This post is a small excerpt from a forthcoming essay, "Writing Historical Fiction: Building a World without a Starbucks," to be published in The Third Degree (Mystery Writers of America) in November 2020.

In his book on writing historical fiction, James Alexander Thom writes, “To put your readers there and make them feel at home in that time, you must teach them what something is the moment they see it, and make it seem like they’ve known it all along” (my emphasis). To do so, the writer of historical fiction must herself be “at home” in her characters’ world and familiar with the objects of it.  

But how to find these objects? And how to know what to call them? The truncheon? The antimacassar?

People have asked me which books I've found most useful in making myself "at home" in the nineteenth century, so I'm sharing some titles from my go-to research shelf:

What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist: The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England by Daniel Pool

Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London by Lynda Nead

Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England by Kristine Hughes

Victorian City and Country Houses: Plans and Details by George E. Woodward.

Books on special topics:

The Medical Profession in Mid-Victorian London by M. Jeanne Petersen

The Ascent of the Detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England by Haia Shpayer-Makov

London: A Life in Maps by Peter Whitfield

City of Dreadful Delight and Prostitution and Victorian Society by Judith R. Walkowitz

Victorian Treasures: An Album and Historical Guide for Collectors by Carol McD. Wallace

The Victorian Country House by Mark Girouard

The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli by Richard Aldous  

"Criminals, Idiots, Women & Minors": Nineteenth Century Writing by Women on Women, ed. Susan Hamilton

The Princess Alice Disaster by Joan Lock

Handbook of English Costume in the 19th Century by C. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Cunnington

The Victorian Underworld by Donald Thomas

Red for Danger: The Classic History of British Railway Disasters by L.T.C. Rolt

     People often ask me about my process of researching and writing historical novels, given that I’m not in London (and not likely to be going there soon) and I write about the Victorian era, often with reference to real historical people or events. Historical novels can be a challenging genre to write, for several reasons. Over the next few months, in a series of posts here, I’ll be discussing aspects of historical fiction and sharing a specific tip for writing evocative historical fiction, doing research, organizing the research, and so on.  
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     Let’s start with the important distinction between “verisimilitude”—which gives the reader the feeling of being transported fully and seamlessly into a particular place and time—and “accuracy,” which aims at reproducing historical facts. Obviously, we do our best to avoid anachronisms—that is, introducing a word or an object that wasn’t around in that time period. Putting a Starbucks in 1870s London would diminish both the verisimilitude and the accuracy. But sometimes, verisimilitude and accuracy are at odds. For example, in a recent talk to members of Sisters in Crime (https://www.sistersincrime.org/), Susan Elia MacNeal (http://www.susaneliamacneal.com/) explained that in doing research for her WWII-era Maggie Hope series, she read Winston Churchill’s correspondence and discovered that he used “OMG” as an abbreviation for “Oh My God.” But she doesn’t include that in her novels because the reader would perceive it as teen-text shorthand and assume it was an anachronism. So while it would be “accurate” to include “OMG” when referencing Churchill, it wouldn’t heighten the sense of “verisimilitude.” And as authors, we are striving to immerse our readers in the story, to avoid introducing something that might jolt them out of it and cause them to question the veracity of our narrator.

     Each post, I will be sharing one strategy I use for writing historical fiction. Of course, different methods work for different writers, so take what works for you and pitch the rest over your right shoulder, or into oblivion! 

For me, "Perceptual Context" is shorthand for the unique aspects of a character that shape the way she views, perceives, and responds to the world. Some people might call this a “mindset,” but to me that suggests merely the intellectual component and elides the emotional/psychological one. The Perceptual Context encompasses attitudes, prejudices, knowledge, desires and fears (secret and overt), assumptions about the world and about other people that the character has gleaned from painful and joyful experiences, the vocabulary and level of discourse a character has absorbed through life and education, and so on. As this description suggests, the Perceptual Context necessarily depends upon and evolves from the character’s past experience, or what we call “backstory,” when speaking of narrative elements.
 
Recently, I read the opening of an early draft by a writer beginning her first novel. In her first chapter, my new writer friend showed me the upstate New York landscape through which her main character, a widow named Carrie, was riding, on a rickety wagon, behind two smelly horses. I could see the flat trail, the hills, the barn with its sagging roof, the stream, and the lantern held by her late husband’s uncle as she arrived at her destination. But in order for her heroine to feel unique and interesting, I needed more of her internal landscape, her emotional and psychological essence, her particularity, her individuality.
 
Why is individuality important? A reader wants to be brought on an emotional journey. For that, we need a protagonist with a profound and unique emotional life and a strong, significant emotional backstory. Hints at this backstory in early chapters provide the biggest enticement to keep reading. Let’s say we have a middle-aged woman named Joyce who pulls into a parking lot, looks at a Harley motorcycle and is overcome with tears, which she fights back, so her nineteen-year-old niece, in the passenger seat, doesn’t see. Our curiosity is immediately piqued: What happened in her past that Joyce would have such a strong response to something so mundane? Was someone she loved in a motorcycle accident? Her brother? The girl’s father? Or maybe the last time Joyce felt free and happy was a cross-country bike trip when she was 18? What’s going on in her life now that causes that memory to resurface? Why is Joyce so intent on protecting her niece? Or does she always hide her feelings? There are a myriad of possibilities. What’s important to recognize is that when characters have strong (or unexpected or strange) feelings—or why they don’t, when it seems like they should—it will pique the reader’s curiosity, which is the best sort of hook.
 
Crafting a character's Perceptual Context is something that takes a while; it evolves unevenly and gradually, as if from rough sketch to completed drawing. 
I'd suggest that before you get too far into your story, make sure each character’s Perceptual Context is at least roughed out pretty well. I know from experience that this saves time in the long run! More than once, as I approach the middle of my novel, I've found the action slowing and meandering and coming to a grinding halt because I didn't develop my characters enough beforehand.

It also took me some time to discover a series of exercises that help me create this Perceptual Context (complete with backstory), and I wanted to share some of them here in the hopes they might help someone else along.
 
So ... after you have that first, exciting idea, and a chapter or two drafted, maybe step away from your manuscript, take a separate piece of paper (I do this longhand, on a legal pad, but a separate word doc works, too) and, if you haven’t already, sketch the Perceptual Context and write out a big, bold backstory for each character. (Note: I add to this PC Page as I write my manuscript, and often pieces of it change; that’s part of the process.) Let yourself come up with wacky events and maybe some eccentric relatives, which you can then cross out later, if you want. Write it in the first person, using “I” (even if your book is not going to be in first person) and begin to listen for the character’s unique language.
 
Each character has her own language, level of diction, vocabulary, metaphors, and tics. How someone perceives and describes their world will reveal something about their Perceptual Context. That is, ideally, descriptions provided by the character will provide two kinds of information: something about what the character is looking at (the dusty long trail that took all day to travel, say) and something about their Perceptual Context. A farmer might say: That day was as tiring as a fall harvest day when you know rain is coming! A race car driver might say: That was worse than 500 times around a track! My new writer friend has the widow Carrie describe a barn as having a swayback roof “like last year’s Christmas bunting.” That is a great example of showing (instead of “telling” us) something about her Perceptual Context. From these few words, we can infer that Carrie is a Christian, she celebrates Christmas, and she has (or had) enough material wealth to hang bunting. It hints at some other aspects of her Perceptual Context too: maybe she’s feeling wistful about last year and those memories are still fresh because they’re the last time she was happy?
 
Another way of illuminating the Perceptual Context is to show what a character notices in her environment. Unlike a movie camera panning across a scene, in writing, authors pick and choose what we represent. For example, an 18-year-old bike mechanic will notice the make of the Harley in the parking lot; a middle-aged woman probably wouldn’t—or if she does, that hints at an interesting element of her backstory. On the other hand, she might notice the pink baby-stroller in the back of a pickup truck because she used to have one, or because she bought one for her daughter but never gave it to her because the daughter had a miscarriage. Her backstory will shape what she notices as well as how she describes it.
 
Each character will have what I call verbal “tics,” which are often influenced by experience, gender, class, nationality, and education. They include aspects such as whether the characters curse out loud (or to themselves), use “ain’t” or “I seen” or drop the “h” on words, choose polysyllabic versus simple words, employ specialized vocabulary (medical, scientific, botanical, artistic, etc.), or drop a foreign word into internal dialogue. You learn something about a character if she says “I’d prefer not to” as opposed to “Nah, not for me”; or if a character describes a couch as “a Queen Anne-style chaise.”
 
Another technique is to write what each character did before chapter 1 begins. Have them describe the last week, or even the arc of their life, in general terms. If my friend’s young widow is arriving in a small town in upstate New York, to stay with her late husband’s uncle, what did the uncle do for the day before she arrived? Write it from his perspective. What is he thinking/feeling/accomplishing? Some of it will have nothing at all to do with her imminent arrival because each character has to have his/her own goals, desires, and motives, apart from the main character, or they run the risk of being mere cardboard “types,” flat and uninteresting.
 
Go ahead and play the “what-if” backstory game, which naturally leads to what I call the emotional undercurrents in scenes. In my friend’s story, what if the uncle thinks his nephew (Carrie’s late husband) was an abusive, unethical man who never deserved her? How will that affect how he feels about Carrie and how much he wants to help her? Maybe he wants to make up for his nephew’s evilness? Or … what if the uncle loved his nephew very much (partly because he never had kids of his own—there’s a story there, too) but his nephew knew his uncle has made a Significant Mistake in his past (maybe he had a bad temper when he drank, or a bad gambling habit), so the nephew always kept the uncle at arm’s length? Does the uncle worry that Carrie knows about his past and feels ashamed in front of her—and so greets Carrie with a forced, large warmth … and then Carrie finds herself wanting to reassure him that she doesn’t judge him because she’s made plenty of mistakes of her own?

I’m just throwing out possibilities about the emotional baggage each character might carry, but I hope the examples convey what I mean. If you take the time to write up a hefty backstory, told from the perspective of each character, it will naturally create small, tiny, emotional inflections in your opening scenes … and the reader will be curious enough to read on to find out the reason for the emotional undercurrents.
 
Lastly, childhood experiences are expected to shape the Perceptual Context. Childhood often produces the most definitive and intractable aspects of a character, and I’d suggest you give yourself lots of time to figure this out. As a simple example, let’s say you have a character who, beginning at age 5, had a mother who would vanish for a month at a time, returning without fanfare, pretending she’d never left. This would create in a child a sense of uncertainty, mistrust, and anxiety. That sort of baggage doesn’t (usually) vanish merely because a character becomes an adult. It will shape her interactions with everyone she meets, and in every situation. Someone who tends to be mistrustful will perceive even a neutral statement differently than someone who is trusting. 
 
What I have found is that when I know my characters well enough, I can put two of them together in a room, and they will talk to each other and move around, and all I have to do is observe and write it down.
 
Knowing your characters this well will also help you clarify and hint early on what the character’s arc needs to be. What does she need to change about herself (often, what mistaken belief, what piece of her faulty Perceptual Context does she need to abandon) in order to achieve her goal by the end? 
 
As a last note: 90% of the backstory and Perceptual Context that I write out on those legal pads never makes it into the manuscript. But I find it has to be in my head as I write, or the characters don’t come off as well as they might. Don’t worry if it seems a waste of time to have wads of material you never explicitly include. As you write, it’s feathering its way in.
 
I hope this helps you, as you begin to understand your characters. I welcome all feedback on this short essay, as I am always developing ideas for workshops and lectures. Please feel free to comment below or send me an email at kmodden@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!
 
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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!