Don’t ‘bland’ your secondary characters

Minor characters allow you to vary the kinds of pressure your protagonist is under. They also allow you to vary the tone of your story. Best of all, they give you scope to write a range of strong, fascinating characters because, as long as they do their job in the story, they can be as unique and out there as you can get away with.

Minor characters are there to put pressure on your protagonist. They keep her off-balance by forcing her to make difficult choices she doesn’t want to make.

They might be minor characters in your story, but..

There’s a temptation to think that you need to keep the minor characters small so they don’t overwhelm your central character. You need to do the opposite – make them large and strong, and force your character to step up to meet them.

These characters might be a minor character in your story. But each of them is the central character in their own story. They have their own strong needs and purposes in their world; it’s just that they needed to bounce across into your character’s world to achieve them.

Status and power

Some minor characters achieve their needs through force of personality and the urgency of their needs, and some through shared history – especially family history.

Many do it through larger forces they represent, and the rules and constraints those forces impose. A weak person might not be able to achieve power through their personality, but power finds the disguise it needs.

Many minor characters who would otherwise be weak gain secondhand power through their positions. A police officer, a priest, a crown prosecutor, an interrogator. This is the difference between earned status and granted status.

But while a weak character who has achieved power through their position is likely to need to assert that power, not all powerful people do. A person who has power through both personality and position doesn’t need to play it up.

A forensically clever interrogator doesn’t need to be overtly domineering and bullying. As long as their real power is always present and always creating jeopardy for your protagonist, they don’t need to assert it constantly. You can afford to paint a character like this as charming, soft and caring if we all know there’s an enormous bald man with a large pair of bolt-cutters outside the door.

All the same, ninety per cent of the time, you want your minor characters to be strong and definite. In another world, if the story was about them, they would have to be more nuanced and more susceptible to the forces acting on them.

But in this story they are the disruptor, not the disrupted.

Power finds the disguise it needs.

A passive-aggressive character can be just as powerful, and even more challenging to your protagonist, than an overtly aggressive character. A minor character doesn’t have to steamroll the central character into submission. They can exert just as much power over the protagonist by simply refusing to make any decisions or take any meaningful action.

At least the protagonist can challenge aggression and resist it, whereas passive aggression is designed to be impossible to challenge, especially if it comes with covert power, like a shared family history.

In drama, there is no such thing as a pure victim. Every victim, sooner or later, finds the means to exert the power they need.

Be bold. Have fun.

You can let your imagination run wild with minor characters, especially if we only see them in a single subplot – as long as they are impacting on the central character, and keeping them off balance and forcing them to make choices they don’t want to make.

It is often helpful to associate your minor characters with senses. Give them one strong colour, one strong sound, one strong smell. Anything that helps you be bold with your choices, and to follow that boldness through in your writing.

Doing so will also help you create variation in your minor characters. If you give each minor character their own colour, a sound and smell, you’ll soon realise if you’ve made any of them too similar.

You might want one character to be fire-engine red, with a sound like a rusty gate and the smell of seaweed drying in the sun. But give the other minor characters as many different colours, sounds and smells as you can imagine, and it will help you write them bigger, bolder, and more different.

This will have the added benefit of forcing you to add more colours and shades to your central character, because they will need to respond to them in different ways, to show a different aspect of themselves to each of these many varied characters.

Minor characters are also a chance to add more light and shade to your story. They are especially good for adding humour to a dark story, or darkness to a story that would otherwise risk being lightweight.

I find it helpful to remind myself that, in their world, people will say of a minor character that “You can always count on XXX to do YYY.”

You can always count on Susan to take any opportunity to make mischief with a smile.

You can always count on Gary to take advantage of any doubt or hesitation.

But remember – however much fun you have writing them, always use them to keep the pressure on your protagonist. Otherwise, they become colour and movement for its own sake.

Related Essays:

Give Your Subconscious a Playground
Creating Meaning through Subplots