In a guest post on Janice Hardy’s Fiction University, Laurence MacNaughton offers a simple, 60-second trick for fleshing out background characters. “Too often, when I read an unpublished manuscript, I find incidental characters who seem like they were frozen in place before the story began,” MacNaughton writes. “It’s like they were just standing there, killing time, waiting for the hero to show up.” Nobody wants that.
On the other hand, who wants to spend hours writing up a character that you’ll use for a few paragraphs? To save time, and your story’s momentum, McNaughton suggests a short checklist of character traits that can help flesh out an incidental character in sixty seconds or less.
Comments