A young witch forced to play concubine for her empirical captor, finally breaks free to find a life of her own, but even those with the power to call Death cannot outrun their past…

All witches must serve the cruel and immortal Emperor Yamueto. But after four years of terror and abuse, Khana not only kills one of his favorite courtiers with her magic, but also discovers the secret of his power and immortality: he’s been making deals with Death. And now, so is she. Armed with magic that she doesn’t fully understand, Khana flees the empire and stumbles into a small mountain town filled with fierce warriors that ostracize her for being a witch, despite using her abilities to heal their sick and injured. There, her magic and courage are put to the test as she is forced to stop running and fight back against the emperor that wants her dead. But every deal she makes with Death takes another piece of her soul. And there’s only so much Khana can give before she turns into the very monster she’s trying to destroy.

The Witch Who Trades With Death is out from Angry Robot on 11th March – you can pre-order your copy HERE

Writing the Found Family Trope

by C. M. Alongi

One of the most beloved media tropes is also one of the trickiest to get right. After all, family is messy and complicated, especially when that family is chosen rather than blood-born. So let’s talk about some basic do’s and don’t’s of writing the found family trope, and why people are so drawn to it.

Found family is one of my favorite tropes. Which is weird, because I don’t have any trauma. I think the reason I like this trope specifically is because I like watching my favorite characters suffer and triumph, and one of the best ways to do that is with people who love you and whom you love in turn. 

It’s also much more interesting than the romantic subplot, but maybe that’s just me being aroace.

I’ve written “found family” in a number of different ways. It comes up a lot in my TikTok series CaFae Latte, it pops up in my science fiction novel Citadel, and also plays a crucial role in my upcoming dark fantasy novel The Witch Who Trades with Death.

But found family can be a tricky trope to get right. You don’t want it to be too cheesy or too flippant. And unlike, say, a romantic subplot where there’s usually only two characters, found family has anywhere from two to seven or more, and all those characters need a reason to have such strong feelings for every other person in the group. 

So let’s go over some basic tips for writing found family:

Take Your Time

Relationships do not form overnight. Not even those with the added advantage of blood relation. It takes time to build trust, to develop affection and friendship, to realize that you really want this person in your life. 

If your story starts with the found family already established and intact, then you can skip this step. In Citadel, for instance, Peterson is already one of Olivia’s primary parental figures, and Riley is her best friend. All that was left was to give Peterson and Riley a reason to be stuck together and develop their own parent/quasi-adopted-child bond, something that was pretty easy as they already knew and were comfortable with each other.

But most stories begin with the main characters meeting each other for the first time. So give them time to figure each other out. Especially if they’re thrown into a situation they don’t want to be in and have reason to dislike each other. Don’t rush it. Having characters go from strangers to soulmates within the span of two chapters is unrealistic at best. And if they’re starting as rivals or even outright enemies? You’re going to need the whole book to properly change their dynamic.

In Witch, the main character Khana is already good friends with Haz, and saves the life of another character—Xopil—fairly early in the story. But the rest of the friend group has little reason to like each other. The only reason they meet each other is because they’re assigned together in a military unit. Itehua is an ex-criminal who takes issue with authority, so of course he’s constantly bucking under Neta, the team’s sergeant and leader with trust issues of her own, and is generally surly with everyone else. Lueti’s one of the few who regularly calls him out on it, which—while it helps build respect—doesn’t initially endear her to him. The youngest member, Yxe, has a very hard time speaking up for himself, so he usually gets run over. And most of the group distrusts Khana because of her magic.

It takes time for these characters to get to know one another, understand each other, and learn to appreciate each other. It doesn’t happen all at once; the characters develop at different rates. The first half of the book is dedicated to the group’s changing dynamic, so by the time they’re thrown into an actual battlefield at the midpoint, they value and respect each other as friends, well on the road to found family.

Give Each Character Their Moment

This is especially important for larger found family groups. Ask yourself why each character is here. If they had the opportunity to leave the friend group, would they take it? If the answer is an easy “yes,” it’s not a found family (yet). If the answer is “no,” then you need to ask yourself why. And then put that on the page. 

Most friend groups—especially in action/adventure genres—tend to be created by circumstance. All these characters happen to go to the same school and were in the same class, they’re all guests in the same haunted hotel, they’re all assigned the same military unit. Once the circumstances are over, the characters will go home and probably never see each other again. Unless, they’ve actually managed to form meaningful connections with each other.

Each character in the found family needs to have an “oh” moment. The moment where they realize they like this group of people and want to stick around, or at least stay in touch after the plot is over.

This doesn’t have to be sudden or even all that obvious. A lot of relationships form gradually over time, sneaking up on you, and that can absolutely happen here. But usually—especially for main characters—there needs to be an actual narrative plot point where they realize and express their desire to stay with these people, and it’s usually a pretty important part of the story. More often than not, it’s tied in with the larger plot, that “we have to work together to save the world from [generically evil villain], and there’s no one else I’d rather do it with” scene in every superhero and action story. But not necessarily.

For Witch, I actually took the lazy option. Instead of three or four scenes where different members of the military unit announce their “oh” moment, I had it happen in a single scene: the night of their military graduation. In a tavern, no less. (Well, technically it’s an inn, but you get it.)

By this point, everyone’s already friends. Most of the group’s development as a whole has already been done; this is just making it official with some last-minute exposition on character backstory. Most of the narrative focus was on Khana, the main character, as this is the first time she willingly opens up about her traumatic past to other people. For her, this is the moment that the group goes from “friends and coworkers I’m friendly with” to “wow, I have never felt safer or more secure with other people—is this what family is supposed to be like?” 

Not Every Character Needs to Be in the Family

Sometimes writers feel the need to push every non-villainous character into the found family group, and that’s just not the case. While the found family can be big, it doesn’t have to be all-encompassing. Some characters are better off as “just friends” rather than “found family friends,” or even as just allies. 

In Witch’s case, Khana’s main love interest is the character Sava. Their relationship starts developing soon after the group’s. But while Sava is friends with Haz and Neta, he doesn’t get the opportunity to form solid relationships with everyone else. He can’t; he’s too busy with his own military unit. So while he’s an important character to the story and close with at least a couple members of the group, he’s not part of the group itself. 

However, different people can have different found families, and there’s likely to be some overlap. There are also different degrees of found families, with even tighter-knit groups occurring within the larger friend group.

(I hope you’re not taking a shot every time I write “group.” You’ll die.)

For instance, while Khana is close friends with Itehua, Yxe, and Lueti, those three form their own trio and are closest with each other over anyone else in the group. Khana and Haz have a similar dynamic as a duo, a natural result of being friends before enlisting. And Sava has his own found family that, while including members of the main group (Haz, Neta, and eventually Khana), also includes the character Athicha, who is also Neta’s significant other and a part of her found family (which, unlike Sava, includes all members of her military unit, not just half).

If this is a bit complicated, don’t worry. Take a piece of paper and a pencil and start mapping out the dynamics of the people in your own life. Graph your relationships with your closest friends, family, spouse, etc. Then graph their relationships with their friends and family. You’ll see the overlaps, the groups-within-groups, and the friends-but-not-found-family dynamics pretty clearly through that. Ask yourself how those relationships started and developed, how they affect everyone else’s relationships, and see if you can replicate that in your story.

Make ‘em Suffer

This is just general advice that can and should be applied to most stories.

The most powerful relationships endure through both good times and bad. How many of us have realized that our friends aren’t actually there for us when we’re going through a rough patch? Conversely, how many friends have supported you through hard times (or you supported them) and you ended up closer because of it? 

Scenes where characters suffer are what proves that the found family dynamic is there and working. The group needs to experience loss, defeat, grief, setbacks. Maybe one or two members of the group ended up killed off. 

A found family will deal with such suffering by coming together and supporting each other. And then they’ll go infiltrate the enemy camp to murder the evil emperor. #RoadTrip #FamilyGoals

You Can Have Blood Relations

The idea of the found family is that it’s the family you choose, not the family you’re born into. The unfortunate reality is that some people’s blood relations are terrible. They’re toxic, they’re abusive, they’re negligent and narcissistic and whatever else that’s putting you in therapy. 

But not always. And in fact, you can have blood relatives in or peripheral to the found family. In Witch, Haz’s father Heimili is the one who owns the inn/tavern where the group likes to hang out, so he’s basically an honorary uncle to them. 

But this type of thing is best encapsulated in stories like Avatar: the Last Airbender. The eventual found family that forms over three seasons contains Aang, Toph, Zuko, Suki, Sokka, and Katara. But Sokka and Katara are full-blood siblings. They’re already family by the time they find Aang in the iceberg, and by the end of the third episode, they’ve neatly folded Aang into their little family.

Their blood relation does nothing to dampen or diminish the wider found family group dynamic. In fact, I’d argue it strengthens it. Aang already knows what functional friendships look like, as does Suki. But Toph and Zuko do not, which is a large reason why, even after they join the group, it takes a while for them to become part of the family. (Well, Zuko also spent the first two and a half seasons hunting them down and hucking fireballs. But even after his redemption arc and one-on-one field trips, there was a bit of emotional distance and prickliness that needed another episode to smooth over.)

If Katara and Sokka didn’t already have a solid, pre-existing relationship for everyone else to build off of, it would’ve taken much longer for the group to solidify into a found family, and the group dynamics would have been completely different.

If you’re going to write a large group (as in, five or more characters), consider having a few of them be already related to each other—or at least have a pre-existing relationship with each other like “we’ve been best friends since high school” or “he saved my life and now I owe him a life debt.” That’s 20% of the found family already found; you just have to build from there.

They Don’t Have to (Physically) Stay Together

At the end of the day, no friend group or family physically stays together forever. Kids move out and go to college. People find jobs and opportunities out of town. A new adventure beckons over the horizon and at least one person in the group can’t or won’t follow it. And that’s fine.

The found family does not have to physically stay together forever. Lord of the Rings explicitly breaks the Fellowship once Sauron is defeated and everyone returns home, keeping in touch but not really seeing each other all that often, if at all. The four hobbits all live close enough to each other that they see each other fairly regularly (at least until Frodo books it to the Undying Lands). But Aragorn’s busy being a king, Legolas and Gimli are exploring the rest of Middle Earth, and Gandalf is out Gandalf-ing. Their lives and lifestyles no longer support being physically close together. 

It would’ve been impossible to write a happy ending where the group stays intact. The hobbits could not have stayed in Gondor and been happy. They’re too tied to the Shire. Aragorn at the end of his arc would never drop his responsibilities to continue galivanting with Legolas and Gimli. Gandalf is allergic to staying in one place for more than a week. This found family cannot physically stay together beyond the plot, but that doesn’t make it unimportant or futile. 

Every person has a different idea of a happy ending, and a good family will support that. The best families will go out of their way to make that ending happen for as many of their members as possible. But that doesn’t mean they stop being a family.

The Witch Who Trades With Death is out from Angry Robot on 11th March – you can pre-order your copy HERE

Christina Marie Alongi earned a bachelor’s in history and social justice from Hamline University in 2017. Immediately after graduating, she worked as a community support staff (sort of a personal care assistant plus job coach) for people with disabilities for over two years, including adults with autism, which helped inspire the main character for her debut sci-fi novel Citadel.

In addition to writing, Alongi created the popular TikTok series CaFae Latte (which is available on YouTube).

When she’s not writing, reading, or creating, Alongi enjoys crocheting, long walks, and defending her furniture from her roommates’ evil cats.