Scondary Characters: They Can Make or Break a Novel

As writers, we spend a lot of time on our main characters, giving them biographies and attending to every detail of their lives, but how much time do we devote to the supporting cast of characters? They are the best buddies of our heroes or relatives, minor villians, the people who lend interest and credence to our stories.

When I construct scenes, I usually think of the main character and what she/he wants and how this will work in the scene, but when I start writing, well, that's when the secondary characters come into play. Boom!  You need somebody, be it a watchman, a farmer, or a stripper.  Who is this person? They need a personality, maybe not a life story, but we must know enough about them to find them believable.  And interesting. In some ways, they must advance the plot.

In Promiscuous Mode, my soon-to-be published mystery, I felt like I hit the secondary character jackpot.  The book is set in Northern Wisconsin.  The real Northwoods.  There's a shoe factory that not making shoes anymore, but ordering them from Asia.  There's computer shenanigans, business shenanigans, sexual shenigans. And people!  I came up with the lowlife Darrell who kidnaps the main character's cat. He's a ne'er do well with a wallet full of cash.  Claims he won it up the road at an Indian casino.  But did he? There's the Revenend Josie, an Episcopal priest who peppers her speech with French. She loves a good glass of wine and adventure.  Maybe she loves adventure too much.  And lastly, there's Phyllis King, a VP at the shoe factory.  She's the town tennis champ, golf champ, has a beautiful Victorian house and a dreadful secret. Oh, I do love secondary characters. They all have secrets.

In The Shadow Warriors, I have a Bulgarian spy, Georgi Balakov  of whom I've very fond.  And a landlady with a bunion who always wears carpet slippers. And a bad guy who turns into a good guy.  This happened because he was based on a real person whom I did not like.  Then we were assigned to a big project together and I got to know him.  He wasn't so bad, and the more we worked together the better I liked him, and his character changed from 100% bad to part-bad, part-good.  I felt better about writing him into the book after that.

Secondary characters are not such nice to have, they're mandatory.  Make them colorful, make them good, bad, evil or better yet, a mixture. Think hard about them.  They prop up the plot and should not be cardboard.  Never cardboard.  Make the reader perk up when they come on the scene. 

 Here are some talented writers who have original thoughts about secondary characters.  Do give them a read.

Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Margaret Fieland http://margaretfieland.wordpress.com
Helena Fairfax http://www.helenafairfax.com/blog
Dr. Bob Rich https://wp.me/p3Xihq-1tC
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Connie Vines http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Rhobin L Courtright http://rhobinsrambles.blogspot.com/
Victoria Chatham. http://www.victoriachatham.com

Secondary Characters? Secondary in Name Only.

Secondary characters have many functions in stories. Often, my secondary characters have surprised me, indeed, they have gobsmacked me. Who are some of my favorite secondary characters in my own works? In other books?  Read on.
In my first novels, I didn't understand about plotting, and the stories underwent much critiquing and rewriting as I tried to make them good.  One of the (many) things I had t learn was to go deep into each character if he/she  appeared multiple times.  
In The Shadow Warriors, my first published novel, there was a "bad guy" named Stephan, a secondary character.  Truth be told, I modeled his physical appearance and even some of his personality on a co-worker whom I didn't like. He didn't like me, either.  We exasperated each other.  Then, we were thrown together on an important corporate committee.  Not only did we see each other daily, but we had to work together.  Familiarity bred__not more dislike but understanding.  I would never say friendship, but I learned where he was coming from.  We started to like each other.  Just a little.  And as like grew, the Stephan in The Shadow Warriors became more complex, and at the book's end, he did a magnanimous act.  It helps to know your characters. 

Festival Madness, my Burning Man novel,  has a lot of zany characters. Sometimes, when I need to get a character from point A to point B I'll have something happen en route, something important to the story, which can mean a new character, but the reader doesn't know that the person will be important. Sometimes I, the writer, don't know how important that character will become.  When the protagonist, Emma, is driving from Reno, NV to the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, she stops by Pyramid Lake to enjoy the scenery.  (It is spectacular.)  Someone nearby is having car trouble, and Emma asks is she can help.  She is astonished and a little rattled when she sees this person closeup.  It is a man?  A woman?  It is Daze, soon to be Daisy, a man undergoing a change of gender.  Right away I liked Daze and his/her sense of humor.  I even bought a book by a woman who had changed her gender.  Daze became, while still a secondary character, important to the plot of the book. And she emerged as a full blown personality from that one encounter seen looking under the hood of her  (glittered encrusted) car. 

Festival Madness is free on the Amazon Kindle from March 18 - March 22nd.  Catch Festival Madness!

The novel I'm currently working on, Promiscuous Mode, (a computer term) has a character, a female Episcopal priest called Reverend Josie, who is modeled on a good friend of mine from college.   She was always eccentric, and when I introduced the character (as a distraction for waiting for another character to appear), I didn't know it was my friend, I just knew I was describing her garb.  Suddenly, she appeared again in the story, and then again. With her French phrases, her odd  speech and her all black wardrobe, she stood out among the somewhat bland corporate types.   My friend died during the writing of the book, and if /when it's published, I'll dedicate it to her.  Writing about her was almost like reliving our friendship, as we seldom saw each other after college.   

An anecdote from college days: I stopped by my friend's dorm room so that we could walk to our gym class--all the way across the campus and usually a total bore. She was reading Epicurus and began reading aloud.  Suddenly we had a bottle of vodka, and after each saying of Epicurus, we'd shout, "I'll drink to that," and swig the vodka.  We left for gym class (finally) and probably staggered all the way.  I remember hysterical laughter.  It was so like her.  Crazy but fun. We had a wild time at a party in the Adolphus Hotel before a Cotton Bowl. 
I never do outrageous stuff like that anymore, and sometimes, I wish I did.   

What other authors have secondary characters I like?  Old Toby in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  Rat, in the Easy Rawlins stories of Walter Mosley, and Maria Bolkonskaya in War and Peace.  So different all, and yet all so memorable.  

Who is YOUR favorite secondary character?  My fellow bloggers will surely have a lot to say on the subject.  Give them a read. 

Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
Skye Taylor http://www.skye-writer.com/blogging_by_the_sea
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Connie Vines http://connievines.blogspot.com/
Victoria Chatham http://victoriachatham.webs.com/
Helena Fairfax  http://helenafairfax.com/
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/
Rachael Kosinski http://rachaelkosinski.weebly.com/
Hollie Glover http://www.hollieglover.co.uk
Dr. Bob Rich http://wp.me/p3Xihq-CZ
Rhobin Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com/