How to Gather Characters

How-To Guide

Okay, you know how many characters you want in your cast, what roles they'll play, and even picked out a color scheme for each! But how do you gather them into a cast? Here's a few ways writers use to bring together their diverse cast:

• Avengers Assemble: The lead has a mission, and purposely goes about assembling a team to get it done.
  • Seen in: Ocean's Eleven and Mass Effect 2.
• Daring Rescue: The hero gets The Call when a Pursued Protagonist and/or Damsel in Distress crashes into their life and asks for help. This method tends to combine well with the others listed here, with the Pursued Protagonist crashing into a classroom, or The Hero using Avengers Assemble to gather a rescue party.
  • Seen in: Star Wars: A New Hope and Sorcerer's Kingdom.
• Debut Queue: Each character is met and run into separately and consecutively in the Magnetic Hero's Journey. Sometimes each new character brings more into the fray because it's a Character-Magnetic Team, leading to a Cast of Snowflakes. Sometimes it happens because Defeat Means Friendship as the hero is just that sympathetic.
  • Seen in: Krull, Seven Samurai, Dragon Ball.
• Everyone Went to School Together: The characters are all classmates, part of the same military unit, or are a family and knew each other well before the events of the story. So when one of them gets The Call, they all choose to make it a conference call. However, it's not uncommon for them all to share the same fate/destiny and get the call simultaneously, something an older character may have wanted to ensure by putting the future protagonists together for this purpose... when it isn't some vague force of fate doing it, that is.
  • Seen in: Harry Potter, Naruto, Final Fantasy VIII sort of.
• Geographical Convenience: All the cast meets in a single location, be it an inn, prison cell or a deserted island, having never seen or met each other before. Normally, they may never have chosen or considered working together, but are forced to by circumstance.
  • Seen in: Cube, The Usual Suspects, Lost.
• Welcome Episode: Sometimes the team has already been assembled by one or more of the above factors apart from one or more characters who are taken under their wing and who will probably play a crucial role in the story.
  • Seen in: Firefly, ER, Hellboy.
• Sealed Cast in a Multipack: Have the cast put itself together by finding and unsealing characters who were sealed away.

Contrast You ALL Share My Story which actually avoids this for the most part, you'll rarely see more than two POV characters meet per episode until the finale, when they tend to congregate en masse.