Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

In 2023 YeahWrite’s free workshop is going back to the basics with a focus on tropes, the sometimes imperceptible and often underrated building blocks of writing. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

Can you relate?

We’ve identified some tropes. We’ve talked about how you can make a story with them. But what about characters?

HUGE caveat: your characters shouldn’t be made up of unexamined tropes, you ARE going to hit -ism and -phobia bingo if you do that. The good news is, that’s not actually what we’re talking about this month. Partly because there’s miles and miles of information on the ‘net about it, and partially because it’s not what gets our amazing guest for this month’s meeting excited.

Instead, we’re going to talk about the tropes of relationships. Whether your characters are Undercover Lovers or just about to be mistaken for a couple after registering for one room at a hotel because their government agency is underfunded, tropes can give us valuable ways to describe how characters relate to each other. By using these tropes as a checklist you can also see if you’re retreading a well worn path (not that there’s anything wrong with that, usually!) or if you need to lampshade a signpost on that path while on the way to somewhere else.

Friends to Enemies to Friends Again?

Let’s say you have two characters. I mean, hopefully you have more than that, but let’s start with two, because the web will become almost impossibly complicated. There are only so many ways they can relate to each other. For purposes of this explanation, I am using “couple” as an involved, committed, romantic or sexual relationship. I’m aware that this is erasing asexual and aromantic relationships, so I want to highlight those for a second – they’re not less valid or committed or emotionally entangled than sexual or romantic relationships, but I’ve also only got a couple thousand words. You should absolutely go look ace and aro relationships up (if you aren’t already aware of how they work) and include those in your work, and I’m sorry in advance for oversimplifying this. Poly folks, relax for a second because you show up in the next iteration of this list – since we only literally have two characters here, we don’t need to get there at this point.

1. a couple
2. family
3. acquaintances
4. strangers

That’s pretty much it. Those are the main, general ways that people relate to each other. Now within those lines, you can break it down further:

• a couple
  • monogamous
    • married
    • not married
  • open relationship (married or not)
  • poly and looking for more
  • poly and not looking for more
• family
  • blood relatives
    • parent and child
    • grandparent and grandchild
    • siblings
    • cousins
    • etc.
  • found family
    • parent and child
    • grandparent and grandchild
    • siblings
    • cousins
    • etc.
  • don’t know they’re related (yet?)
• acquaintances
  • from work
  • someone you see frequently (store, bus stop, hobby, events)
  • friends
    • SO MANY SUBCATEGORIES HERE
  • enemies
    • AGAIN, SO MANY KINDS
  • someone who you’ve never seen but corresponded with etc.
  • friend of a friend
• strangers
  • know each other by sight
  • don’t know each other by sight

And the tree just keeps growing and growing. And not only can tropes help you decide on and describe the relationships between characters, they can help you work out how those relationships evolve given situational changes (anyone for Oh my God, They Were Roommates? How about There Was Only One Bed?). They can even suggest what situational changes you need to make or what responses a character should have to those changes depending on what you need the reader to learn about them.

Once you throw in a third character, who has to relate to each of these first two, and then a fourth and a fifth and, well, a whole fellowship? Stuff gets complicated. But tropes can get you started.

With these frameworks in mind, let’s look at some relationships and what tropes they support (and what the author brings to them that’s unique to the story). There will be a LOT of links here, but if you don’t have the time or energy to deep dive, this explanation should be enough. If you do want to deep dive, well, the resources are right there, good luck, and set a timer before you open TVTropes.

First, we’ll pick an easy one from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, since it’s wildly popular and very well known: Captain America and Iron Man. Or Steve Rogers and Tony Stark. (Yes, shippers, Stony will be mentioned, you are welcome.)

Outside a very VERY brief window in time, Steve and Tony are acquaintances. They meet through work, they have to be together because of work, they are coworkers who know each other. You can find that on the relationships tree, right? right. At the start of that relationship their two larger than life and uncompromising personalities lend themselves very well to being basically antagonists despite being on the same team. But the writers know that Steve and Tony need to end up being friends, so they worked in “and yet, the team goal is more important to each character than personal feelings” into those personalities. This sets up a lot of opportunities for grudging respect, spirited competition, and a worthy opponent dynamic that’s interesting because it doesn’t usually come from within the same team. Eventually, they end up in a friendship that would have surprised either character earlier. The writers’ ultimate goal of having them be on a functioning team works out, because the tropes they leaned into were played as opportunities for viewers AND the characters to get to know the positives and negatives of each. While they didn’t quite get to “there was only one bed” they did have Steve and Tony effectively living together. And there is only one team (until Civil War, but obviously they were going to be a team again). By using plot reasons to keep the characters in the same place at the same time, the writers made it reasonable and in-character that they’d come to some sort of accommodation. Annnnnd then Endgame happened. But, uh, it’s the MCU so don’t worry I guess? Anyway.

Other places this could have gone, of course, depend on other relationship tropes. There are tons and tons of basically prewritten modules that could have taken Steve and Tony from acquaintances to enemies (Civil War, did I mention Civil War), or from friends to lovers (there you go, Stony folks). But the real treasure was the banter we found along the way. That’s what makes the story uniquely Steve and Tony: the way their personalities and backgrounds play off each other while they get to the place the relationship is going.

Next, we’ll turn to another tried and true piece of media: Lord of the Rings. If you’re tired of LotR, offer me an equivalent piece of media in the comments and I will be THRILLED to take you up on that. But I’m not using Gimli and Legolas: I already have my Steve and Tony! Instead, we’re going to look at characters that start as family. Yes, I’m talking about Merry and Pippin.

Merry and Pippin’s familial relationship – with each other and with Frodo – provides an easy, low-backstory reason for them to join Frodo and Sam on the road. It also provides reasons for them to stay together and support each other that don’t have to be developed over the course of the story, which is good because there’s a lot of story in that story and it probably doesn’t need more story (CoughTheSilmarillionCough). Because of this “family that plays together stays together” grounding that the characters have, they’re free to do more things as individuals without the author needing to keep finding reasons why they don’t wander off entirely. If you have a character without a lot of reasons to stay in your story, you can usually do worse than making them a relative of another character.

We’ve hit acquaintances and family, what about couples?

Couple dynamics in tropes (or, partner dynamics, because relationships don’t have to be limited to two unless your worldbuilding makes it that way) can be expressed a number of ways. The couple could be coming together over the course of the story, they could be breaking apart over the course of the story, they could do both (once or many times), they could be together, or they could have already broken up and the story takes place in the aftermath of that relationship whether or not it’s about that relationship.

If you want to hit every one of these tropes and maybe a couple more with your hot dog fingers, go watch Everything Everywhere All At Once again. The ways that Evelyn and Waymond (and Dierdre) integrate or unmesh their lives depend entirely on the rest of the worldbuilding for each world. You can see a Green Eyed Epiphany, and you can see the tiny plot difference it takes to make that a Belated Epiphany. You can see Fond Memories that Could Have Been, and even an Antagonist in Mourning. It’s a great movie on its own, but it’s also a master class in overlapping tropes while being very aware that it’s delivering those tropes.

In conclusion…

If you’re not sure how to stick your characters together or how they’ll interact, think of some characters with similar attributes and think about how THEY interact with other characters. Maybe write out all your characters’ names and draw lines between them, writing their relationship arcs in just a few words on those lines. Looking up established characters who ALSO have those relationship arcs can give you ideas for how your characters will interact, what some crucial scenes to include might be, and how their relationships will play out.

THIS MONTH’S SPECIAL GUEST

After suckering Christine into a place on last month’s program (thanks again for coming after you hurt yourself!) we’re on a roll. This month we’ll be hosting Angie Bee! Besides running an AirBnB for an alarmingly large slate of mystery-themed cats, Angie has found time to write series such as Weird, USA; Sorry, We’re Dead; Hazeldine; and Sink or Swim: Tales from the Sappho (with Stephanie Rabig) as well as a host of articles and short stories. We asked for her favorite tropes, and you’ll be hearing why it’s not Kill Your Gays this month on the 7th when we sit down for a fireside chat about found families and the tropes that find their homes there!

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. The March meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 7 (Time TBA, keep an eye out here and on Discord)! Future dates and times TBD based on member availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible.

You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session. (The January meeting is free, but please use this link to RSVP!)
• $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
• $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.