{"id":40,"date":"2014-01-08T14:40:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-08T14:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/08\/secondarily\/"},"modified":"2015-05-23T23:17:07","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T23:17:07","slug":"secondarily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/2014\/01\/08\/secondarily\/","title":{"rendered":"Secondarily"},"content":{"rendered":"
\nHappy new year to all!<\/div>\n
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\nNovember 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?<\/i><\/div>\n
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\nElisa 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.<\/i><\/div>\n
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\nThese are interesting ideas. Something along the lines of J. Garf\u2019s suggestion comes up in Becoming a Writer<\/i> 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<\/i> 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.<\/div>\n
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\nThis technique works equally well with secondary characters, and your story doesn\u2019t have to be derailed in the process. Think, for example, of \u201cSnow White.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2013or 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\u2019s 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.<\/div>\n
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\nObviously, we can use this technique on any secondaries who’ve entered our story with nothing more than a stereotype.<\/div>\n
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\nI love quirks for secondary characters, who often don\u2019t 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<\/i> just from his habit of consulting The Book of Homely Truths<\/i> whenever he has to make a decision or respond to someone. Or in Fairest<\/i> the library-keeper speaks mostly in book titles.<\/div>\n
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\nOften, secondary characters can be as peculiar as we want to make them because the reader isn\u2019t likely to identify with them as much as with our MCs. The reader won\u2019t see herself in the secondary. And they don\u2019t have to carry the full weight of the plot, either. We can fool around. So, for example, Kenzi Anne\u2019s brooding character\u2013let\u2019s call him Hamletti–doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s sympathetic, the reader can pity him.<\/div>\n
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\nI don\u2019t think it\u2019s 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\u2019s frightened her. But Thomas expresses his fear by writing long letters to the editor of the local newspaper.<\/div>\n
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\nI like to make lists of possibilities in my notes. It could go like this: Why does Johanna mistrust?<\/div>\n
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\n1. Her parents lied to her about what happened to her puppy.<\/div>\n
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\n2. 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.<\/div>\n
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\n3. The first time she tasted tofu she lost her hearing for a week.<\/div>\n
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\nAnd so on. Maybe whenever a new character meets her, Johanna feels obliged to tell her sad history as a way to protect herself.<\/div>\n
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\nIf our secondaries threaten to take over our story it may not be because they\u2019re too interesting. More likely it\u2019s because we\u2019re 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.<\/div>\n
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\nBut, 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.<\/div>\n
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\nHere are five prompts:<\/div>\n
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\n\u2022 List five more reasons for Johanna\u2019s trust issues.<\/div>\n
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\n\u2022 List eight ways Johanna shows her mistrust.<\/div>\n
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\n\u2022 List seven other reasons that Hamletti finds to fuel his despondency.<\/div>\n
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\n\u2022 Both, Johanna and Hamletti, are persuaded by friends to go ice skating. Have them collide, meet, and set each other off. Write what follows.<\/div>\n
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\n\u2022 Make Johanna and Hamletti into dwarfs in \u201cSnow White.\u201d Write a scene with the two of them and Snow White, but keep Snow White and her problem central to the scene. They\u2019re 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.<\/div>\n
\n<\/div>\n
\nHave fun, and save what you write!<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[47],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gailcarsonlevine.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}