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Q&A First quarter friends

As the author, you have full foresight of events to come in the plot. You know in advance which characters will be with your MC, where, why and when. If you decide to write about them it is becau...

posted 5y ago by _X_‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

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#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-18T21:34:22Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41408
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T10:37:24Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41408
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T10:37:24Z (over 4 years ago)
As the author, you have full foresight of events to come in the plot. You know in advance which characters will be with your MC, where, why and when.

If you decide to write about them it is because they have a meaning. Generally, you don't describe every single person that ever happened to be within a twenty feet radius from the MC. This is in the same way in which you don't describe every single cobblestone on which they walk. Some cobblestones are interesting, some are necessary to understand the plot, some happen to be, the rest is a uniform background.

A suggestion. As your character gets to know these characters, show his feelings towards them. Show that he thinks about them. Show the emptiness after they are not there. Compare new characters to the old ones. Or that he just, suddenly and out of nowhere, recalled that irrelevant moment in which he was with them. In other words, show the reader why they were not just background cobblestones.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-01-18T11:56:45Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 1