How often should you use walk on and characters that just are moving the story forward?

Never, really. Or it depends on what you mean by "moving the story forward."

I am writing a scene with a character that has to prove she is lethal. In a movie, we would use a walk-on, unrelated to the main plot of the story, to prove this trait: She would kill somebody, as part of an unexplained job, or a man that thought to mug her, or a cop that tried to stop her. These are "walk-ons" but in the story they must have a reason to be there, she must have a reason to encounter them, one that is within her character thus far: She can't be a businesswoman for 20 minutes, and suddenly get the urge to explore the alley behind a strip club. But if she is a cynical cop for 20 minutes, and hears something odd in the alley, she might find two guys harassing a stripper that is fighting them off, and without a word shoot and kill them both, tell the stripper "Be more careful, honey," then just walk away.

So in that sense, all the time. But that is character building, I'm not sure what you mean by moving the STORY forward.

If you mean you wrote yourself into a corner and introduce a walk-on that solves that problem, that is crap writing. Heroes must solve their OWN problems with brains, guts, or sacrifice. Never SOLVE a problem with a walk-on. You can use them to CREATE problems: Bob can't get to Celia because some jerk cabbie is double-parked and he can't get by.

You can have them killed (to prove something or somebody is lethal), many an "assassin" movie starts that way, or "ruthless criminals" movie. You can have them in the way or impeding the hero, the cheerful tow truck driver towing his car.

You can use them as examples: Like wow, this war is really lethal, that villain is really ruthless, or that woman is crazy attractive: That great looking guy just walked into the back of a cop for watching her go by.

If you need walk-ons to solve the heroes problems, you have fallen into the trap of creating difficult problems for the drama when you have no idea how to solve them, and THEN the walk-ons are a deus ex machina, and completely unsatisfying to the audience. Tone down the problems, build in an escape hatch from earlier in the story (weave it into the earlier story if necessary), or make your characters smarter.

Added due to OP comment:

In general your hero has an over-arching problem to solve; and between him and the solution should be some kind of opposition. If that is some natural disaster, your problems may be all incidental and walk-ons conquered one by one (escalating, probably). For example, a family trying to escape Los Angeles when the San Andreas fault ruptures, and continuous earthquakes break California off into the sea. They face an escalating series of threats, by 'walk-ons', the villain is the earthquakes and raging nature. Their obstacles are gang members and many other walk-ons, until they finally set foot on dry land.

However, if the over-arching problem is really some evil commander putting things in their path: A corrupt politician trying to thwart reporters on a story that could unseat him: The link must be established early to make the defeat of the super villain a satisfying end, and the obstacles must be escalating in severity (because that is the human nature of super villains, they throw harder and harder and harder until they are throwing everything). You can't have the story wind up as "Okay, you win, Dr. No really did not want you to find this out and that is why he broke your can opener, knocked your mail box over, and flattened your tire. But I guess you did find out..."

It is anti-climatic. You need a pattern of escalation. Escalating stakes, escalating risk, and perhaps escalating reward. The final escape from LA is Jill hanging by one foot tangled in a rope beneath a faltering helicopter, holding her screaming baby by one arm, while they fly into the worst rain storm in history between bolts of continuous lightning. Not Jill bicycling across a bridge with her baby in a front pack.

posted over 6 years ago

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Amadeus‭

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