THE BEST CHARACTERS HAVE SOCIETIES - AND HOW TO WRITE THEM
The Societies you choose to put on the page will do tremendous work refining your character and their social world, and will help lend the fiction the vivacity of life.
Here we go, another rabbit-hole excursus into narrative structure. I can’t help it — I’m one of those people that when they’re learning something really needs to diagram its mechanisms. Not necessarily because I believe that schemas will ever explain the entirety of the narrative element but because isolating its aspects makes it easier for me to grasp and replicate more easily what it is that bedevils me.
As we’ve seen, Community can appear in our stories through any number of strategies.
And yet like many other narrative elements, Community often best communicates itself through Character. No surprise, really. We’re designed to connect to people better than we are to abstraction or exposition. Talk to me about a community for hours and I still won’t remember or feel it with the same force as meeting and spending time with a representative member of said community.
But if a described Community is rarely as convincing (or memorable) as encharactered Community, encharactered Community is rarely as convincing (or memorable) as dramatized encharactered Community — i.e. when you embroil representative members of a community into a dramatic scene.
In other words, “My uncle is a stubborn dictator-addled campesino” ain’t as strong as “Please meet my stubborn dictator-addled campesino uncle” which ain’t as strong as “You and me and some of our colleagues are at a gopchang restaurant with my stubborn dictator-addled campesino uncle, who wants to convince us to join him in a heist.”
In other words: Community is good, but Community dramatized through Community scenes is better. (Though if you’re writing certain kinds of stories or a shorter work you won’t always have need or room for these.)
There are plenty of Community scenes worth exploring and including in our repertoire — for example: the classic protagonist arguing values / ethics with a representative community member or two. Or the "relative disapproves" scene (check out all those mother-daughter moments in Everything Everywhere All At Once) — or party scenes that end in conflict or an unsettled awareness.
All, and more, will serve you in good stead.
But there’s one variety of Community scene that’s especially useful at conveying Community big-pan style, a type of Community scene that I myself have been trying to become fluent in — and that’s the Society Scene.