Have Fun With Minor Characters

Creating characters for fiction can seem impossible. Mountains of books and posts have been published giving acres of advice, some of it contradictory. Main and major characters should be realistic and relatable. Likable. No, not likable. Intriguing. Flawed but heroic. Peanut butter but jelly. After working so hard to make our characters ones readers want to spend time with, it’s a relief to have fun with minor characters. I don’t have to worry about how they are growing and changing through the plot. Minor characters serve a limited purpose, so I can tinker with them as much as I want as long as they accomplish what I need them to in a particular scene.

Feel Like Stretching Your Writing?

If you feel like your major characters, great as they are, have confined you to a certain type of personality, experiment with minor characters who are very different from your major ones. My main character, amateur sleuth Rae Riley, is reserve and/or shy with a sense of humor based on observations. So I might make a minor character more outgoing or outrageous to widen the variety of characters in my story.

Let’s say Rae needs to talk to a woman working at the post office. I could write the woman as extremely chatty, going off on tangents left and right, making it hard for Rae to find out what she wants to know.

Even better, I could have two minor characters play off each other. The chatty postal worker could work with a woman as gloomy as Eeyore the donkey from the Winnie-the-Pooh stories. The contrast would be a ton of fun to work with.

Choose Minor Characters from the Setting

Think about the setting your scene is taking place in. What kind of people do you normally find in that setting? Let’s say your main character is a mom who is waiting in the principal’s office to have a meeting with her. Who would you find in the principal’s office of an elementary school? One or more secretaries, teachers coming in and out, students coming in and out. Possibly other non-teaching staff, like the school nurse or speech therapist. Any of those could be used to freshen this scene.

You could also toss in unlikely people you’d find in the office. Like a single uncle who got stuck delivering his nieces and nephews to school that day. Or a toddler who escapes from Mom while she waits for her second-grader to come to the office for an appointment.

Here are more tips on writing characters.

What story had memorable minor characters?

July 24, 2025 0

How to Write Characters Who Are Leaders

Giving advice on how to write characters who are leaders is a bit complicated because there are so many different kinds of leaders. Leading soldiers into battle requires a different kind of leadership from leading volunteers at a church or students in a classroom. But you can ask yourself some basic questions for any kind of leader as you create him or her.

Effective or Ineffective Leader?

Is your character good at whatever kind of leading you want him to do? Or is she in over her head? If the answer is yes to the second question, you can concoct a variety of reason for her ineffectiveness. For example:

Lack of skill, talent or training
Received position due to nepotism. For a stunning example of an ineffective leader, you should watch the 1956 movie Attack. An officer has been promoted to captain during WW II due to who is father is, and his incompetence is getting his men killed.
Ambition exceeds ability
Personal problems, such as taking care of a chronically sick spouse or relative

But if your character is an effective leader, the next question you should ask is …

Good or Bad Leader?

We’ve already decided this character can lead. But does he do it in a good or bad way? If he leads in a good way, there are numerous routes toward making him a believable leader. He may lead with charisma or by being transparent or likable or personable or many other admirable attributes. One of my favorite novels is Watership Down, the story of a band of rabbits trying to survive the English countryside while establishing a new warren. Two of the leaders, Hazel and Bigwig, have very different styles and yet are both effective leaders. I found it interesting to learn that the author Richard Adams based the two characters on two officers he served with during World War II.

If she’s an effective but bad leader, her flaw usually comes down to leading through fear. That use of fear can be deployed into two main ways: aggression or manipulation. The aggressive leader is a bully. People under him fear his intimidating or humiliating tactics. The manipulative leader keeps the people under her off balance. No one knows what she’s doing behind the scenes, who will be let go next, or even what the rules are because she can change them without notice. And you can have a leader character who combines aggression and manipulation.

What books or shows have memorable characters who are leaders?

July 17, 2025 0

How to Write Sneaky Characters

My advice on characters today concerns how to write sneaky characters. I had to create one in my second novel, A Storm of Doubts, and he proved to be a challenge.

What Do I Mean by Sneaky Characters?

Since I write mysteries, of course the guilty party is always sneaky because he or she has to cover their tracks after committing the crime. But for this post, I’m referring to characters who are sneaky by nature. The weaselly police informant who will tell the cops anything for a price, making his information suspect. The high school girl who is so sweet to everyone’s face and yet anyone who associates with her is always caught up in some kind of drama.

These are characters whose actions, words, and expressions mask their real thoughts and feelings. A writer can approach this character one of two ways–either, the main character (MC) is completely taken in by the performance and the revelation of sneaky character’s true intentions is a big plot twist. Or the MC is suspicious of the sneaky character to begin with or soon after meeting him but has trouble deciding if the character is a sneak or trustworthy.

By the way, if you want your MC to be the sneaky character, you are allowed. Just remember–most readers enjoy a book because the MC is someone they want to spend time with. A sneaky MC could get very old, very fast.

Creating a Sneaky Character

In A Storm of Doubts, I adopted the second way of developing a sneaky character. Rae’s Uncle Troy returns to Marlin County, Ohio, where he grew up. Everyone there knows he’s a grifter, so Rae, my MC, is suspicious of him from the start.

I’ve read a lot about grifters and realized Troy would never be aggressive or combative in any situation. Grifters don’t want to bully you into doing what they want. They want to entice and manipulate you. This is harder to write than a blunt bully. A bully’s intentions are obvious and therefore easy to convey to the reader. Showing Troy entice and manipulate Rae was much harder because I had to write him in subtle lines.

What helped me was to realize Troy would agree to anything anyone said if it gave him an advantage. Unlike a lot of characters, who would take offense at being criticized, Troy goes along with the criticism because agreeing with someone puts him in a position to get closer to them. He’s like a snake who can pivot and twist in any direction he thinks necessary.

In this scene, Rae’s dad, the sheriff, is questioning Troy.

“You need to come up with better excuses.” Dad put away his notepad. “You made a mistake two years ago, and I got jumped. You made a mistake today and put my daughter in danger. You can’t keep saying you make mistakes, Troy. You’re forty-three. Not fourteen.”

Tory sighed, his tiny mouth drooping. “I’m just not as smart as you are. “

I also use several two-person scene between Rae and Troy so I have the time to describe in more details his expressions and mannerisms and how Rae analyzes them to figure out what her uncle’s true intentions are.

Have you tried to write a sneaky character? What helped you to write them? Who is a convincing sneaky characters in a book or show?

July 10, 2025 0

How to Write Shy or Stoic Characters

The month of July is all about characters here at JPC Allen Writes. This is my favorite element of writing fiction. I can’t get started on a story until I have a good grasp of the main characters. For my weekly tips, I’m going to focus on certain types of characters, kicking off with how to write shy or stoic characters.

The Problem with Shy or Stoic Characters

Shy or stoic characters present a particular problem with the prevalent style of show, don’t tell. Show, don’t tell is becoming more and more visual, as Janice Hardy points out in her book Understanding Show, Don’t Tell ( and Really Getting It). People expect to be able to “see” a story like they do movies. So expressive characters with broad mannerisms and incisive, funny, or simply lots of dialogue are easier to build on the page. The subtleties an actor uses to convey a character’s shyness or stoicism can be difficult to put into words.

Drawing Attention to Shy or Stoic Characters

I have a few shy or stoic characters, and they’ve stretched my writing skills as I’ve tried to construct them realistically.

Chris Kincaid is a possible boyfriend for my main character, young adult amateur sleuth Rae Riley. He’s twenty-three with a fierce features that usually mask his true emotions. One way I’ve dealt with Chris’s lack of expression is for Rae to notice and correctly deduce what slight changes in his facial features mean. Rae is the kind of character who notices small details like that because she’s also an amateur photographer. So when she sees a muscle tense a ong his jaw or his eyebrows raise more than millimeter, she knows he’s experiencing a strong emotion. It’s also fun to write because I can make it funny.

“I don’t know what to do.” The muscle along Chris’s jaw tightened.

Wow. I didn’t know Chris found the situation so infuriating.

Another character, Luke Norris, is in his sixties and basically a shy man. He’s the father of Rae’s uncle. One way I can convey that trait is to place him on the outskirts of group scenes.

As the church members lined up for the potluck dinner arrayed on the various tables, Mr. Norris waited near the front door, tugging on the end of his moustache.

When he does speak, I need to make every word count even more than with other characters because he’d only speak when he felt it was necessary.

Other ways to convey shyness are hiding techniques–pressing into a wall, using an object as a shield, avoiding eye contact, shrinking into themselves, focusing on a task or object rather than a person.

Stoicism can be shown with mannerisms instead of dialogue. Nods or shakes of the head instead of “Yes” or “No”. Leaving a scene when angry or upset without a word.

What words or mannerisms have you seen a shy or stoic person use? Who is a memorable shy or stoic character?

Here are more tips on writing characters for novels.

July 3, 2025 1

Reveal Character Traits through Music

Since this month’s theme is about how other arts influence our writing, today I’m reposting about how to reveal character traits through music. A character’s relationship to music is a less common way to show parts of their personality and can freshen your character descriptions.

You are Your Music

My teen detective Rae Riley is, first and foremost, an amateur photographer. It’s the way she sees the world. But, like a lot of creative people, she enjoys other arts. She played drums in her high school marching band and jazz band. Making her a drummer gives her personality another layer. She’s playing an instrument that leans more toward males, so some might see her choice as unusual or offbeat (ha!).

When I was in band, certain personalities tended to pick certain instruments. The Type A, straight arrows played flute and trumpet. The clarinet was the everyman or woman of the band. The more quirky kids picked trombone, saxophone, or percussion. My character’s choice of instrument can say a lot about who he or she is.

If you need to draw disparate characters together, making them all musicians gives them a common interest and a plausible reason for people who might not normally associate with each other to interact. In A Shadow on the Snow, Rae joins three young police officers in jam sessions because they play outlaw country music for fun and didn’t have a drummer. (Yes, it’s supposed to be funny that cops like outlaw country.)

The fact that these Gen Z cops are playing music from the 70’s says something about their personalities. Houston, who sings lead and plays lead guitar, explains how he can’t stand current country music. His love for outlaw country can mean any number of things. Maybe he’s not concerned with following popular trends. Or he doesn’t like how big business takes over an art form; he likes art for art’s sake. Or he just likes to be different, to stand out from the crowd.

When Rae and the cops take a break from jamming, they play songs from their playlists. I can use their choices to say something about their characters. Since Rae doesn’t know the three young men well, she hesitates over her selections because her playlist contains what she considers some pretty obscure songs. So she picks more popular songs. Her choice shows her uncertainty in this new social situation. Out of the four characters. the bass player is the only one to pick instrumental pieces instead of songs. I can use that deviation from the other characters to reveal something about him.

Now it’s your turn. Have you written or read about characters who love music? How did the author use music to show character?

For more tips on character development, click here.

April 10, 2025 1

Category: Characters