Could your secondary characters be stars?
I embraced my own Fuck It Fall mantra last weekend and escaped the unseasonable chilly fog in San Francisco to soak up some sun and warmth on a quick camping trip to Napa Valley. After a very full work day, we scrambled around doing all of the prepping and packing we hadn’t squeezed in earlier, and a few hours later we pulled into a camping site with a yurt, a fire pit, a picnic table, a lot of vocal crickets and frogs, and not much else.
Saturday we followed a trail that led us past an old cemetery, where we stopped to find out what stories these gravestones might tell us. A trio of graves suggested one: Rebecca Jane Kellogg, who died in June 1861, “Aged 40 Years & 15 days”; next to her, the grave of another Rebecca Jane Kellogg, “Aged 13 yrs. 10 m’s & 6 d’s.,” who died in March 1859; and Mary Ellen Kellogg, “Aged 1 yr. 10 m’s & 29 d’s.,” who died just two months later in May 1859. A mother, lost before her time, laid to rest two years after the deaths of two young daughters.
Arriving at the nineteenth-century grist mill at the end of the trail, we heard about another Kellogg—this one the man who expanded the mill and added a thirty-six-foot water wheel that allowed the mill to grind thousands of pounds of grain a day to feed the masses pouring into Northern California following the Gold Rush.
We heard the story of Florentine Kellogg, the husband of one Rebecca and father of the other, from the mill docent, a man who was living his best life that afternoon as he told story after story to a small group of listeners. He started with Edward Turner Bale, an English immigrant who was given nearly 18,000 acres of land in the northern Napa Valley after serving as surgeon for the Mexican Army in California and marrying Maria Ignacia Soberanes, the niece of Mexican General Mariano Vallejo. It was Maria Soberanes Bale who expanded the mill after her husband’s death in 1849.
Each story the docent told featured a secondary character that would spin off into yet another story in which that character was the star. After about an hour, a new group entered the mill, and the docent seamlessly looped the story he was telling back around to Bale before spinning off again to tell a story about trench warfare during World War I in the Marne Valley, the place where the mill’s original nineteenth-century grinding stones were quarried.
On the hike back, I was thinking about how important it is for secondary characters in novels to give the readers the sense that every one of them could be the star of their own novel. As Chuck Wendig puts it in Damn Fine Story, “Supporting characters don’t know they’re supporting characters. They are the protagonists and heroes of their own stories.”
Can you, as the writer, imagine what every secondary character’s story would be? What is this character’s core need and pathological maneuver? What does this character need, and how is that different from what they think they want? (For series authors, this is an excellent way to identify secondary characters who can become the protagonist of a future book.) Can you sum up a character’s entire backstory in a single sentence? Here’s a beautiful example from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, a single sentence about another mother who died before her time: “Lady Elliot had been an excellent woman, sensible and amiable; whose judgement and conduct, if they might be pardoned the youthful infatuation which made her Lady Elliot, had never required indulgence afterwards.”
Wendig covers the topic of secondary characters in great depth in Damn Fine Story, offering up some key questions and tests you can apply to your own characters:
Is this character on a journey that is parallel to your protagonist or perpendicular to it? (In other words, do they share a goal or have competing goals?) What would happen if you changed the direction at some point during the narrative?
Is this character a “unitasker” or a “multitasker”? As Wendig defines it, a multitasker character is one “who pushes on the plot, who ably represents the theme, and who isn’t just a precious peacock there to preen and look pretty.” (If there are darlings to be murdered in your book, they might be hiding among your secondary characters.)
Does each character get at least “three moments to exist, but ideally to do something that emblemizes the character or furthers the plot”?
Secondary characters are often grouped around settings, so that’s another way to think about them:
What kinds of people exist in this kind of setting, and how many do you need to make it feel real?
How can you mix up these sets of secondary characters later in the book to create new combinations and clashes?
Austen’s novels are a master-class in how to get the most value out of secondary characters, and how moving a character from one setting to another creates narrative fireworks. Think, for example, of Lady Catherine de Bourgh showing up at the Bennett household near the end of Pride and Prejudice. Take a look at the story spreadsheet I put together for Persuasion and note how Austen uses Lyme Regis and Bath as settings that allow her to mix together groups of characters with competing agendas.
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