We've come to the last session of my workshop on Secondary Characters. If you're just joining us now, please go back and start with Part I. These are just a few more guidelines, cautions, and thoughts ...
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1: Just as secondary characters have their own lives, they have feelings that have NOTHING to do with the protagonist. Sometimes we have to say this to people we know: "Just because I'm upset and you happen to be in the room doesn't mean it's about you!" People have lives, concerns, plans. Let your secondary characters have lives that the protagonist doesn't even know about!
  
2: Secondary characters need to further the plot or push against the protagonist’s character/plot arc. The acid test? If you can take this secondary character out and nothing in your plot changes, then they don’t belong. It’s very sad, I know—but you have to kick them out. Tell them it’s not personal, that you like them, and they can go in a different book! Maybe they deserve one of their very own! 
 
3: Eliminate redundancies. Combine roles in single characters; it lends them complexity and keeps the narrative cleaner. For example, in A LADY IN THE SMOKE, I had two sidekicks for Tom Flynn, one an echo and one a foil. I cut it to one, Jeremy, who could serve both roles.
 
4: Don’t introduce your secondary characters all at once. It’s far too confusing. Space them out. Each time you introduce one, put [NSC] (New Secondary Character) in brackets in your manuscript. As you get toward the middle-ish, or even the end of writing your draft, do a SEARCH for all the [NSC]s. Are there too many too close together?
 
5: Help your reader keep them straight. A few good ways
• Distinguish the voices. In Stef Penney’s brilliant historical novel THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES, she has four or five different narrators, and the voices are so different you don’t even need to be told who’s speaking. This difference in voices will often evolve naturally if you’ve done your off-stage work.
•  Associate characters with a particular hobby or place. Someone who is always fiddling with his stamp collection or playing her piano. Someone who goes to the same bar every day after work.
•  If it’s been a while since we’ve since the SC, remind the reader with a bit of dialog or internalization of who she is. 
"Sorry," she interrupted. "I don't think I've met Mr. Jonas."
"Yes, you did," he replied. "At Mr. Wells's barbecue. He wore that Hawaiian shirt and threw his beer can over the wall at the dog."
•  Make sure your character names don’t sound too similar. Blackwell and Boulter and Bingley and Burns … change it up. And don't refer to characters by multiple names. Mr. Blackwell and Simon and Buddy may all be the same person, but if you use the three names interchangeably, your reader is likely to feel confused. (Often readers feel confused by Russian novelists who refer to one character by various names, surnames, and titles.)
•  Red herrings—especially the false suspects--must feel real. Otherwise you are tipping your hand to the reader that they won’t be legitimate suspects.
 
6. Last but not least …. Play with your secondary characters. Often an eccentric, quirky character is a ton of fun. Think of Johnny Depp’s pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean. He’s wacky and full of unexpected, out-of-the-box, actions and memorable as a result. Now, that’s all good but you may not want your main character to be that quirky—for two reasons. First, because it’s hard to sustain that level of quirkiness for hundreds of pages—it’s like a joke that gets old. Second and more important, the wackiness is a single attribute and doesn’t necessarily lend itself to complexity or personal growth—which is, as most of us would agree, necessary in a MC. But wackiness can be great fun and very memorable in secondaries.
 
If you have any questions or comments. Please go to my home page on this website and click the STAY IN TOUCH tab. Thanks for being with me, and good luck!
 
 
 

​In the past two posts, I've presented a range of secondary character roles and offered some questions to start getting at their characteristics, psychology, and backstory. In this section, we'll be trying to find the SCs' voices.

Before we go any further, I want to talk about the difference between Point of View and Focalization. (For those who are interested, Mieke Bal’s book Narratology has a great discussion of this.) I tend to write in the first person, and to focalize through my narrator. But those are two different things. POV is the grammatical relationship between the narrator and the story being told. Focalization is perhaps best described as "where the camera rests." Whose shoulder is it peering over, if any? Here are three examples of the same scene:
 
(1) I walked into the room and as I saw a ghost lurking over the fireplace, my heart began to race. (1POV, focalized through MC.)
 
(2) She walked into the room and as she observed a ghost lurking over the fireplace, her heart began to race. (3POV, focalized through MC.)
 
(3) She walked into the room and her face paled. (3POV, focalized through secondary character or narrator)
 
Whether you are writing first person, or second, or third, with one narrator or several, focalization is a useful and important tool when we begin thinking about these secondary characters. If you have only one focalizer for the book, you still have to mount the camera on your SC’s shoulders, away from your manuscript, in order to make them feel real.
 
To see the world the way they do is our surest guide to creating solid Secondaries. We all notice different things, based on our past. Our past informs our perceptions and our language.
 
I’ll give a simple example. Here are two different ways of describing jealousy:
 
Jealousy like the sting of a wasp.
 
Jealousy like a thick choking smog.
 
Which character likely grew up in London? Which in the country? Our past experiences inform our ways of perceiving.
 
I am going to describe a scene three ways.  
 
(1) The house was a white clapboard with a front door that didn’t shut proper. Slovenly, this one was, same as all the other Morgans. She’d strung a laundry line from a rusty hook on the house out to a tree, hanging her laundry instead of drying it inside decent-like. Today it was whites ‘cause it was Monday.
 
(2) We drew up to his childhood house and Kevin turned the engine off. In the sudden silence, I peered through the windshield. The white house cast its gray shadow forward, over the gravel, and over us as we climbed out of the car. Pale sheets and towels dangled over the line, flapping in a syncopated rhythm in the wind.
 
(3) As we pulled in the driveway, I noticed the bottom half of two newish wheels of a bike that stood just to the side of the house. A bedsheet flapped in the breeze, and a sudden gust of wind lofted it high enough that I could see the bike was a rebuilt Honda. Dwayne’s. Crap.
 
It’s the same scene, a house with laundry. But if you had to take a guess, which one of these characters is a mechanic? A musician? And a nosy neighbor? You can also make guesses about how old they are, their gender, and their education. Each of these are only a few lines long.
 
Exercise 2. Now we’re going to retro-engineer this. Choose a scene in your manuscript, not your opening scene. Maybe one from later in the book in which the main character enters a room. I’ll give you a moment to find that, and I want you to read it silently to yourself. If you are not working on a manuscript at the moment, write a paragraph right now from the perspective of that main character entering, for example, the kitchen in your house. What does he or she notice?
 
Now, I want you to take a fresh piece of paper or open a brand new document and write the exact same scene from the perspective of two different secondary characters. Use first person voice (“I”) and focalize through your secondary characters. This isn’t going to go into your book. This is all for off-stage.
 
Take at least 5 minutes for this.
 
The point of this exercise is to temporarily inhabit your secondary characters, in a separate space. If your manuscript is the "on-stage" space, this is what happens off stage. But it matters because in my experience, every bit of backstory and imagining you do off stage feathers its way into your book in ways you only realize later.
 
Part of the reason this sort of “off-stage” work is important is because feathering is key. You all know what an info-dump looks like, where the narrator has a paragraph filling you in about what happened before the book begins. We’ve all encountered them. Frankly, they can be ugly. Here’s an example of a bad info-dump that was in one of mine.
 
Claire remembered that night six months ago. She had looked out her window, and in the light from the streetlamp she saw a car pull up next door. The light inside the car went on, and she saw the silhouette of her mother kissing the driver. Who was he? Claire’s father was downstairs. Was he seeing this? Claire felt a wave of betrayal, for both of them. The car drove away and Claire heard the key turn in the lock. And two months later, when Claire’s mother was killed—a passenger in the seat of a car, driven by a man from work who was DUI—she thought back to that night and wondered if things would’ve ended up differently if she’d said something. Now she and her father were moving to Arizona, to make a fresh start. But she still felt wracked with guilt and uncertainty.
 
This sort of thing can be clunky, if it appears in the novel. But it’s good material if it remains off stage. Claire’s guilt over her silence, her anger toward her mother, and her curiosity about what her father knows or doesn’t know, can be feathered in adeptly over time. I mean, real life doesn’t follow the same rules as books, but if you met someone who dumped all this on you straight away, you’d be thinking, TMI!—and you would probably distance yourself. To some extent, that holds true for readers. If backstory is presented incrementally, we can absorb it; furthermore, feathering in means a character’s psychology evolves for readers over time, which suggests that a character has layers and depth.
 
My point is, keep that infodump, that formative story that shaped your Secondary Character, put it in your Character List, print it out and put it up on your bulletin board--and it will feather its way in.
 
As far as imagining a scene from several perspectives, once you get rolling along with your writing, chances are you won’t need to do this for every scene. But when you are stuck—when a scene is feeling flat—this is one of the best ways I know to bring it to life.

In Part IV, I'll give some "cautions" about using Secondary Characters. Stay tuned!

Who are they and what’s their story?
 
In the previous post, I suggested 15 “roles” for Secondary Characters (SCs), but paradoxically, we have to get beyond the roles if we want the SCs to be successful. They need to breathe and live their lives outside the pages of the book, beyond the view of the protagonist and even the narrator (if they aren't the same). This is the hardest part, in some ways, of any book. To avoid stereotypes, you must avoid taking shortcuts in your development of these characters. This isn’t Tinder. You can’t swipe left and right. You need to take time to get to know them, much like you get to know your MC. So there are two things to keep in mind here:
 
First, they need their own story arc, however small, based on their motivations. In A Lady in the Smoke, Anne’s brother Philip decides he will help Elizabeth prove that Paul is not guilty of manslaughter. But Philip does it in a way that remains loyal to a dead friend. Similarly, in The Hunger Games trilogy, Prim occupies many roles: she’s an ally, an innocent victim, and at times Katniss’s conscience. But she also wants to be a doctor. That’s how she would describe her arc, if she were the protagonist of her own book.
 
Second, I would suggest having a character page and a backstory for every secondary character. I know this sounds time-consuming. But it will matter, and I’ll share my thoughts about why in a bit.
 
There are several ways to develop these secondary characters. I’m going to give you two exercises I find most useful. 
 
Exercise 1:
 
Take a piece of paper (or start a brand new document on your computer) and put at the top the name of a secondary character—one that maybe you’re having a problem seeing at the moment. Now you're going to begin to describe this person.
You probably have some questions of your own that help you get at a character. And while I know a lot of writer’s guides suggest questions, I had to assemble my own. For our purposes here, I’ll use “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun.
 
Most people begin with physical appearance. What do they look like? Tall or short? Lean or heavyset? Hair color? Eye color? Some people find pictures of people in magazines, or online to help with this. But I want to push this a bit further. If they are tall, where do they get their height—which side of the family? If they have wheat-colored hair, which parent had it? If they have green eyes, which parent or grandparent had it? Who else in their family has it?
 
Do they have an unusual scar or—as in the case of my Mr. Flynn, is he missing part of one of his fingers? A disability or medical condition? Where did they get it? Or when did it become manifest? Is there a cure? How does it affect their daily life? What can they not do because of it? Is it the sort of thing other characters will notice?
 
How old are they? What was happening in the world the year they were born? What is a key historical event that happened since then?
 
Do they have any verbal tics? (Think of the way Snape speaks. Or Yoda.)
 
Where did they grow up?
 
What is their ethnicity? (Consider diversity in your cast, if historically appropriate.) Did their family come from elsewhere or immigrate somewhere? Why?
 
What is their sexual orientation? Are they in love? How did they meet the person they love?
 
What are their favorite food(s) and books? Would they read Wall Street Journal or New York Post? Do they prefer ice cream or veggie burgers?
 
Do they smoke or drink? Why or why not?
 
What sort of exercise/activity/sport do they like? When did they first start it?
 
What is their socio-economic class? Has their family climbed up or down the social ladder in the past 100 years?
 
Where do they live, and with whom? Who are their closest relatives?
 
Do they have any political or religious leanings/passions?
 
What are their eccentricities? Quirks? Mannerisms? What are two of the physical signs they demonstrate when they are anxious or upset?
 
What do they want? Is it something money can buy? Where do they want to be three years from now?
 
What is something that scares them? What would be the worst thing that could happen to them? Do they like change or shrink from it?
 
What would they say is their worst memory from childhood? Or their best?
 
What event or aspect of childhood was most influential in making them who they are today?
 
Many of these questions push toward backstory. They are intended to uncover past experiences and motives, family and the past, which for many is the source of most of our baggage and our identity, our psychology and our assumptions (plausible or misguided) about the world.
 
Now, how can you keep track of all this? I use a Character List. Orson Scott Card makes the point that in the movie world, someone keeps track of the "bible" that keeps details consistent: if a cigarette is 2" long in the opening shot, it is shorter later in the scene. Each time you introduce a new character, enter the name. It helped me discover I have a propensity to name too many characters with last names beginning with S. I also tend to have too many characters who fidget with the fabric or leather on chair arms when they’re nervous--and too many with green eyes. This also helps keep track of traits so you don’t have a person with gray eyes in chapter 2 reappearing with blue eyes in chapter 19.
 
If these exercises help us figure out who the secondary characters are, and where they came from, the next exercise is to help us figure out how the secondary characters contribute to the world in your book.
 
 

Well-drawn secondary characters can add depth, humor, and conflict to a novel. In this workshop, I present different types of secondary characters and suggest ways to develop them so they sing for themselves while also harmonizing with the main plot-line. Every author will do this differently, so take from this what works for you and your WIP.

This workshop has several parts. Here, I present 15 different possible roles for the secondary characters. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but this will get us started.

(1) Expert. This character provides expertise or information to the Main Character (MC). This can be as simple as the help Hermione Granger provides Harry Potter, given her superior book-knowledge and ability with spells. For amateur sleuths, this can be someone in the crime-fighting professional realm such as a Medical Examiner, or a search-and-rescue dog handler, or a scientist or a hacker. For a professional detective, it might be a ballerina who can give him insight into her cut-throat dance world, or a priest, or a make-up artist. In short, it’s anyone who has knowledge outside the MC’s realm that the MC needs to get things done.
 
(2) Guide. This is a special instance of the expert. This Secondary Character can be one or two steps ahead on a learning curve. For example, your MC has just lost her brother to cancer; and the Guide character lost his sister to cancer two years ago. The Guide can be a mentor, or merely a character who might provide sympathy, understanding, or another perspective.
 
(3) Narrator. Examples of this are Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby or Dr. Watson in Sherlock Holmes tales.
Sherlock is the MC, but Watson writes all the tales, and as with most Secondaries who serve as narrators, he has a very distinctive voice. I’m going to read the opening paragraphs of The Hound of the Baskervilles: “Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a `Penang lawyer.'” Right off we hear Dr. Watson’s long sentences, his double negatives, his awareness of things that are “known” by other people, and his habit of tucking startling facts into subordinate clauses, as if nothing Sherlock Holmes does will surprise him.
 
(4) Ally. This is someone closely associated with the protagonist or the antagonist, and, significantly, has some of the same virtues and values. This character often serves to prove the need for, and reinforce the value of, the MC's traits in their world. For example, Gale serves the role of ally for Katniss in District 12 in The Hunger Games. At the level of plot, he’s her backup and helper, and her surrogate caretaker for Prim when Katniss leaves for the games. But at the level of character, he provides context. That is, Katniss’s ruthless streak might not be so acceptable to us except that Gale has it too—and because of this we understand that Katniss’s rough edge has evolved as a result of the harshness of her environment. Thus, our sympathy flows to her more readily. Does that make sense? Another variation of this is to have similarities not in virtues or values but in goals. For example, Dr. Watson is an Ally for Sherlock Holmes, for although Watson is a foil for Sherlock Holmes as far as his characteristics, their goals are aligned: they want to solve the mysteries. Another interesting ally can be a pet—a cat or a dog. One author who did a brilliant job with that was Garth Stein in The Art of Racing in the Rain. But we also see pets as allies in some cozy mysteries.
 
(5) Foil. This is one of the best-known roles for a Secondary. The foil is usually an ally for the MC, but has different traits. For example, in Anne of Green Gables the unimaginative, rather dull but very beautiful Diana with her lovely dark hair is a foil for imaginative red-haired Anne. Peeta, the gentle baker’s boy, in The Hunger Games trilogy is an ally; but he also serves as a foil for the more combative Katniss.
 
(6) Love interest. This one is self-explanatory. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Peeta serves this role, as does Gale. However, generally speaking, the love interest also has another role. In Emma, Mr. Knightley is her conscience and her guide, as well as the love interest. In many stories, the love interest is also an ally. But a word of caution here … if the love interest is too close of an ally, usually you will not have that tension between the hero and heroine that can help drive a book. If your romance is a significant subplot, the love interest cannot be merely an echo and helpmate.
 
(7) The Provider. This character is an ally but is also special kind of foil. This Secondary fills a lack in the Main Character's world. For example, Harry Potter has no loving family who are alive; Ron Weasley has heaps of it, all boisterous and warm.
 
(8) Comic relief. Ron Weasley and his brothers certainly provide this in the Harry Potter books. Also Hagrid, with his unwise choices in raising dragons. Some other examples of comic relief are R2D2 and C3PO in the Star Wars movies. Another great example is in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, where Merry and Pippin provide comic relief as Bilbo Baggins and crew take a perilous journey to destroy the ring. These two consistently show themselves as practical jokers as well as light-hearted companions for Bilbo:
 
"I don't think he knows about second breakfast, Pip!"
"What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? He knows about them, doesn't he?"
 
(9) Conscience. This is someone who shores up the conscience of the protagonist—often by providing insight or confronting the Main Character when he steers down the wrong path. Sometimes this Secondary is older or younger than the MC, someone who speaks with hard-won wisdom or with a child's wide-eyed innocence. But not always. In The Big Easy, one of my favorite movies from the 1980s, the MC is a charming but corrupt cop in New Orleans, played by Dennis Quaid; Ellen Barkin’s character, a righteous DA, shows up to expose the corruption in his department. The Conscience character can also provide the moral compass in a book. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus and Scout (the narrator and MC) both serve as the conscience for the community.
 
(10) Plain Talker. This person says things that the protagonist can’t. In the series The Crown, Princess Margaret is sometimes given this role; she blurts out things that, for reasons of propriety and politics, her sister Queen Elizabeth can’t. In Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Bennet often serves this role. This character can serve a variety of purposes. For example, if he says snide things under his breath about an unpopular character, he can demonstrate the Main Character’s tact or forbearance. Or he might say things under his or her breath that are truthful, or wryly observant; and by contrast, the Main Character can come across as naive or self-deceiving.
 
(11) The innocent victim. This secondary character is rescued by the Main Character—and often this rescue initiates a significant plot arc. For example, Katniss’s sister Prim in The Hunger Games is an innocent victim; through no fault of her own, Prim’s name is picked out of the jar, and Katniss rescues her. In my book A Dangerous Duet, it’s Nell’s friend Marceline, the trapeze artist, who is beaten and left for dead in an alley because people are trying to find her brother, and she loyally refuses to tell them where he is. As a result, Nell has to rescue her—and this starts Nell off on her mystery. Significantly, this Secondary usually has a significant emotional tie to the Main Character prior to the first page of your book. This provides the Main Character with motive for rescuing and starting the plot.
 
(12) Thorn. This character is bothersome, a thorn in the Main Character’s side. I want to be clear that it isn’t the Antagonist. In the Harry Potter books, it’s more like Draco than Voldemort. The Thorn character can be the annoyingly nosy neighbor who offers all kinds of outlandish theories and red herrings to the detective; it can be the newspaperman who prints a story that unwittingly alerts a criminal to the movements of Scotland Yard. The Thorn can stymie the Main Character at various points, can add tension to a subplot, and can contribute to the main struggle between the Protagonist and Antagonist. And these thorns can be incredibly engaging characters; when well drawn, they create annoyance and frustration in us and therefore engage our sympathies even more with the Main Character.
 
(13) Could-Have-Been. This is Cho in Harry Potter. These Could-Have-Beens have the significant value in that they present other options, and can keep the plot from feeling inevitable; as such, they can shore up suspense. These characters are useful in another way, for often they show that a MC isn’t going to get everything he wants. (That’s a danger for books … when a protagonist can have her cake and eat it too.) A subcategory of the Could-Have-Been is the Fateful Warning—what the MC might be or become if circumstances were different. In Les Miserables, Fantine is who Cosette might have become, if Jean ValJean hadn’t intervened.
 
(14) Betrayer. This character is one of the heavy hitters. He betrays the Main Character in a way that pulls the rug out from under her, causes the Main Character to distrust her own judgment, and throws into jeopardy our interpretations of all that we’ve read so far. This is—interestingly—also Cho in Harry Potter. Judas is perhaps the original betrayer. In One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Bibbitt betrays McMurphy to Nurse Rached, who has longed to punish McMurphy, and she can finally justify giving him the lobotomy. In the third book of The Hunger Games trilogy, this is President Alma Coin, who claims to want democracy but turns out to be as power-hungry as Snow at the end. The betrayer is a very powerful Secondary Character, for betrayal can bring up feelings in your Main Character of injustice, abandonment, and loss--three of the big ones.
 
(15) The Dead Body (aka “the red shirt”) Often the dead body has a significant backstory. That’s why he ends up dead, even if it’s on page 5. I put this Secondary Character last, but if you are writing a murder mystery, the dead body is in many ways the most important Secondary Character, even if he never appears alive. A dead body on page 5 means the entire rest of the book is the story of discovering the story before the book begins, which is how he got there in the first place. Why him, of all people?

I want to share that the Dead Body is the one character I have found I cannot shortchange when it comes to rounding him out. As I was writing TRACE, I must have written twenty pages from Edwin’s perspective, about his childhood, his schooling, his art, his forging, his relationship with his sister and with his teachers, and his time in jail and the opium dens. He had his own timeline, separate from the whole rest of my book, on my wall. If you are writing a murder mystery, I would say this Secondary is the heart of your backstory, and in my experience, I’ve found that spending a lot of time on The Dead Body is crucial.
 
So those are my 15. Of course, these distinctions are sort of artificial. As this list suggests, often a Secondary Character will play more than one role—and generally that’s efficient so far as plot goes, and it organically adds complexity to your characters. This multiplicity finds it natural echo in real life, for none of us play only one role in our lives either.
 
One final NOTE: If you give someone a name, they need a role, even if just a small one. Don’t name characters if they’re not going to do anything that either advances the plot or illuminates another character. The barista at the coffee shop can be elided: like the servants sometimes in Austen, “the tea was brought in.”  

For more about Secondary Characters, stay tuned! I'll be back!