. So that we can better understand and dream about how they might react to events and what they might do in response. 

This is an exercise I constructed, to that end. Use it if you have an instinct that you might be missing something in your story, an event, or response – from a source that is fresh. It’s almost always better, especially when you’re already deep in a story, to use who and what you have gathered up to this point, rather than introduce new characters and new events. This is a way of mining the people already in your pages. 

On a piece of paper, draw a circle and then write the names of your main characters around the circle, in any order, and paying attention to the order in which each one comes to mind. 

Imagine these people are gathered at an Al-anon meeting or something. Family therapy.

Now I want you to think about the relationships between each person in this circle with every other one. Each of them will have some kind of ‘take' on each other, deep or shallow. (Unless they never meet, because they’re from different times in the novel, perhaps, in which case you don’t need to trace these connections - although, in the case of family ancestors, there may well be an emotional legacy involved…) 

An important story-building question to ask yourself, from each character to each other character, is: what changes between these two characters, in the course of the story? What has to change between them in order for this story to end? This change will be both external (in the outside, over story, visible world), and internal. 

I started out doing this, just drawing lines across the circle between the various characters, and writing my notes along those lines, but the circle gets pretty messy and too full up, pretty quickly. So another way to do it is: 

Take one character at a time and write a series of short sentences about the relationship he/she has with every other (relevant) person in the circle. The first sentence is about the relationship at the beginning of the story; the last about it at the end. 

Here’s an example from a novel I’m currently writing:

(At the beginning of the story) Mari is using Cal.
(At the end of the story) Mari respects Cal.

Mari controls the Children.
Mari sets the Children free.

Mari loves Isaac.
Mari loves Isaac.

Mari watches the Summerlanders.
Mari rejects the Summerlanders.
Mari blows up the Summerlanders.
Mari heals the Summerlanders. 

In the third example, you see that Mari’s relationship starts and ends in the same place. But it doesn’t stay that way in the middle! (Otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story so why come for therapy? What this tell me is that it will be useful to elaborate, and add the sentences about what changes in the relationship over the course of the story before she is able to return to loving Isaac. 

In the final example, you can see how I began to do this, filling out the stages of the story. You’ll also see, in the second example, that I instinctively felt a need for a collective character, The Children. These children have separate fragmentary voices in my book, but I found myself not wanting to give them individual seats round the circle. Yet they absolutely needed to be there as a collective. 

As I said before, follow your instincts as to whom you feel you want at this therapy session. 

Hope there’s not too much shouting.