Does my frenemy have to remain the same individual throughout my entire novel? Currently, I have the same frenemy throughout the first half of my plotline, but then she dies and I had planned to have a series of frenemies as my character moves around the foster care system… can this work? Or do I need to have a consistent frenemy all the way through?
Thanks!
That’s a really good question, Jaela.
Typically, the “Guide” is the only character that we really give permission to be a relay character–one Guide can go away and then pass the baton to the new guy.
You can get away with it with some of the other character archetypes. Unfortunately, the “Frenemy” is the one character type for which it really doesn’t work.
The reason is that in order to be a Frenemy, we need lots of exposure to the character. In order to show the nature of the character, we need to see them several times–times that they help, and times that they hurt. It takes a lot of building just to show the reader who the character is for just one Frenemy.
It would be very challenging to do that multiple times in the course of novel-length work. So much of your word count would have to be used to establish the frenemies.
For those reasons, I recommend that you have one established Frenemy throughout the manuscript. This character can die, but only after they’ve served their function.
That could work. There’s no hard rule.
Can their function be fulfilled only halfway through the plot or is that too soon?