The Space Between Two Things

When people talk about what makes stories great they usually talk about characters, plot, prose, sometimes worldbuilding, occasionally voice (close to prose but not quite), and theme. And maybe a few other ideas but rarely do I see people talk about relationships, or dynamics, or interactions, or any of the many names you could give to what happens between one actor in the story and another.

I hear fans talk about it. "I love the romance between Han and Solo". "It's really cool watching Jean and Locke be friends". "When Tyrion and Tywin go head to head, it's compelling". It's clearly a decent sized chunk of what people remember, what people talk about. Yet writing theory as I'm aware of mostly locates it under character and occasionally plot or theme. This makes a certain degree of sense but I think undersells it.

This is mostly coming from two books. One is The Goblin Emperor, where I'm chronically behind on a readthrough because I'm just not that into it. The prose is enticing and the idea intriguing but it just hasn't been doing it for me after the start. The reason? It's a character-based story where for a huge part of the book, none of the various decisions lead anywhere much. Why? Most of the decisions are with different characters. Because of this, no one thread builds momentum. This is a plot problem. But there's a side issue in that none of the decisions or interactions are entertaining enough to carry me without plot. That's a relationship issue. There are too many different character relationships for any particular one to build depth and complexity. 

Compare and contrast with Men At Arms which has wowed me once again and where the characters are the best thing about the book. Why? Many reasons, but one of them is they are constantly thrown into conversations and scenes with each other that highlight who they are compared to each other. The relationships in this book are big and bold and vibrant and full of the sense of reality.  And relationships between each character influence their relationships with others. When Angua and Carrot are in Vimes' room, their conversation is with each other, but it's shadowed by how they feel about Vimes. The level of depth you get from that is just outstanding.

Of course, a lot of people love The Goblin Emperor. Why? One person talked about enjoying Maia's struggle with his court and fitting in and trying to make it better. They were, by my lights, talking about enjoying the relationship between Maia and the entity of the entire court. I didn't get it but to me, that's a perfectly sensible relationship to love. It's why I said actors. The relationship between a character and the organisation they're part of, the city they're in, the culture they're from, it all makes sense. It's all important. In Men At Arms, how Carrot relates to the city of Ankh-Morpork is a big part of who he is. In Line of Duty, how Arnott feels about the police and its mission is huge. In Dragonlance, Tanis' identity as only half-elven in an elven nation is a vital part of his motivation. And so on. I think people will say this all fits under character and they're right to a point, but it is such a crucial and important part that to a certain extent, it's like trying to fit two big people under a small umbrella. It can work but life is happier for a degree of separation.

Plus, of course, these links can be between organisations. The Houses' beefs in Song of Ice and Fire, the web of interactions in Harry Potter - between houses, between Ministry and Hogwarts, and so on. These are in worldbuilding but I see no reason why the theory on how it works is any different. That's part of why talking about relationships as it is own thing matters.

What should be the theory? Honestly, I've no idea, and I'd love it if people read this and said "Oh yes, this is a thing dumb-dumb, here it is". However, if I had to come up with something off the top of my head.

1) Most great dramatic relationships are built on having ready points of conflict and potential grounds of shared interest; obviously enemies/best friends/lovers might be different in terms of tilting hard towards one or the other, but even then there's usually a bit of both. Accounting for this when making characters is wise.

2) It is easier to start assigning relationships for main characters if they're larger than life and will always be more X than people on some end of the spectrum; honour with Ned Stark and Jon Snow, cynical rage with Sam Vimes, cunning with Locke Lamora, etc.etc. Because everybody will deal differently with that X, you start getting depth on it. Not the only way to do it but it works. It doesn't have to be extreme either, just more or less than the other main cast members work. Han Solo is memorable because he bogarts all the lines about looking out for themselves in Star Wars, despite not being completely mercenary throughout the whole series.

3) Relationships between A and B can add text to A and C. The Angua and Carrot in Vimes' room example I used is a good one but, oh, think about the way Harry Potter's and Snape's relationship is shaped by their relationship with Potter's parents. Which is incidentally a good way of showing that despite multiple PoVs making this easier, it's not necessary. 

I guess ultimately it's about building the characters, and their environment, to interact with each other. Then making sure they do and are changed by it, rather than saying their lines and going home for the night. And then making sure those changes flow out and come back in. And then do it over and over, because some relationships just work but if you've got enough good ones, failing to hit a reader on one doesn't matter that much. 

To go back to The Goblin Emperor, there is a book where if you don't whole-heartedly love Maia for who he is and his struggle with the whole court, the book's basically not going to work. It's all or nothing. It doesn't have to be that way, even in books so tightly focused on one character; when the Dresden Files get going, Harry's got a lot of really close people to bounce off. Not fond of Harry's relationship with Murphy? Then maybe you'll enjoy the way he snarls at his antagonists like Marcone and Nicodemus. Or bonds with the super wholesome Michael. Or look at The Wounded Kingdoms or The Warlord Trilogy. Similar things.

This sounds super simple and obvious but it seems to go missing often enough for me. Some of that's people trying other things. Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence isn't going to have that multi-faceted depth of multiple character relationships when over half the book is just two characters alone. Fair enough. But some of it feels like misses, or people not considering it. I think The Goblin Emperor falls into the former but I wonder. Obviously taste comes into it but not always. It's pretty hard to claim, for instance, that Feist built in as much conflict into his character relationships as Jordan or Pratchett did, and it's part of why the latter two would be considered to have deeper characters.

One final point. Whenever writers talk about characters, talking about this aspect of personality or that flaw or whatever, I think there's a tiny misleading thread to it. That's because, what the character is in the writer's mind, on the page they are simply a set of descriptions, actions, monologues and dialogues, with whatever else the reader's mind adds from context or their own imagination on top. Anything that is not shown through that doesn't exist. Anything that can't be shown through that doesn't exist. 

And those descriptions will be told mostly through the eyes of other characters, and their actions will be mostly in opposition to other characters, and the dialogues will be with other characters unless they're batshit crazy. In short, a character without meaningful relationships to other characters (and other big things) is probably a boring one. The personalities we give them is the seed of all that, but maybe we should talk about the tree from time to time as well.