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 This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
| Recurring Characters Following on from "20250523 Frame Story"  .This is something that a few writers have experimented with – the idea of recurring characters, though not writing sequels. This is when the same character appears in separate and distinct stories. I guess the most famous would be the creations of Robert E Howard: Conan, King Kull, Solomon Kane. And so, as such, I am going to use Howard’s technique to show how to do it well, and how not to do it well. Something that Howard understood was that characters age, their skills improve, they become smarter… but they also become a little slower and their attitude becomes world-weary. He understood this, and he wrote the King Kull and Conan stories in a vague sort of order so that he could show them aging. In the original Conan stories, he even had allusions to the stories he had already written to make sure there was a sense of continuity. However, the reader did not have to know this previous story to enjoy or understand the one they were reading – it was only a reference, a brief mention that maybe he’d faced this sort of opponent before, or maybe that he’d known fear only once, as a child. With the King Kull stories, though, he did this and made the allusions to important events that had been written… and then he went and wrote a few stories of early on in his life, including how he became a king. The problem? That was a brutal fight and the later stories make no mention of it. So such an important life event meant nothing to the older Kull. It hardly felt right. However, when it came to Solomon Kane, Howard wrote two stories, and then went and outlined a sort of life story with question marks at certain points where he had no idea what could happen. He wrote a heap of older Kane stories, then a few earlier, but these stories had been alluded to already because Howard had the life worked out. This is the way to do it properly. And he had friends re-appear where Kane said he knew him from elsewhere, and then Howard went back to write that story when he had the details some time later. You can read the Kane stories out of order because each is a standalone, but in order and they paint an interesting life picture. That is the thing, though – each story needs to be a standalone. I use a core group of around 10 characters in my main fantasy stories, but I have a complete chronology worked out of important events, so when something unimportant happens I can put that into the chronology and it is understandable that later on the characters would not remember it after the War of the Demons. They have scars and gain them in other stories, but there have been times when I allude to the scar and then later I might write about how they got it. I follow Howard’s method. An example in my own writing is here: "Whispering Jack" . The recurring character is a cryptid hunter. Some previous stories are alluded to, but each story can be read independently of the rest. In fact, only the last story is a sequel to the very first; the rest are just with Whispering Jack the recurring character.Writing stories so the events of the previous story have an impact on the next is writing a sequel, and there is nothing wrong with that. But standalone stories are an easier sell (and, yes, I have sold seven stories from my fantasy world); recurring characters are more fun for the writer and, if you become well-known, for later readers to get the whole life of a character. Recurring characters are perfectly acceptable away from sequels, trilogies, decalogies or whatever. And they are some of my favourites I have created. |
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