Creating a Likeable Team Versus a Cast of Suspects

Lately Ms. Lee and I have been talking a lot about our characters and how we want our readers to respond to them. I’m a romance reader, so of course I want to love and root for the featured couple. However, I also have a penchant for a likeable ensemble à la the Hidden Legacy or the Black Dagger Brotherhood series. I enjoy seeing the main couple engage with a loyal group of friends and family, and I like it best when the friends and family add interesting perspectives, elements of humor, or their own drama to the larger story. Better still if the members of the loyal crew eventually get their own turn at finding love, hopefully in a future installment of the series.

We’re writing a hidden world romance/mystery mash-up. The romantic couple exists within a larger family and a magical community. We love our supporting characters–we even discussed writing spin-off stories about some of them–so, of course, we want our readers to be invested, not only in the couple, but also in their friends and allies.

However, we also want to write a compelling mystery, which means there has to be a villain, and for the villain to not be obvious, even the good guys will need to have secrets, questionable motives, and suspicious actions. Finding the right balance between creating a likeable team versus a believable cast of suspects has been a challenge for us.

For instance, we recently made significant revisions to a scene in which a number of our characters received news of a murder. In our initial draft, we leaned into opportunities that created suspicion around each of our characters. However, in rereading the scene, we realized we were too heavy handed in our approach. A lot of the characters we want to revisit in the future came across as insensitive or unlikeable because we were forcing them to assume a role that didn’t feel authentic. We were trying too hard to leave things open for mal intent instead of letting moments of suspicion unfold naturally.

One strategy we plan to employ is giving each character a secret. Our good guys will have something benign that they don’t wish to reveal, and this hesitance can create space for suspicion. Even so, managing this balance is turning out to be one of the biggest challenges of our genre mash-up. We haven’t yet resolved it, but we’ve identified it as something we need to be cognizant of and consistently work on. When we do later revisions, we’ll definitely have to do a revision focused primarily on this issue.

Photo credit: karosieben at pixabay.com