Update Time

As you know from last week, currently I’m deep in revising The Wall Of Night #4 (working title: The Chaos Gate.)

With another About The Characters post due on Thursday, it got me thinking about the importance of minor characters in storytelling, as well as the major ones.

And that reminded me (eventually!) that I’d penned a post on the topic away back in 2012 (gulp!), shortly after The Gathering of the Lost came out.

On tracking it down, I decided it was just as relevant now, as then (with a few tweakings), so am reposting it as part of the “From The Backlist” posts.

Enjoy!

Reflections On Minor Characters

“Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about minor characters, in particular how I take as much care with naming them as I do with the main protagonists. In part that’s because changing a name can alter a character’s personality and role in the story.  Even if that’s an entirely positive process, it’s still a dynamic to be aware—if not wary—of, since expanding the list of point-of-view characters inevitably lengthens a book.

A reason why this phenomenon occurs could be “…because characters, it seems, just like real people, have minds of their own. But perhaps that’s because — if I’m doing my job right — within the pages of the book they are real people. They have to be, in fact, in order to live for you on the page.”

The rider I want to add to this prior observation (yes, I do discuss character development reasonably often 😀 ) is that it’s just as true for minor characters as it is for major ones. One of the telling measures of writing quality for me is whether the minor characters, for whatever brief time they are on the stage of the story, live and breathe and are real. When a writer does this successfully it adds depth and texture, as well as conviction, to the story — in my humble opine. 🙂 I know it adds greatly to my personal enjoyment of the read.

One way I like to think about this in my own writing is that even if characters are not important to the story being told, they will be important to themselves. Even the most minor character will have a history and a life that matters to them, and as the writer I have to convey a sense of that, even if the reader will only ever catch the most fleeting glimpse of the character on the page.

To convince, though, the glimpse the reader catches must feel real and three-dimensional—as real and believable as the main characters, albeit for a much shorter period of time.

I greatly admire authors who can do this with a key word or phrase that cements the character convincingly — but without overdoing the page time allowed, given the character’s place in this story (if not their own) is still minor.