Point #3: The Care Package

Want to know something interesting?

Your protagonist has a past long before your book started. Even if you haven’t thought of it yet, or even if it doesn’t matter to the overall plot, your character has a past. And in that past is something important to that character. So, we come to the Care Package.

The Care Package is a specific point that comes from James Scott Bell’s Superstructure Narrative Structure (that is a mouthful), and is basically this: your character had a special connection before the story began, a connection that tugs on the reader’s heartstrings, and shows some of the character’s personality and flaws. In other words, it is a package the character cares about, and that you as a writer can use to illustrate different parts of your character.

The theory behind the Care Package is that it gives your character someone or something to care for which allows you to humanise the character by garnering sympathy for them (e.g. of course he loves his mother, who doesn’t?). The relationship is something that has started before the book starts, which is why I used a mother as the example.

The reason why it’s effective in garnering sympathy is because it makes the character feel less selfish and less self-involved. Think about a character like Cersei Lannister. She is a terrible human being, but the one thing that always grounded her, that made people even respect her, was that everything she did, she did for her kids. It is something that any person – and especially any mother – can understand. Does it make her a good person? No. But then, she doesn’t need to be good, only understandable. Only sympathetic.

With that, there are two things I’d like you to do. The first is the point of this post, and the second is optional if you feel like brainstorming. The first thing, the point of this Point, is that I want you to write down who your character’s care package is. I then want you to answer these questions:

• Who are they to the main character?
• Why are they important to the main character?
• How do they link to the character’s flaw?
• When and where will we meet them in the story?
• What role do they play in the story?

That’s the first part. Understand who this care package is and how they fit into the grander story, both for your character’s arc and the narrative as a whole.

The second part of this activity is entirely optional, but if you’re up for it, you should maybe note other important people to your character. Unless they are a loner – and even then – people are rarely alone. They have someone in their lives, even if they don’t like those people. They have parents, friends, siblings, cousins, teachers, mentors, and even enemies. If you’re up for it, I’d urge you to think about who these people are, and if they play a role in your story, or in how your character sees themselves.

Finally, it should be noted that there are no set rules in crafting a story, so if you want to experiment, you can make your care package a location or an object. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a person. It can be something inanimate, even if that inanimate thing is linked to a person.

And that’s that.

Thanks for participating, fellow writers.

And always remember, every great story started with just one line.

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Thanks for Reading, Fellow Writers!

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If you want to find other points of this narrative structure as I write them, just click here.