In the simplest stories, circles are generally invisible, largely because they're usually only one, so it's no surprise that they generally go unnoticed as an important piece of story design.
In simplest terms, a character circle is a complete unit of colleagues or directly associated characters. Hero, love interest, villain is your classic case of a character circle. All the characters have direct ties to each other by way of the plot and a large portion of their interactions are shared among most or all of the characters in the circle.
The hero courts the love interest, the villain taunts the hero, the villain threatens the love interest, who taunts back, and the circle continues. By and large, they focus on each other, like a close group of friends or a set of coworkers.
Your average author will stop there.
A large number of stories can be told with a single circle and a few floating outliers hanging on here and there. That said, adding additional circles to any story adds a layer of depth and completeness that can otherwise leave a story feeling flat and overdone.
Think about real life: you have your family, your friends and your coworkers, for starters. Within each of those groups are different levels of granularity: you have your immediate family, and then the larger family with uncles, aunts, cousins and grand-things. You have your friends from college, your friends you met online, maybe even your neighbors. Then there's your current coworkers, the guys you still talk to from your last job, and your guild on WoW.
Think about all the people in those circles. Each subcircle itself can make up a full story without any real interference from the others. But that doesn't mean the others don't have a place in the same arc.
When it comes to translating this to your characters, there are a lot of advantages to including multiple circles. For one, you can include perspectives and styles that don't otherwise fit in your world as it stands. For instance, if a character's work life or love life is in jeopardy and thus high-drama and serious, you can use their online friends or oblivious family to add a bit of levity (and possibly some caustic insight) to their otherwise-dour situation.
In addition, multiple circles can let you include more necessary characters without stretching the boundaries of realism for your audience. If all your characters form one massive circle around your main hero like spokes on a wheel, your hero becomes almost too popular to be attainable. It's the perfect time to pinch off parts of the circle and turn your hero into the onlooker for a change.
Remember that your ancillary characters are heroes in their own right: they have their own friends, their own families, their own circles. If all we ever see is them interacting with the main character, it's difficult for the story not to feel repetitive (and your hero quickly becomes a prime Mary Sue candidate).
Sometimes the circles will be completely independent and operate with no knowledge of each other, all connecting to the hero in a sort of narrow Venn diagram model. For an added layer of complexity, however, I recommend letting the circles intersect: introduce them independently, and then bring them together to help illustrate that the story, that your world, doesn't all revolve around one person.
A great way to do it is with friends and coworkers. On the surface, these two groups have the most in common, and yet some very key distinctions that can create delightful tension and humor in any story. Coworkers won't likely know as many intimate details about a hero, while friends won't get the chance to see the hero really shine in their day job.
Bring the two together, and both sides have the opportunity to gain some perspective on the hero, as well as meshing together to form a sort of friendly enemy for the same. If the hero has a crush on a coworker, bringing him or her into view of the hero's friends can lead to all manner of delightful awkwardness, not to mention the well-meaning scheming of the hero's matchmaking friends.
Similarly, if the hero in an adventure gets captured, the love interest can go to his family and convince them to "come out of retirement" to help break their son/daughter out of this predicament.
Blending circles without the direct involvement of the main character lets you highlight the heroic qualities of your ancillary characters, and often helps prevent any of them from catching the sidekick label dead in the face.
The trick, of course, is managing all these circles. A sheer volume of characters is already a tough assignment, although most of us wind up making more than we ever intended to quite by accident. To help navigate the circles of characters and prevent one large pile-on, so to speak, just remember to treat each character as their own person.
And part of being your own person is being part of a circle yourself.
Each secondary character (or at least the ones you like) will have their own circle. Not all of their circles will matter (just as not every hero's family necessarily features in the story), but they're all there. You don't have to outline the membership, but outline the different circles by rough definition, and you'll quickly find common veins to link that secondary character with other secondary characters for a feeling of a larger, connected world.
It may be best to think of the circles as characters themselves. Meta-characters. A group of coworkers has their own collective bent, just like a given family has its quirks and lovable qualities. For circles you don't intend to spend as much time on, you can save yourself a good bit of effort by using its members to symbolize given personality traits of a single, larger character. It's important to avoid stereotyping, but if all we see of a given group is the occasional brief dialog, there's no problem with archetyping.
One of the other unsung advantages to having multiple character circles is that your secondary characters can quickly become as popular or more popular than your mains. Within their own circles (or by combining character circles together), you can give any particular secondary character their moment in the sun as a hero.
Don't think small. If a character's boss suddenly has a "moment of bad-ass" and saves the company, they quickly become beloved, even if the story doesn't center around the hero's place of business. If one of the hero's friends finally gets the guts to ask out another of their friends, you wind up with a wonderful romance that you can freely view from the outside (where most relationships are adorable) without having to delve into the individual characters' deepest feelings for each other.
When you create these secondary heroes, you wind up with a great opportunity: creating a story not about a person, but about people, about friends and family and loyalty and cherishing each other, something that can be difficult if it's all about how one hero saves everyone all the time.
When the story isn't just about the hero, it also becomes easier for all of us to relate, sitting on the edge of our own little circles in a sea of other people's circles that we just happen to be in. While they may be a little work to maintain, character circles always add a feeling of depth, realism and belonging to nearly any story.
And that can be a major plus.
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