Keep Minor Characters Minor

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Photo courtesy “There’s an old joke in the theater about the annoying minor player who constantly asks the director, ‘What’s my motivation?’ but that is exactly the question you should be asking about your secondary characters,” Allen says. 

Allen’s advice includes:

  • Give your secondary characters their own goals and motivations. You can’t put your supporting characters’ entire backstory on the page, but you should know some or a lot of it. Understanding what your minor characters want and why can help you choose the right actions and reactions to support your protagonist and your overall story.
  • Don’t add too many secondary characters and subplots. Once you’ve given your secondary characters motivation and backstory, resist the urge to create more or let them take center stage, Allen says. “If you give each secondary character a subplot, you’re going to have the reader flipping the pages back to previous chapters, trying to remember who this is and why we’re suddenly in Southeast Asia with a bunch of smugglers who deal in old German auto parts,” she writes.
  • Cut or consolidate extra characters. We love our characters, but we don’t have to use them all at once in the same story. “If you have this problem, sometimes you’ll find several characters can be combined into one,” Allen says. “Maybe you don’t need the sassy best friend if there’s also a feisty grandma your protagonist confides in.”
  • Keep minor characters minor. Your Uber driver, pizza delivery person, or uniformed cop probably don’t need significant backstory or attention. “Unless one of these characters plays an important role later, don’t draw the readers’ attention to them,” Allen advises. “They help the story function, and they can be colorful, but we don’t want to give them names or get into their internal lives or the reader will be too overloaded with information to follow the main story.”
  • Let genre dictate the number of secondary characters. How many is too many? It depends. A mystery needs suspects, so you’ll probably need a dozen. An epic fantasy might have multiple dozens and an intimate family drama only 3 or 4. Pay attention to their role in the story and you’ll have a good start on making them individuals while keeping them in check.

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