Minor and Supporting Characters

I just attended a class at Grub Street in Boston on Minor and Supporting Characters, part of Tim Weed’s Novel Revision Series. Tim is by far my favorite writing teacher. he really gets the balance between instruction and support, and while he offers concrete suggestions that are well-explained, he consistently espouses finding your own way and staying true to your own vision, and trying new things without worrying about criticism.

The class was terrific, but it raised one issue that I can’t stop thinking about, partly because it’s an issue in my own writing. He recommended limiting the number of minor and supporting characters, eliminating some and consolidating two who served a similar function into one in the revision process.

We had discussed the function of such characters in novels, including serving the plot, giving the main characters someone to play off of. I raised the issue of story world. As a reader, I want a book to immerse me in that world, and for me, to feel real and satisfying, that world has to have lots of people. Some books, most notably suspense stories, have only a few characters.

Supporting characters, if they exist at all, are so underdeveloped as to be like fleeting shadows. This renders the story world flat, two dimensional and boring. Its unreality pushes me out of it, back into my own position as a reader of a work of fiction. I’m not convinced it’s real, so I can’t be fully immersed.

I get it that my worlds can be messy, but that texture mirrors the way I experience the world. Never fully grounded, never understanding where I am and what’s going on, assailed by forces that seem chaotic and often random—that’s my life. I’m not convinced by tidy story worlds where the protagonists race together down a narrow hallway, always looking ahead with a clear objective—or back at a clearly drawn pursuer, finally to pop out into the clearing where they slay the baddy or at least bring him to justice.

Work worlds are important in my writing, and they are full of people.

I like George RR Martin, as quoted by Tim: “I always try to keep that in mind—that each minor character who comes on, even if it’s only for one scene, has his own agenda, his own ideas, and he’s not just there to serve the leads, so to speak.”

I like a story world full of minor characters elbowing each other and the reader, demanding attention and whining when they are pushed off the stage—what about me, Goddamnit?!. That feels real, textured, interesting. If readers are left wanting more from them, that’s OK.

Thanks to Tim, I now have fresh ideas on how to introduce and describe such characters. Photographic detail will always have its place, I think, but it was inspiring to learn about all the other ways to do it, and seeing examples by the masters. Great fun! Gotta think up more characters!