Writing the Party of Four

What do Dimitri Karamazov, Meg March, Alvin the Chipmunk, and the Cowardly Lion have in common, and how can they make your novel better?

The mightiest epiphany I’ve ever had as a writer shook me when I was standing in front of a group of high schoolers, lecturing on The Brothers Karamazov. Now, this novel can be a hard read for teenagers. It wanders a lot, it suffers from an abundance of elderly monks, and the women are all sad. Actually, everybody’s sad, or about to be sad. Here and there a chapter will emerge to captivate my students, but monastic life in 19th century Russia isn’t the most relatable milieu, and Fyodor Karamazov is so unpleasant you just want to murder him yourself.

Of course, I love this novel. I’m a sucker for big messy classics, but kids have to be suckered into digging through all the layers. So I focus on the brothers themselves, the four children of the main monster. Dimitri is a soldier: lusty, physical, a little bit dumb, but passionate and loyal. Ivan is a scholar: intellectual, mad, full of hypothetical digressions, cold and analytical. Alyosha is a priest: a novice monk who cries over sick children, worries a lot, cares for people, and wants to be good. Then there’s Smerdyakov: only a half brother, a snarky chef, raised by the servants, bitter and sly. Finding their relationships to each other and to the world helps map the novel’s themes.

My students wrote a Buzzfeed quiz: Which Karamazov Brother Are You? Then they drew the four brothers as Marvel characters. We sorted the brothers into Hogwarts houses. Dmitri is Gryffindor, Ivan is Ravenclaw, Alyosha is Hufflepuff, and Smerdyakov is Slytherin. Then we sorted them by Dungeons & Dragons classes: Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Rogue. That was easy as well. Wait, maybe that was too easy. I stood at a white board, with a squeaky marker in one hand, and a pack of high schoolers looking at me expectantly, and I had this revelation: These brothers’ birth order aligns with their Hogwarts Houses and their Dungeons & Dragons classes, like, exactly.

Immediately I thought about another book with four siblings: Little Women. Why did I think of it at that moment? Well, in this novel, Meg is the firstborn brave pioneer who ventures first into marriage and employment (Fighter! Gryffindor!). Jo is the thinker, the writer, the bookworm (Wizard! Ravenclaw!). Beth is a healer, who cares for the poor neighbors, and holds the family together (Cleric! Hufflepuff!). Amy is the naughty one, making questionable moral choices and getting into trouble (Rogue! Slytherin!).

Hold on a minute there, I thought. Maybe Dostoevsky read Little Women and Gary Gygax read Dostoevsky, but these foursomes are really multiplying. I forgot my lecture notes. I remembered the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And before long my students and I had a chart on the board and we were mapping out Leonardo, Donatello. Michelangelo, Raphael. Fred, Velma, Daphne, Shaggy. Paul, John, George, Ringo. This was some basic, fundamental, what-does-it--mean-to-be-human stuff unfolding. Archetypes. Essences. Identities. Four of them.

I knew what to call the first three. The first three are as old as philosophy and religion itself. But the fourth one? Well. That’s the real puzzle.

For the first three archetypes, let’s go all the way back to Aristotle and Plato, where without getting too deep into nested hierarchies of identity, we find a simple triangle, with body, mind, and spirit at each point. This tracks with the rhetorical triangle of speaker, text, and audience, along with other triangles like morality, logic, and belief, and so on. Philosophers and writers love a triangle! A triangle is stable and strong, and as humans we find them a natural way of ordering things, both in religion (father, son, spirit) and psychology (id, ego, superego) and politics (executive, legislative, judicial).

But as storytellers, what do we know about stable, functional systems? They don’t make good plots! A story where everyone gets along and all bases are covered and the long road to confront the villain is peppered with agreeable conversations is boring! Imagine the first three March sisters without naughty Amy. Imagine the first three brothers Karamazov without the suspicious Smerdyakov. Fred, Velma, and Daphne without Shaggy to get lost looking for snacks, or open the wrong door.

Now, pardon me while I get nerdy on you. But the original three classes in Dungeons & Dragons were Fighter, Mage, and Cleric. They mapped exactly to Aristotle’s triangle: Body, Mind, Spirit. Characters could be a Soldier/Leader, a Scholar/Writer, or a Healer/Priest. Players would build balanced adventuring parties so that each of these classes was present. With a beefy hero, a brainy wizard, and a nice guy to pray for healing, you could fight hard, control the battlefield, and keep the party alive. But within a year of D&D’s release, a supplement was added, introducing the rogue class. That slippery fourth element in any party (or ensemble cast or rock ‘n’ roll band or magical wizarding school or clutch of siblings) makes things interesting.

To write a good ensemble drama, a team of three is not enough. You need the rogue to make it go. And here’s a very important fact to remember: The rogue is not the enemy. They are not the antagonist, or even an obstacle to be overcome. The rogue is one of the party.

In fact, the rogue is a necessary instigator, the stone in the story’s shoe that provokes conflict and defines the team’s character. It is, after all, Smerdyakov that kills the patriarch, Fyodor Karamazov. (Sorry, I have no spoiler alert for you, as it’s 140 years old!) It is Amy March that burns Jo’s manuscripts to foment her sister’s bitterness, and then falls into the ice to bring them back together. It is Severus Snape, the ultimate Slytherin, who kills Dumbledore and saves Harry Potter again and again. While the fighter is usually the hero, the mage gets credit for all the thinking, and the cleric is the emotional favorite, it’s the rogue who drives the story forward. Without them, things stay tidy and defined instead of exciting, tragic, hilarious, wild.

Is your story stuck? Get yourself a rogue to catalyze the action. Not a villain. A rogue.

Consider another foursome: The Lion, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy, from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It’s easy to map the trio of creatures that Dorothy meets to mind, body, and spirit. The lion is the body, or the fighter. What he wants from the wizard is courage. The scarecrow is the mind, or the mage. He wants a brain. The Tin Man is the spirit, or the cleric. What he wants from the wizard is a heart. With just that trio, all elements in balance, there is no story. They’re in stasis, each stuck in their fragmented identity. It’s when Dorothy comes along with her ignorance of the rules, her immediate murder of one of the witches, and her urgent goal, that the story kicks into gear. Now, Dorothy doesn’t seem like a Slytherin to us, because she’s a sweet young girl in a gingham dress whose only desire is to go home. But functionally and literally, Dorothy is an outsider. She’s the odd man out that brings the party together, that element of otherness that makes the group click.

The instigator. The catalyst. The disruptor. The agitator. If the other three archetypes represent aspects of the human identity, what exactly do we call that fourth thing? It can’t be mapped onto the triangle that illustrates body, mind, and spirit. So where, exactly, does this fourth element exist? Behind, above, beyond? Inside the triangle or outside? Does it form a pyramid? What aspect of the human identity does this fourth element represent? What else is there in us besides body, mind, and spirit? Maybe it’s will, or chaos, or becoming, or death. Whatever it is, it must be in there, because this character type is so present and important when we humans tell stories. My current hypothesis? It’s truth. Your guess? That’s your novel to write.

These four-person parties are formed in literature across genre, media, and centuries. Not all stories have them, of course, but have you begun to think of other examples of these archetypes in your own reading or viewing (Star Trek? South Park? The Golden Girls?) —or even your own writing? If you dare to cook up a foursome like this for your novel, it might almost feel like cheating, or fill-in-the-blanks. Maybe you’re thinking that your novel will be too derivative if you follow these strategies for rounding out your cast. But just like the hero’s journey, the four-person party is timeless, not trendy. Take a chance on mapping out your characters this way, and see what develops.

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