If I had five seconds to name my all-time favorite book series, it would undeniably be R. M. Scheller’s Extension Squad.
Weird for a horse lover, right?
Since I already did an in-depth book interview on Extension Squad (see HERE) and Scheller is going to launch book 3 this month, I decided that Miss Rachel Scheller deserved an author spotlight of her own (in short, Extension Squad is about a teen hero who is put into a death row system where convicts of murder get more time to live from doing the grunt work for the super heroes).
Rachel Scheller writer adventure books that feel like an anime adventure or a superhero movie, with elements such as “teenage heroes, parkour, sanity-challenged first responders, fair maidens saving knights in shining armor, copious amounts of prison jumpsuits, and venomous rhino-like creatures. That sort of thing.”
Clearly, there is a lot to talk about!
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About the Author
Rachel Scheller loves to tell stories through words and visual art, but she doesn’t leave all of the adventure to her characters. Her three years spent as an EMT has left her with a bounty of knowledge on character injuries and offers a realistic injury check for those who hire her as a line editor.
She currently works as the Community Manager for the online writing community the Young Writer’s Workshop, where she mentors other students and helps make sure everything runs smoothly. Her light novel series, Extension Squad, is currently available as a print-replica ebook on Amazon.
(and let me tell you guys, it’s GOOD)
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What Can We Learn?
As a writer, I firmly believe that we should learn from any author (whether we write in that genre or not) and see what we can apply to our own writing. And there is TONS to learn from Scheller’s Extension Squad books.
Who here has trouble with writing large casts of characters?
Yeah, I do too. Which is ironic considering that my most prominent WIP has two POVs and eight important side characters who stick through the whole book, AND a whole cast of smaller side characters. And that doesn’t even count the villain.
Huge cast. Lots of people to balance, more than I’ve ever had before.
And what helped me most?
Reading Extension Squad.
I’ve really got to hand it to Scheller. Her books aren’t just from Austin’s POV– you see things from Jax’s, Victor’s, Connor’s, and Deborah’s eyes too. What could be considered the “midpoint” of the first book isn’t even from Austin’s point of view– it’s from Connor’s. And the character voices in the prose don’t sound all the same either. Even with third person, you can hear every character voice distinctly– Connor for the sleazy creep he is, Austin’s puffed-up pride and self-righteousness, Deborah’s gentle demeanor and cheerful outlook, Victor for his resolve and practical thought process, and Jax for his mystery and his unusual, crusty compassion.
That’s what I learn the most from reading the books. Extension Squad books are the lighter stories I read while I’m figuring out Protectors and character dynamics, especially in a big group. Because it’s hard to keep all of those voices balanced, and keep track of a dozen characters or more.
While there are a lot of books that have a large cast, I’ve found Extension Squad to be the easiest to dissect to help me apply the same rules to my writing. Here’s three takeaways I got from reading:
- Know your limits. It’s easy to overdo it and throw twenty plus characters into a room and get all mixed up. Only have as many characters as you can handle talking at once. Most of the time, Rachel only has 5 or 6 characters talking at once, which is much easier to manage than the fifteen she may have at once in one room.
- Sharpen the character dynamics. Knowing how your characters will react with each other (and what sort of friction that will create) will make it easier to keep track of them. Sometimes things as simple as throwing the characters into a certain scenario and scribbling a quick scene is an excellent exercise in honing character dynamics.
- Nail your character voice down. A strong enough character voice will make your characters stand out even without a dialogue tag. For instance, in Extension Squad, if something rather disturbing and quite slimy is said, you can bet your cookies it’s Connor. Hear an ice pun? It’s Brandon. Haughty and unbelievably self-centered? Oh look, it’s Austin! Character voices can make dialogue tags in themselves (although sometimes with a big group, you still need to throw the names in occasionally so your readers aren’t completely lost).
It’s also interesting how much Scheller uses anti-heroes in the ES books (for those of you who don’t know, an anti-hero is someone who does the right thing for the wrong reason). Like Connor. He’s willing to remove any obstacle in his way that keeps him from getting time to live. But is wanting to live really the wrong reason? His actions are questionable, but he’s also relatable, so you’re left in this twisted conflict of not being sure if you want to like the characters or not.
There’s also anti-villains (those who do the wrong thing for the right reason) and technically, I think Austin is a “villain” for part of the story in the fact that he does the wrong thing for the wrong reason (refuses to save people so he doesn’t buy up time and so that he can die with his “honor” intact). It’s quite a complex conundrum in that half of the time you want to slap the characters and half the time you want to hug them, and that is really one of the things that keep the readers going– they want to know when they can officially hate/love the characters.
It also shows how much the character’s relevant truth applies to them. Connor believes that keeping himself alive is more important than anything else– even to the point of psyching out other characters. Austin believes that he shouldn’t even be here, and that he is above the rest of the “scum” in the program. Deborah and Victor just want to survive as long as possible so they can stay together. And Jax… well, it’s hard to know what Jax believes, because so far he’s only had two POV scenes, but it’s obvious that he believes to some point that the lives of both the people they save and his fellow prisoners matter. If anything, Jax might be more of a hero than Austin is, because he does the right thing for the right reason (is it any wonder he’s the crowd favorite? If readers came into that world, Jax would probably be spooked by how many people love him). And Taylee, the main “certified” hero of the story, just believes in saving the innocent– the guilty she could care less about.
What a character believes shapes them. It’s important to make sure that you know what your character believes, what their worldview is, before you start writing the story. Because your character’s worldview will shape all of their choices in the story.
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It’s clear that there is much to learn from Scheller’s Extension Squad books, and the adventure is only beginning as we expect many more adventures from Austin and the gang in the months to come. Keep an eye out for book 3, due to release this month as an ebook.
(Pst! If you want to support R.M. Scheller, you can head over to Amazon and buy the books, or you can request your local library to bring them in).
