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?
