Supporting characters…
Many novels have a large cast of characters. The main characters, protagonist(s) and villain(s), always capture the readers’ attentions, but supporting ones are also important. The main characters interact with them and that makes them all seem a bit more human, assuming they all act like real people to begin with. Every character is an actor on a stage where the stage is your fiction story.
Pirandello wrote the somewhat schizophrenic drama Six Characters in Search of an Author. The problem he describes is often not the real one, though. Sometimes supporting characters are so good that they seem to clamor for top billing in other novels. That happened to me with Ashley Scot, for example, the DHS agent who’s friends with Detectives Chen and Castilblanco. Even the detectives wanted her to have her own book. I gave Ashley top billing in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan. Ashley did a great job. Detective Castilblanco is reduced to a cameo role.
Another example from my own oeuvre is found in Esther Brookstone and Bastiann van Coevorden. Esther, the Scotland Yard Inspector from the Art and Antiques Division, was only a supporting character in The Collector; Bastiann, an Interpol agent, played supporting roles in Aristocrats and Assassins and Gaia and the Goliaths. In The Collector and Gaia and the Goliaths, they were already a bit romantically involved. That romance really bloomed when I gave them their own novel, Rembrandt’s Angel; that romance is only part of the story in that book.
In my next major novel, The Last Humans, which will be published by Black Opal Books, no secondary character is clamoring for her or his own novel. Benjamin Thomas, the ex-physicist affectionately called Ben Hur, is an important secondary character, though, and he insisted I include one of his poems at the beginning of the book. Time will tell if that’s suffice to keep him satisfied.
People often say “It takes a village.” That applies to the best novels. Some secondary characters are important to the main plot, others not, and still others participate in subplots. As the village is populated, a short story becomes a novella and the novella becomes a novel. That’s an evolutionary process that represents a lot of the fun in writing fiction.
The danger of secondary characters is that they can become caricatures—2D representations of humanity. Or worse, they can become parodies of the main characters. It’s not easy to make all these characters seem real, but that’s more challenging for the secondary ones. The author will spend less time developing them a fortiori, so s/he has to be careful.
One place where many authors fail is naming secondary characters. Their names have to be as carefully chosen as the main characters’ names unless they’re just what a movie director might call “extras.” The same goes for their personalities. Time is needed to develop them too.
The longer the novel, the more characters there are, and vice versa. In Rembrandt’s Angel, my longest novel to date, I included a list of all the characters. In my new book, The Last Humans, I probably won’t. There are two reasons: it’s about the post-apocalyptic journey of Penny Castro, and she tells her story in the first person. The reader will remember her adopted family well enough by the end—Ben Hur is one of them—and that’s what mostly counts.
As a reader, I’ve found books where I wish I had a list of characters; with other books, I wonder why the author bothered to include one. Maybe for readers who read more than one novel at a time (guilty as charged, but I still don’t often need the character list). As a writer, I always have a working character list, together with a brief description of each one, and that helps me as the novel writing progresses. I make the decision before sending the manuscript out to anyone else whether to include an edited version.
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Note: Why are all the links above to ebooks on Smashwords? Because that online retailer provides better service to readers than Amazon. It offers all ebook formats, including .mobi (Kindle), distributes to other retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc), offers ebooks to lenders (Overdrive, etc), and allows me to sell ebooks at a reduced price to public libraries. Amazon does none of that. For those who insist on Amazon, here’s the link to my Amazon author page. I try to reach out to all readers, no matter what their preferences are.
In libris libertas….
