I'm enjoying this so far, but like everyone else am still having some difficulty with the who's-who game. Three observations:
1. I wonder if it's not so much that Ian and Bo have been characterized more clearly than the others than it is that your audience instantly recognizes them. It may be a little of both, but once the Sam-Ian BossBoss-Bo connections are made, a whole lot of other things are inferred about those characters just because they are people we are already familiar with. Is it wrong that I'm thinking of this kind of like a RP fanfic about your life? That I already knew Ian was accident prone before it was called out as a character point? I guess the broader question is: who is your target audience for this piece? For this story in particular, a non-Cafe audience will have a very different experience.
2. The time with Sarah at the front with Ian waiting for interns helped her stand out as an individual to me. I now connect her with a position in the company, a set of skills, and the inklings of a personality outside the broader group. Is there any possibility of introducing some of these characters more slowly from the get-go? Maybe two or three were not at the Charity event for various reasons? Holidays/sick time/client functions/etc. I find any time I'm introduced to more than three or four new characters at a time I tend to lose them in the din.
3. While it is absolutely the case that people who spend a lot of time together (ie: work together) start to sound like each other (evoke each other's speaking patterns, senses of humour, etc.) I'm finding that a barrier to connecting with the individual characters. I'm struggling to figure out who is a main character and who is a secondary character, or whether or not this is meant to be a true ensemble piece, and this is partly because of the rapid-fire dialogue from multiple sources that all sounds the same. Again, this has a lot to do with the who's-who game as well.
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Date: 2010-01-16 05:08 pm (UTC)1. I wonder if it's not so much that Ian and Bo have been characterized more clearly than the others than it is that your audience instantly recognizes them. It may be a little of both, but once the Sam-Ian BossBoss-Bo connections are made, a whole lot of other things are inferred about those characters just because they are people we are already familiar with. Is it wrong that I'm thinking of this kind of like a RP fanfic about your life? That I already knew Ian was accident prone before it was called out as a character point? I guess the broader question is: who is your target audience for this piece? For this story in particular, a non-Cafe audience will have a very different experience.
2. The time with Sarah at the front with Ian waiting for interns helped her stand out as an individual to me. I now connect her with a position in the company, a set of skills, and the inklings of a personality outside the broader group. Is there any possibility of introducing some of these characters more slowly from the get-go? Maybe two or three were not at the Charity event for various reasons? Holidays/sick time/client functions/etc. I find any time I'm introduced to more than three or four new characters at a time I tend to lose them in the din.
3. While it is absolutely the case that people who spend a lot of time together (ie: work together) start to sound like each other (evoke each other's speaking patterns, senses of humour, etc.) I'm finding that a barrier to connecting with the individual characters. I'm struggling to figure out who is a main character and who is a secondary character, or whether or not this is meant to be a true ensemble piece, and this is partly because of the rapid-fire dialogue from multiple sources that all sounds the same. Again, this has a lot to do with the who's-who game as well.