(A table of contents will become available at the end of the series. Recent additions can be found in the meantime in either the posts by pear or the relationships tags. This series will remain open for additional posts and the table of contents up-to-date as new posts are added.)
Part Seven: Writing Siblings
Luckily for me, and all the stories I want to see, siblings tend to appear in stories quite a bit more than parents, but still not as often as a group of friends or acquaintances that come together to work as a team. Siblings are another tether to your character’s family–to their past and their roots, to all the secrets in their past you may have built into plot devices for later. They’re cut from the story as easy pressure points for evoking emotion; in a similar way to how significant others and date-mates may be killed off to serve the story, siblings often find themselves in a similar fate. Siblings are a fantastic resource for stories and provide an opportunity for intense relationships to your character if you bother to let them stay in the narrative.
This is one of my favorite things about sibling characters: They share a special history. If they grew up together, they have many of the same experiences: holiday traditions and family trips, opinions about a family member and all the remember-when moments. They know the tics of their parents, know what happened when a certain button got pushed one too many times. They know what each other went through, and they know each others strengths and weaknesses; they know how to support each other with that shared history. Friends can come to develop that over time, but siblings come with it inherently if they were lucky enough to grow up together.
If a character didn’t grow up with their siblings, there’s a beautiful opportunity when/if they do meet to begin building that shared history they missed out on. You get to watch as two people not only come to be friends, but also realize that their friendship could become something deeper if they wanted it to: a true family relationship. If both characters accept the family tie and are interested in pursuing a connection between them, there’s so much story depth that can be added through scenes watching them go from laughing at the same joke to realizing that losing the other would tear them apart.
Shared history also extends to family background, too, so if your main character discovers something about their lineage, their sibling is also affected. This is an important thing to remember since you can spin more complex tales using it–all of a sudden, it’s not just your character dealing with the discovery, it’s also the sibling, and it’s not just how your character’s relationship to their family changes, but also how their relationship with their sibling changes, too. Your plot devices like prophecies and chosen heroes and go-it-alone-only-you-can quests and no-one-understands-the-struggle dilemmas all of a sudden get a lot more interesting, much more faceted, and provide lots of nooks and crannies of emotion and character development to explore.
Relationship with their sibling:
We know that siblings share a connection deeper than just friendship–they’re family. Portraying that part of their relationship to your character is vital to making them feel right and real. There are a couple of things you can use to help get that across.
Using that shared history is going to help no matter what. Your siblings are going to be able to reach each other easier because they can bring up things they both experienced and relate those emotions back to what they’re going through currently. They’re more likely to be able to coach each other through situations and more likely to have things to say or remember that are poignant, relevant, or impactful in some way for your character. Because of this, an added side effect is that emotional reactions that are instinctual when it comes to other people may not be the same toward a sibling. For example, an acquaintance may say something that sends your character into a rage, however if a sibling had said something similar, it might have been funny instead. Our relationships with others slowly change our emotional reactions the more familiar and comfortable we become.
Take into consideration personality, as well. Do these siblings get along with each other? What contributed to that? My family moved a lot, so my sister and I wound up very close because we were our only constants in our lives; we knew we’d both be there to face new places, and we lived in cars and hotels together for weeks at a time, so we had to get along or we’d kill each other. It helped that we liked a lot of the same things, some of which were shared by our parents as well. Remember that while you want to have well-rounded characters that are capable of standing on their own as full individuals, it doesn’t mean that your siblings have to embody completely separate, opposite personalities in order to be effective characters. Maybe they’re both quiet and smart, which allows them to ping ideas off each other and solve super complex problems; maybe they’re both defensive and it causes them to butt heads because of it. Don’t lock yourself into the idea that they need to be juxtaposed against each other to create interesting dynamics between them.
Your siblings will provide an opportunity to portray a relationship full of familial love–just as deep as romantic love, but without any pressure from readers for it to get sexual. (And if you were planning that really common foster sibling or separated sibling love relationship, please don’t. It’s very awkward for literally everyone involved and there are 1,000 more conflict and emotional growth opportunities out there than that. Ugh.) That positive portrayal will go a long way toward not only reestablishing siblings in literature but also showing real-world siblings a reflection of themselves.
Think about your plot and whether their sibling status has any kind of impact toward the plot or whether it’s simply a minor detail. How will your siblings’ connection change how they react to certain situations by shading their goals? What are those goals for each sibling and are there ways they connect and interact? There should be some that each sibling doesn’t share–goals that are specific to each individual as a person, not solely joint goals as a functioning unit together. After all, these are not one person, but two people who care about each other. How can those goals feed into your plot or into the character development of either and serve to escalate or resolve other conflicts?
Do they like to stay in communication with each other? Is their communication mostly long-distance, or face-to-face? How often do they see each other? What are a couple of key memories and the emotional reactions that go with them? How do their personalities interact and how can you take advantage of that with the plot? Would manipulation of one bring out the best or worst in the other? What would happen to your character’s mental state if one of their siblings was to be put in danger or injured? How protective are they of each other, and how much would one sacrifice for the other? How well do they handle being apart, and how much do they respect each other’s space when it’s self-initiated vs. circumstance-initiated?
Next up: Immediate extended family!
kianamaiart
germansingergirl
baratheonpilled
discoholicmusic
gracieabrams
izzy806
theartofmadeline
