I love my secondary characters. And not to toot my own horn, but when people praise my books, often secondary characters are described as “round” “well-developed” and “having their own motives and aspirations.”  

We all know that in most successful, engaging books—whether they’re mysteries or mainstream novels, you have a group of interesting characters, aside from the protagonist. 

In every book, there’s the MC (MC), and then you have the A List. These are characters who participate both in the emotional arc of the main character and the plot arc. The B List participate largely in the plot arc. They can provide information or do things to move the plot along. For example, a B lister might be the medical examiner at the morgue who explains how the victim died by poisoning. Then there are the unnamed characters, the taxi driver who ferries your MC from one place to another. For the next few minutes, I’ll be talking about the A list or secondary characters.

In a murder mystery, as a result of their particular backstories,
suspects often have a secret,
something they desire,
and/or a problematic story they're telling themselves
(for example, that someone is standing in the way of his/her happiness, and that person would be better off dead).
 
A main character such as Lady Elizabeth in A Lady in the Smoke (discussed elsewhere on this blog) has heaps of backstory including several secrets and desires and problematic stories. But she’s the main character. With secondaries you can get away with less. But I always make sure to have at least two out of the three.
 
Let’s say you have a dead body—a wealthy, sour-tempered viscount. We have five suspects and each suspect needs his or her own small story that leads to motive.
For example, Professor Plum, who grew up poor, resents the viscount for being rich. Also, the professor has only has ever been drunk once in his whole life, but unfortunately it was at a cocktail party at the Viscount’s house … and the Viscount told the head of the university, which led to the professor being fired from his post, which wasn’t fair, and he wants revenge.

The young niece Miss Scarlet is secretly in love with the Viscount’s wife, who has begun to reciprocate her feelings. Miss Scarlet assumes with the Viscount out of the way, their romance might have a chance.

The greedy cousin Colonel Mustard has gambling debts and he desperately wants the inheritance to pay them off … as well as to pay for the mistress he’s secretly keeping in Grosvenor Square, who is now pregnant and needs financial support.

​You have to keep in mind, a villain is never a villain in his own head. The story he has going about why he deserves the money and why the viscount has what’s coming to him is legit to him or her.

In 1966, the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, wrote a wonderful short essay called “On the Typology of Detective Fiction.” In it, he made the point that a detective novel is always comprised of two stories. The story of the crime and the story of the detection.

Put simply, if there’s a dead body on page 5, the entire rest of the book is the discovery of how it got there in the first place. That means that dead body usually has a hefty backstory. 

​So here we have a diagram. The story begins at some point in the past, when the events leading up to the Inciting Event happen. The novel begins on page 1, and the dead body, which is the Inciting Event, appears shortly thereafter. In mainstream historical fiction,  the possibilities for the inciting event are broader than just a dead body: the Titanic sails, a queen is crowned, a spy is put under house arrest. 

What’s helpful to borrow from mystery, though, is the awareness that the Inciting Event operates rather like a fulcrum. If you want the story after the Inciting Event to be hefty and juicy, you need to have a hefty, juicy backstory.

​Now for me, backstory is all about character. Backstory comes from what your characters experience in two realms: the Worldly Realm and the Personal Realm.

The Writing Exercises
 
Karen Odden, “Crafting Secondary Characters: Beyond Friends, Foils and Foes”
ASU Desert Nights, Rising Stars, February 18, 2021
 
Pull out a sheet of paper or start a word doc. Choose a Secondary Character you’d like to develop and put their name up top. Maybe it’s one that you’re having a problem seeing at the moment.
 
1. Consider which of the 15 roles they might play, maybe more than one. Write that down. (The list of 15, with descriptions, is on my website at www.karenodden.com, under the FOR WRITERS tab, a few posts before this one, from 3/18/2020.)
 
2. Now we’re going to begin to describe this person—and we’re going to begin with Characteristics. (For the 4 categories of Characteristics (Static) and a description of each, scroll down to the next blog entry, dated 1/16/2021.)
 
3. What is a Problematic Story for your character?
 
4. Where did this Problematic Story come from? Write a short episode, preferably from adolescence but maybe drawing on earlier experiences, again using first person POV, about one experience that helped instill this Problematic Story.
 
5. Once you have that Problematic Story and its source, can you think of a way that the Secondary Character can refine it or undo it, to evolve, to lead to a greater sense of autonomy or happiness by the end of your book? What might be the Corrected Story?
 
6. What is something your Secondary Character wants that has nothing to do with the main plot or the main character of your book?

7. Choose a scene in your manuscript, maybe one from later in the book, where your SC appears with your MC. Now, write the scene from the perspective of your SC, keeping in mind their personal myth.  
 

(1) Physical characteristics.
This is anything that will help you visualize your character moving in space. 
These can include: age, height, weight (or body type), eye color, hair color, skin color, scars, tattoos, left/right-handedness, verbal tics, inheritable conditions (color-blindness, diabetes, high blood pressure)

(2) Social markers.
These "markers" are social constructs, and carry meanings that are particular to each time period and location.
They include: race/ethnicity, gender, nationality, class, sexual orientation, education, dis/ability, religion. As a sidebar, I recently listened to a talk by K. Tempest Bradford on intersectionality, and she makes the point that social markers such as race and gender and disability inflect each other. This may be something to consider as you’re developing your MCs or SCs. I have a short essay elsewhere under the FOR WRITER tab about this, if you’d like to know more.

(3) Personality traits 
I’d say pick 5 for now, when you're starting. Generous, selfish, anxious, ambitious, sly, naïve, fussy, an insomniac, impatient, insightful, empathetic, shy … 

(4) Shorthands
In our Western culture (again, these are era and place specific) these "shorthands" gesture to what is almost a small plot-line, or a set of traits that we might expect.  
Examples are: divorced seven times, only child, orphan, ex-Marine, Depression-survivor, cat-lover

1: Secondary characters need to further the plot or resist the MC’s plot arc. The acid test is 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! 
 
2: Eliminate redundancies. You will also find some Secondary Characters can be combined. For example, in LADY, I had two sidekicks to Tom Flynn, one an ally and one a foil. I cut it to one, Jeremy, who could serve as both.
 
3: Don’t introduce your secondary characters all at once. It’s way 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 them. Are there too many, too close together?
 
4: Help your reader keep them straight. A few good ways
(1) Distinguish the voices. In Stef Penney’s 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.
(2) Associate characters with a particular hobby or place. Someone who always is fiddling with his stamp collection or playing her piano. Someone who goes to the same bar every day after work.
(3) 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.
(4) Make sure your character names don’t sound too similar. Blackwell and Boulter and Bingley and Burns … change it up.

I learned more about this complex topic recently, listening to a talk by K. Tempest Bradford who explained that the origin of this idea was the lawyer and feminist scholar Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1989 essay, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.
​Crenshaw's argument is theorized and complex, but the main point, for me, is that social markers such as race, gender, sexual orientation, dis/ability, class, education, nationality, and religion inflect each other. In thinking about identity, and the way these markers affect people's lives, they cannot be considered separately. For example, as scientific studies have shown, a chronic pain sufferer (that is, someone with a disability) who identifies as Black may have a harder time obtaining good medical care and pain meds than someone who is white.
I’ve been thinking about intersectionality more these days, and the way my fictional characters' traits and social markers inflect each other and shape their actions and reactions in my stories.

When I was a debut author, I was absurdly naïve about the role I could take in marketing my books. Years ago, the publishing houses took care of all aspects—book development, printing, and marketing, but that has changed a great deal, and now many authors find themselves doing most of their own marketing. (Trying to balance marketing the books with writing them is a subject for another article.) It wasn’t until my third book was published that I began to understand the many opportunities to do grass-roots marketing online. 

So I wanted to share a few specific tips for the authors who wants to sell their books as well as write them. The focus here is on on-line resources. Some of these tips are pretty basic, but I figured I'd include them because they're new to everyone at some point. As with all suggestions, take what works for you!

A version of this article originally appeared (https://booksbywomen.org/things-i-wish-id-known-about-book-marketing/) on Women Writers, Women's Books, which has dozens of articles about both the craft and business of publishing. Check out their website or join their private Facebook Page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WWWBMagazine) for more insights and industry insider knowledge!
 
(1) When people ask me how I found my agent, I tell them about Publishers Marketplace https://www.publishersmarketplace.com/. This is an enormous database that lists (nearly) every book deal, as well as the deals for movie/TV adaptations from books. It covers all genres, from cookbooks to YA to picture books to romance to historical fiction to biographies. Each entry (I’ve included an image of mine as a sample, above) provides the author, the agent, the publisher, and a brief synopsis. The database is also searchable. So when I was looking for an agent, I typed in: “Historical Mystery Agent.” This produced a list of dozens who describe themselves as interested in “historical” and/or “mystery,” including the seven agents who requested my manuscript and the two agents who offered me representation. You can also find their websites, where they will explain how to query them. (Perhaps it goes without saying, but follow their instructions. Most want submissions by email, and if they ask for “one chapter pasted in the body of an email,” do not send them two chapters in an attachment. You are not twice as likely to have them open it. Attachments can contain viruses.) The subscription to PM costs $25 for the month, and in addition to this database, PM provides news articles with invaluable information about the industry. You can join for just a month, but I ended up subscribing for several months afterward as well, just for the industry scoop.
 
(2) As many book marketing people will say, grass-roots marketing and your “brand” begins with your website. I am utterly inexperienced in website design, so I worked with a freelance website designer, who used the design program weebly (https://www.weebly.com/), which is easy for a novice to navigate, once the framework is in place. (Other favorites, depending on what you want and how adept you are include GoDaddy, WordPress, and Wix.) Weebly also hooks to mailchimp (https://mailchimp.com/) for easy administration of your mailing list (more about mailing below). Whether you are an aspiring writing or a published one, I would suggest getting your website up and running at least 3 months before your book publishes, if not more. If you have not yet created a website, take some time and review a variety of websites for other authors in your genre. Develop a checklist of things you’d like to incorporate into yours. A starter list probably should include most of these:
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• links to your social media (Facebook, twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• “Buy Now” buttons
• your bio with a headshot
• cover shots of your book (s)
• a synopsis and maybe first chapter of your book
• a place for reviews
• a tab for your blog
• a tab for "Keep in Touch"
• a place to list upcoming in-person appearances, podcasts, and blogtours
 
(3) With multiple book review platforms, sometimes it's hard to know how best to use them. When you have a book published, reviewers will be able to post on Goodreads before your book’s pub date (for those reviewers who have been provided ARCs, or Advance Reader Copies). This is different from Amazon, which only accepts reviews after the book is published. While some authors advise, “Never look at your Goodreads reviews,” my experience with Goodreads has been positive overall, in that I’ve found people who gave 4- and 5-star reviews to my first book, A Lady in the Smoke; after my third novel was published, I messaged those people via Goodreads (there is a “message” option), asking if they’d like to read another, and most said yes. It’s a vibrant, engaged community with avid book readers including  “Goodreads librarians.” Before your book is published, get on Goodreads and set up your author page; also go to Amazon and set up your Amazon Author Page (here is mine: https://www.amazon.com/Karen-Odden/e/B0186FIQF6/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1) which is where people can find out more information about you, including your bio, your website, and your blogposts. Other book review sites I like are Library Thing and Bookbub.
 
I have found it is best to use these platforms as both an author and a reader. That is, when you read someone else’s book, write a review (assuming it’s positive). That review of their book becomes content for you. Post it on any platform you use, including these four sites and Instagram or facebook or twitter. It helps out your fellow author and gets your name out there, too.

When I first started writing reviews, I scribbled them in a notebook. It took me a while to get going with an online review habit, and at first I only published reviews on Goodreads. However, now when I write a review for a book I like, I publish it (with an easy copy & paste) on these six sites: Goodreads, Library Thing, Bookbub, my Facebook page (personal and author), my book blog LoveBooksAZ (http://lovebooksaz.blogspot.com/) and my website, under the “BOOKS I RECOMMEND” tab. I also take a picture of the book and post it on Instagram, with a brief review and the line, “For the complete review, go to www.karenodden.com” and include hashtags. (More on that, below.) From Facebook, I post it on my personal page and my author page and then “share” the post to various pages for groups to which I belong, including (for example) Bookworms of the World, Historical Novel Society, and Women Writers, Women’s Books.

Use this to market your book with images that are professional and eye-catching. You can select which size and format you’d like (e.g. “Instagram Post” “Twitter” “Facebook” or a custom size). I've provided two samples here, just to give you an idea, but if you go to Instagram, you'll find lots of layouts and ideas. 
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(5) Bitly. This is an amazing resource, and free; find it at www.bitly.com. There are two reasons to use it. First, Bitly takes a long URL and shortens it, so you can put it more easily on Instagram, twitter, and elsewhere. This is especially useful on Instagram because you cannot have a “clickable link” in your caption to your image. You can only have one link, in your bio. So if you want someone to retype into their browser something that looks like this: https://www.karenodden.com/blog/rosy-my-faithful-writing-companion-or-how-i-became-a-dog-person, it’s not going to happen. Whereas something that looks like this: bitly/KarenLovesRosy  it might. The second reason is that Bitly also enables you to track how many people clicked on your link on different platforms. This provides invaluable information about how effective your placements are. 
 
(6) A newsletter. Some people like doing them; others don't. Whatever you do, don't send it too often (I send one every 6 weeks) and make sure to have some interesting content and a reason for people to open it, including a giveaway or book news. Develop a recognizable "header," consistent with your brand, so people know it's you. I use mailchimp for creating my newsletter, and I keep it pretty simple, with one column and plenty of pictures. Here is a sample of mine, but I would suggest signing up for several newsletters from authors in your genre, so you can see what other people do: bit.ly/OddenOctNews Building your mailing list can be a challenge, but one thing you'll probably want to do is put a "pop up" window on your website, so people can sign up for it there. 

(7) Hashtags. #Hashtagging can be done on virtually any social media platform (twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.). Hashtagging is an art in itself, but eventually you’ll find the ones you use most often to attract interest from people who follow particular hashtags. For example, I would tag A Trace of Deceit with #histfic #historical #Victorian #art #bookstagram #authorsofinstagram #mystery #suspense.  #bookstagram is one of the most potent, as the community is very active on Instagram; it is a veritable web of book bloggers, fans, authors, and writers.

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, the "Story She Lives By" is shorthand for the unique aspects of a character that shape the way your main character 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. It also effaces the fact that we think in stories, and I believe we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, other people, and our world all the time, subconsciously.
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The SSLB 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 SSLB 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 SSLB 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 SSLB 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 SSLB (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 SSLB 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 SSLB. 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 SSLB. 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 SSLB. 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 SSLB 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 SSLB 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 SSLB. 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 SSLB does she need to abandon) in order to achieve her goal by the end? 
 
As a last note: 90% of the backstory and SSLB 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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