Secondarily

Happy new year to all!

November 2, 2013, Kenzi Anne wrote about her difficulty with secondary characters: Usually I get pretty unique main characters that I feel satisfied with, but I feel like the secondary characters in every one of my stories fit the same mold–like I plop the same character into four different stories and just change the looks. “This is the funny one,” or “this is the brooding one,” or “this is the one that has trust issues and betrays everybody else.” I guess I feel like all of my secondary characters are cliche. When I tried to make them unique, they became too main. How do I make secondary characters interesting and unique, while still keeping them secondary?

Elisa suggested that giving quirks to secondary characters can help distinguish them, and J. Garf wrote, I used to have that problem too, until I started thinking about people I really know. Think about your friends. What makes them different from everyone else? Maybe one of them is really tall. Maybe another only has a sense of humor when it comes to horses or hot air balloons. Maybe one enjoys math and is a total nerd…. I have one character who was the standard, funny and supportive secondary character, and it didn’t take me very long to realize that he was way cliched. So, I edited him and made him seem different from the very beginning. He is part of a group of men that has to be very strong, which he is, but I made him really short for a man. He now has one of those odd personalities that’s so positive that you have a hard time believing that they’re serious, which would be weird if he was the main but he’s just a secondary, so it just makes him interesting. He’s very friendly, immediately. He’s still supporting, and is the funny one, but he’s different enough to make him a unique character. Just make sure that you don’t give too much detail, or too much uniqueness if you want to keep the character secondary.

These are interesting ideas. Something along the lines of J. Garf’s suggestion comes up in Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, a book I found helpful when I started writing. As an exercise, Brande has her reader think of a story she knows well and plug into one of the main characters a real person she also knows well and imagine the result. I thought of Pride and Prejudice and my sister as Elizabeth. In my imaginings my sister would find Darcy way too stuffy. The story would have to find a new direction.

This technique works equally well with secondary characters, and your story doesn’t have to be derailed in the process. Think, for example, of “Snow White.” We have a rich cast of secondaries here in the hunter and the seven dwarfs. Try this prompt: Pick three of the dwarfs and the hunter. Think of four people you know and endow the characters with their personalities. The real four don’t all have to be male. Neither do the dwarfs or the hunter, for that matter. The four are walking through a forest and discussing what to do about Snow White, how to protect her, how to keep her occupied and happy, what the hunter should tell the evil queen. In the middle of the discussion some crisis arises, which could be exterior, like a bear, or interior, like a disagreement–or both. Let your characters show themselves as they would in real life. Be sure to include dialogue. For example, one of the dwarfs could be a person I know who says everything more than once. The dwarf who stands in for her would do the same, and might get interrupted by another dwarf who’s impatient and a tad rude. In the exchange they will each distinguish themselves for the reader and as the scene progresses the reader will be able to pick out each one.

Obviously, we can use this technique on any secondaries who’ve entered our story with nothing more than a stereotype.

I love quirks for secondary characters, who often don’t have to have the depth of mains. They can be all quirks, sometimes just one. For example, I was able to nail King Lionel in The Two Princesses of Bamarre just from his habit of consulting The Book of Homely Truths whenever he has to make a decision or respond to someone. Or in Fairest the library-keeper speaks mostly in book titles.

Often, secondary characters can be as peculiar as we want to make them because the reader isn’t likely to identify with them as much as with our MCs. The reader won’t see herself in the secondary. And they don’t have to carry the full weight of the plot, either. We can fool around. So, for example, Kenzi Anne’s brooding character–let’s call him Hamletti–doesn’t have to worry about ordinary problems, like personal failures or relationships. He can stress out over the danger of plankton eating their way out of the ocean and becoming an invasive terrestrial species, and he can be really despondent over this. If he’s sympathetic, the reader can pity him.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a problem to have more than one story with a secondary who has trust issues–as long as the reasons are different and the manifestations are, too. For example, maybe Johanna, when she feels threatened, retreats into long sessions of Monopoly, playing in her imagination against the person who’s frightened her. But Thomas expresses his fear by writing long letters to the editor of the local newspaper.

I like to make lists of possibilities in my notes. It could go like this: Why does Johanna mistrust?

1. Her parents lied to her about what happened to her puppy.

2. She went to sleep when she was eight in her own bedroom and woke up stretched across two seats in a bus bound for Pittsburgh.

3. The first time she tasted tofu she lost her hearing for a week.

And so on. Maybe whenever a new character meets her, Johanna feels obliged to tell her sad history as a way to protect herself.

If our secondaries threaten to take over our story it may not be because they’re too interesting. More likely it’s because we’re giving them too much stage time. The thrust of the story, the major problems belong to our MCs. The secondaries appear once or intermittently. To keep them from stealing the show, we need to remember what the main problem is and how our MCs are approaching it.

But, if we do fall in love with Johanna and want to tell her story, well, we can change our mind. Or we can finish this story and write a sequel about her.

Here are five prompts:

• List five more reasons for Johanna’s trust issues.

• List eight ways Johanna shows her mistrust.

• List seven other reasons that Hamletti finds to fuel his despondency.

• Both, Johanna and Hamletti, are persuaded by friends to go ice skating. Have them collide, meet, and set each other off. Write what follows.

• Make Johanna and Hamletti into dwarfs in “Snow White.” Write a scene with the two of them and Snow White, but keep Snow White and her problem central to the scene. They’re preparing her, because they suspect the queen is going to show up, and they want her to survive, but their advice is filtered through their own quirky perspectives.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Robin’s Merry Band of Secondary Characters

I recently met an intellectual property attorney (patents and copyright) at a fund raiser for a book festival. We started talking – she’s writing for kids, too – and I told her about the blog and the questions that sometimes arise about copyright, and she offered to write a guest post, so that’s coming up in the next few weeks.

Now for today’s post. On January 26, 2013, Anna Marie wrote, I let a very close friend of mine read a story I wrote and she has recently gotten back to me. One of the things she mentioned was character development, she says I could go a little deeper. I totally agree, but I’m not sure how to effectively and smoothly go about adding deeper details about my characters. The story is in first person present tense, and it switches between two different characters. I’ve tried to tell the story in easier ways (3rd person, 1st person past only one character, etc.) but I keep coming back to the way I’ve got it. Very much like your story EVER which I hadn’t read when I first started but have read since (I must say, it’s pretty awesome). Can you give me any help? It’d be much appreciated.

The problem is with my other characters, my friend said that my MCs came to life very well, but that the others were still just words on a page. My story is a flip off Robin Hood, my MCs a female Robin and a boy who joins the band. The story jumps between their points of view. My trouble is in working character descriptions into the story through them. If that makes any sense whatsoever…

One of my favorite moments in Ella Enchanted, which is told in first-person, past tense, comes when Ella, Hattie, and Olive are in a carriage chased by ogres, and Hattie shrieks, “Eat me last!” If she were in the book for only that moment (she’s not), the reader would still know her: selfish, self-centered, self-involved, self-important, self, self, self.

One trick is to give your minor characters the opportunity to express themselves. Ella could be so frozen with terror in the carriage that she’s oblivious to what’s around her. Instead, she’s scared but she’s thinking about a way to save herself, and the one she comes up with requires the help of her stepsisters. Thus she gives both Hattie and Olive the chance to be their horrible selves.

Another trick, which I think is critical, is to make your MCs observant. If you’ve got an MC who isn’t (that’s fine), you may need to write in the third person – or your reader is going to miss a lot.

Elodie in A Tale of Two Castles and Stolen Magic has to be observant for her job as assistant to a detective dragon. Plus, she’s an actor, and acting calls for observational skills. Addie in The Two Princesses of Bamarre is fearful, and fear calls for heightened alertness. When she goes off to save her sister, her survival depends on her observations.

Power relationships affect the observations of people, and this works for characters, too. We watch those who have power over us the most closely. Teachers and bosses are the victims of this hyper-vigilance. If a teacher, for example, habitually adjusts her bra strap, or if he rubs his nose, or she pulls her ear, pupils notice. They notice everything. If they don’t like the teacher, oy!, these mannerisms become the butt of jokes.

In the Robin Hood story, the boy who joins the band, let’s call him Thomas, may be low in the hierarchy. Say he wants to be accepted, so he pays sharp attention to everybody. If a chapter is told from his POV, he’s going to think about who says what, how it’s said, how the others behave, how they relate to Robin, and his thoughts are going to show up on the page.

The first three out of these five tools of character development – dialogue, action, appearance, feelings, and thoughts – are available for non-POV characters. Suppose the band is walking through Sherwood Forest and we’re in Robin’s POV. She notices that Simon is stepping carelessly as usual and Jack is falling behind. She wonders if Jack’s fever is back. She sees that Melanie’s lips are pursed, which means she’s whistling in her head. These are actions that reveal character, filtered through Robin’s perspective.

Dialogue next. Let’s take careless Simon. The band reaches the safety of their hideout. Robin says, “Simon, if the sheriff had been within a mile of us, he’d have heard us and we’d be trussed up and on our way to the dungeons.”

What Simon says is an opportunity to reveal him. Here are some possibilities, but there are a million more:

“You’re dreaming. I was as quiet as a clam.”
“Your whipping boy at your service. Who would you pick on if you didn’t have me?”
“Sorry, chief! I didn’t mean to.”
“I’ll get it. You’ll be proud of me next time.”
“I can’t keep my mind on my feet. I try. You know I try, don’t you?”

If I were Robin, I’d probably find the last one the most annoying.

More action: Is Simon meeting Robin’s eyes? Is he blushing? Folding his arms across his chest? Tapping one foot? Each is an opening into his character.

Onto appearance. Let’s move into Thomas’s POV, because a character who’s new will have the freshest perspective on everybody else. He’s in the hide-out for the first time and seeing the band at their leisure. Maybe he’s thinking, What am I getting into? This is the legendary band that gives the sheriff apoplexy if even its name is mentioned? Simon is so knock-kneed it’s a wonder he can walk at all. Jack looks like the first strong breeze will blow him away. And I don’t like how caved-in his cheeks are. The band may be short one merry man by next week. I don’t see what the sheriff doesn’t like about Melanie. A smile permanently glimmers in the corner of her mouth. Nothing menacing about such a round, jolly face.

The POV characters can speculate about the thoughts and feelings of the secondary characters, too. If Robin knows that Simon is sensitive, she can think about his easily hurt feelings and couch her criticism in a way that doesn’t distress him – or that does. And characters can say how they feel and what they think. Not as direct a source as actually being in the head and heart of a POV character, but useful.

If you think about these tools, you’ll find yourself building them in, and your secondary characters will put on depth and weight.

Three prompts:

• Maid Marian is being held in the sheriff’s jail. The band that I’ve described needs to get a message to her without being discovered. Write the scene from Thomas’s POV. You can make them succeed or fail.

• Write the christening scene in “Sleeping Beauty” from the POV of one of the fairies. Use her narration to reveal the characters of the king and queen and at least two other fairies. Everyone is trying to keep the evil fairy from doing her worst.

• The next time you go to the supermarket or any big store, watch everyone you see. Notice how they reveal themselves and think what you would do with them if you put them in a story. When you get home, imagine some crisis in the store, whatever you like. Maybe there’s a large rat or a thief, or the power suddenly goes out. It’s night, and it’s suddenly dark outside and in and the power doors won’t open. Or somebody has a heart attack. You pick. Write a story.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Character clamor

On February 3, 2012, CallMeAddie wrote, I also have the problem that I’m trying to make too many of my characters important, and my main characters aren’t feeling so MAIN anymore. Any advice?

The great aspects of this problem are that you (and anyone else in the same pickle) have set up a story world with a lot of complexity and a cast of characters that interests you. You have a problem of abundance, which is much better than a problem of scarcity – but no less frustrating.

(When I say story world I don’t necessarily mean fantasy. Every story, even an utterly realistic one, exists in its own world.)

Of course I understand the impulse to make everybody interesting. We don’t want stick figures walking across our pages. Suppose your characters include five companions, the mother of one of them, the little brother of another, an instructor in the art of making singing puppets, the owner of a lumberyard that sells the wood for the puppets, and a villain who wants to destroy all puppets. The major characters are two of the companions, the instructor, and the villain. Try giving the others no more than two identifying qualities; just one may do. The little brother has a genius for saying the wrong thing. The mother interrupts the companions’ work to offer creature comforts – pie, cookies, pillows, blankets – that nobody wants. The lumberyard owner shortchanges her customers, and the companions always have to check they’re getting the kind of wood they asked for. Etc. Each of these is enough to hint at depth for the reader. We don’t have to do more.

If your secondary characters are stealing the show, could be that the plot as well as your mains is being undermined. After all, it’s the mains’ troubles that drive the story car. If you’re caught up in the miseries and quirks of your secondaries, the car may be wandering on flat side roads rather than climbing the mountain to the story summit.

For most stories mains mean one or two or conceivably three characters. I have two mains in my novel Ever: Kezi, a mortal girl who may soon die, and Olus, the god of the winds, who loves her. The narration alternates chapter by chapter from one to the other. The thrust of the story is the effort to save Kezi. A second very important strand is their growing romance. But some of the other characters intrigued me, especially in Olus’s pantheon of gods, several of whom sleep their immortal lives away, out of boredom. There’s also Puru, the god of fate, who wishes for happy outcomes but can do nothing to bring them about. They’re tragic figures, and I would have liked to explore them, but if I had, my story would have seeped away.

If your minor characters are screaming to be brought to full life, you have options. You can promise them their own stories if they’ll shut up. Then trim them back to definite secondary status in the one you’re working on. If you have to, in order to satisfy them, write a page or two of the story for each. Or you can write these stories completely. There’s no law dictating the sequence of your creation. However, the deal is that in these new stories, the less important characters remain so.

Or consider whether some of the fascinating aspects of these lesser characters (lesser only in terms of your story) can be loaded onto your mains. Maybe the lesser guys appeal to you because your mains aren’t developed enough. Suppose Puru, the god of fate in Ever, bows compulsively in a vain attempt to appease the forces that cause bad outcomes. Imagine Olus picks up this odd practice. He’s seen Puru do it and figures there must be a value, and what harm can it do? Now that the gesture belongs to Olus, we don’t ever have to see Puru do it, we can just be told in a sentence that he does. And Olus’s bowing can become more frequent, deeper, and more frantic as he gets increasingly worried about Kezi. (I didn’t do this in the book; it never occurred to me.)

Or you can press on. Let the minor characters do their things and discover in the writing what you need and what you don’t. Then fix and trim in revision. Maybe you’ll discover as you keep going that you’ve picked the wrong mains, and your story really is about Jeff and Judy, not Marie and Mark.

Can you have more than three mains? Maybe. If you have a proliferation of important characters, you may want to frame the story in another way. Imagine a theater tale, and suppose the issue at issue is the production, not the lead. Maybe this is a community theater and the soul of the town is at stake if the theater goes under. So we see that the director is having a creative crisis and the great lady of the troupe can no longer memorize her lines and may be on her way to dementia. And the male lead, who is really good, has lost his job and may have to relocate. And the set designer and the costume master are feuding. And the building itself that houses the theater needs electrical work and is a fire hazard. Somehow they all have to pull together to save the day. Any group activity will work for this approach. Bat 6 (upper elementary school and up) by Virginia Euwer Wolff is an example of a novel with a big cast of main characters that works amazingly well.

Here are three prompts:

∙ Write the puppet-making story. What do the mains want? What’s the purpose of the singing puppets? Write enough of the story to introduce the mains and at least some of the secondaries, who may not all come into the story right away. You can use the distinguishing qualities I suggested or make up other ones. If you like, keep going.

∙ An interesting aspect of The Wizard of Oz, book or movie, is that the wizard, a major character, doesn’t appear until late in the game. Before then, he’s spoken of, and his effects are felt. Write a story along the same lines. A main character is evident by her absence, but her influence is ever-present (or frequently present). She can be villain or heroine.

∙ Write a collaboration story, like the theater one I suggested. The problem could be an underdog team (any sport, ice hockey, swimming, laser sword fighting) winning a championship. Could be the survival of the human race against aliens, a pandemic, robots. Could be whatever. Introduce quirky main characters, at least five, who have issues that may both help and hurt the joint effort.

Have fun, and save what you write!

Disappearing secondaries

On May 13, 2011, bluekiwii wrote, ….I often have the problem that I concentrate solely on one character as I do a scene and the result is that I often neglect the other characters in the scene –making his/her speech patterns, overall behavior, and, well, “character” inconsistent. This often happens because I’m so in tune with the main character’s mind-set, that I sort of forget the mind processes that the characters reacting to the MC have. How do guys avoid this?

In A Tale of Two Castles, the ogre Count Jonty Um is usually with his dog Nesspa, who’s important to the story, but, since this isn’t a talking-animal tale, he doesn’t speak. As I wrote I tended to forget the dog was there, and the reader would forget, too. Then, when he comes into the action, the reader has to leave the story for a moment to think, Nesspa? Then the reader may page back to make sure Nesspa was in the scene to begin with. By that time the reader is feeling sleepy or hungry or checking to see what her own dog is doing, and the book is closed to be picked up later or never again.

The solution was to cause a refrain to go through my head as I wrote and as I revised. Where’s Nesspa? When did I mention him last? Put him in. Put him in. Put him in.

Since he doesn’t talk, I needed other ways to bring him forward. Count Jonty Um, who loves him, could look around for him. Elodie, my POV character, could think about him or make sure he isn’t putting his nose where his nose shouldn’t be. Somebody could give him a command or say something else to him. Or he could bark, snuffle, whine, put his head in somebody’s lap. When you write this kind of situation, your mentions can and probably should be short, but a page shouldn’t go by without one.

In Beloved Elodie which I’m working on now, Count Jonty Um himself is the problem. In A Tale of Two Castles, he’s central to the action so he never fades into the background. But in the new book he’s not the focus and he does tend to disappear, for all he’s eleven feet tall. Trouble is, he’s shy and not talkative; he can speak, but he rarely does. I have to treat him almost as if he’s a dog, give him actions, have Elodie think about him, have a character speak to him or ask him a question, forcing him to speak.

I’ve decided to intersperse chapters here and there from other characters’ POV, including Count Jonty Um’s. One reason for doing this is to bring the ogre more to the fore. If I’m writing from his POV the reader hears his thoughts.

If you neglect characters in a scene, you keep happy accidents from happening. Let’s say the star of a scene is Harlin, who, along with his friends, Jana and Sylvie, is in the wizard Florian’s stronghold and meeting the wizard for the first time. Florian has been causing havoc in the friends’ home town: tornados, spontaneous fires, rampaging bears on Main Street. The friends have designated Harlin as their spokesman. The temptation will be to focus on Harlin and the wizard, but if we do, we may not give Jana a chance to surreptitiously lift the edge of a wall hanging and see a secret door behind it. We may not be aware that Sylvie thinks Harlin is bungling things, and she’s getting angrier and angrier until she has to burst into speech. Maybe she provokes Florian into revealing something he doesn’t want to tell.

Part of the solution to bringing your secondaries in is mechanical, merely a matter of reminding yourself until it’s automatic that there are four people in the scene, and all of them have thoughts, feelings, actions. Although you don’t have direct access to your non-POV characters’ thoughts and feelings, your main can guess at them or they can express them in dialogue and action. So, get a reminder refrain going as I do, both while you write and as you revise.What’s doing with my secondaries? What are they doing, thinking, feeling, saying?

The rest of the solution is to ask yourself questions about your subordinate characters, to get interested in them in this scene in which they aren’t the most important actors. How does Jana react when Florian pulls out his wand? Why is Sylvie crossing her arms? What got Florian muttering in a language nobody else understands?

You might try recasting your scene, just in your notes, not in the ongoing story. In my example, I’d make Jana the main for the purposes of the exercise. She might be the one to speak to Florian, or, Harlin may still be the speaker, but the scene is told by Jana, focusing on what she notices and thinks and feels. Then you can write it again from Sylvie’s POV and Florian’s. When you have all four versions, you can roll them together, probably omitting a lot from Jana, Sylvie, and Florian, but still coming up with a more rounded whole.

And, as always, it can be helpful to have someone read your scene and say if your secondary characters seem to disappear and where that happens. This someone may also see opportunities to show them off.

Alas, I have the opposite problem, a tendency to let my secondaries steal the show. In Fairest, for example, I became fascinated by Queen Ivi and Skulni, the being in the mirror. I wrote scenes for them that had no place in the story, and when they were in scenes with my main, Aza, I gave them too much attention. The manuscript called forth an eighteen page, single-spaced letter from my editor, much of which was about the pages and entire chapters I should cut – sections I had spent months writing.

The downside, of course, is the wasted time and energy. The upside is that I got to know these intriguing characters, and they live for me outside the book that got published. (Too bad for the reader!) Often my side characters are even more interesting than my main, who has to be sympathetic and normal enough for the reader to identify with. There’s no restriction on secondary characters; they can be wild, eccentric, downright peculiar. If you let them breathe and expand in the scenes they’re in, they may dazzle you with their exotic natures.

Here are a few prompts:

• Write four versions of the scene with Harlin, Jana, Sylvie, and wizard Florian, one from the POV of each. Then write a composite scene in third-person omniscient. Decide which you like best. Rewrite your pick so that your main is dominant but the others also shine.

• Write the story “Snow-White and Rose-Red” from the point of view of the bear. Then write it from the point of view of the dwarf. (If you don’t know this fairy tale, I found a synopsis on Wikipedia.)

• Write the scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Elizabeth first meets Wickham from Wickham’s POV. And/or write the dance scene in which Elizabeth first meets Darcy from the POV of Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte. And/or pick a scene in a different book you know well and write it from the POV of any side character.

Have fun, and save what you write!