When Isaac Newton first came up with the theory of gravity, he presented what seemed like a simple problem. If you have three bodies orbiting around each another, how do you come up with an equation that describes how they move? Two hundred years or so later, mathematicians came up with the answer – you can’t. It’s easy enough to describe two bodies orbiting around one another – the Earth and the Sun, say – but once you throw in more bodies – the moon, for instance, or the other planets – then you can’t really predict what will happen. The extra bodies throw the system into chaos. This is why you’re always seeing news reports about celestial events that won’t happen again until some seemingly arbitrary time in the future.
When you’re writing a novel, you naturally center on your hero or heroine, tracking his or her fears and desires to your big climax. That’s where your story lies. With a mystery, you’ve also got to consider the perspective of a second character, the murderer. Romances, too, involve two characters whose lives circle around one another, as do thrillers that include a well-developed villain. All these stories tell how these two characters orbit one another and come together at the end.
But most stories have more than two characters, which means you’ve also got these other people with their own motives and desires circling around your main characters. How you handle these other characters – how much independence and individuality you give them – can change how much your fictional world feels like real life.
The obvious mistake — and it’s easier to make than you might imagine — is to simplify the other characters to the point where they become props. They don’t really have internal lives or backstories of their own, they’re just there to play a specific role in the story – feeding your readers critical information, or causing some complication at a critical point. Granted, you don’t have to delve deeply into the motives and history of the delivery guy or the cop who pulls the heroine over that one time. Their characters don’t have to amount to more than a couple of telling, idiosyncratic details.
But when your supporting actors – outside the orbit of your one or two main characters, but still players – are nothing more than props, your story is going to feel less authentic. After all, everyone but a complete narcissist knows that other people are living lives as unique and complicated as their own. So if your hero has a friend whose only purpose is to provide comic relief, or if your heroine has an old lover who is only there to play the rival, your readers simply aren’t going to believe in your world.
After Agatha Christie’s first marriage — to a handsome bounder — fell apart, the villain of many of her mysteries was the handsome young man with the evil heart, who was often little more than a plot device. These mysteries are often entertaining as puzzles – she was still Agatha Christie, after all — but they are not her most memorable works, in part because her villains became stock characters with no individuality.
So how do you bring your secondary characters to more convincing life? One exercise that can help is to rewrite key scenes from the point of view of one of the more minor characters. Even though those scenes won’t wind up in the final draft, they force you into the heads of your supporting actors so you can see what your major plot developments look like to them. This makes it easier to give them their own stories. And once your minor characters come to life, what they do might surprise you.
It also might throw your story into chaos. If all of your characters are living their own independent lives, there’s no reason those lives should dovetail together to form a single, well-paced story with nicely-timed twists and occasional surprises. This may be why writers who follow their characters rather than outlining their stories in advance occasionally wind up with an incoherent mess. So how do you hit the right balance between making your minor characters people and making them behave themselves so you can write your story?
Subplots are one way to do it. Humanize your secondary characters by giving them their own, independent plot threads not really connected to the main plot. This lets you people your novel with living human beings without overly complicating your story. Blood Never Dies, one of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ Bill Slider mysteries, lets us watch not only the search for the victim’s identity and pursuit of the killer, but the development of McLaren’s romance with a young lady who has him eating more healthy meals and losing weight (they break up in the end and he goes back to curry and fry-ups). But subplots can still feel artificial, especially if they have little or nothing to do with the main plot. In the real world, our lives are more intertwined than that.
Another way to fold your secondary characters into your story is to have your climax – the moment when the hero’s story resolves – also mean something to the minor characters. If a single event wraps up everyone’s stories at once, then what came before is going to feel more coherent. And you can make the characters’ various stories feel more independent if the climax means something slightly different to all of them. When the couple in your romance finally get together, the rival who loses out may be freed from a nostalgic dream of past romance and be able to move on.
You can also take advantage of the fact that, if all these characters are in the same story, they’re probably connected in some way. The lives of people circling in the same orbit often do dovetail together, with each character’s story affecting all the others. What you’re looking for is the right balance between interconnectedness and independence – minor characters who are unique individuals but not so much that they undermine the structure of the story.
Alice Hoffman’s Practical Magic [spoilers ahead] is a good example of how to do it well. The story centers around two orphaned sisters, Sally and Gillian, raised by a pair of spooky maiden aunts who are (perhaps justly) considered witches in their hometown. The town’s unease with the aunts leaves the girls socially isolated, and the aunts themselves are often cold and demanding. Eventually, the two sisters escape in different ways. Sally marries and settles into a conventional, responsible, boringly ordinary life, remaining single after her husband dies. Gillian takes off at 18 and spends the next years moving from town to town and man to man. Their lives collide once again when Gillian shows up in Sally’s driveway with the body of her latest man, Jimmy, in the car. Together, they bury Jimmy in the garden, and the rest of the story centers on how the sisters reconcile with each other while they deal with the fallout from Jimmy’s death, including being haunted by his ghost.
But there’s also Gary, the investigator looking into Jimmy’s crimes, whose arrival puts extra pressure on Gillian and Sally, but who has his own story of loss and isolation that keeps him from simply playing the role of “the relentless investigator.” Eventually he finds love with Sally, and she with him, which brings both of their stories to a satisfying conclusion.
There’s Sally’s two teenage daughters, Kylie and Antonia, whose own peaceful lives and budding loves are shaken up by Gillian’s arrival and the upheaval that follows. When they are invited to help Gillian and Sally deal with Jimmy at the end, it’s an important part of their coming of age, of being accepted as adults by their mother and themselves. The ending wraps up their stories as well, but it means something different to them than it means to Gillian and Sally.
Then there are the aunts. At the beginning of the story, they are simply a force of nature, two brooding maiden ladies in black presiding over and dominating Gillian and Sally’s lives. Readers only learn their names – Francis and Jet – near the end, after Gillian and Sally turn to them for help in dealing with Jimmy’s ghost. And while brewing potions in Sally’s pasta pot to settle Jimmy’s spirit, they finally have the chance to express the love they never really showed during the girls’ childhoods – as they’d learned they needed to do by watching Oprah.
One reason Hoffman’s book feels so real, despite the magic woven through it, is that all of her characters circle around one another, each on his or her own trajectory, the way we live in real life. Yet all of their lives weave together into a single, well-paced, satisfying story.
Finally, if the music of the spheres doesn’t work for you, here’s another way to look at the question.
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About Dave King
Dave King is the co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a best-seller among writing books. An independent editor since 1987, he is also a former contributing editor at Writer's Digest. Many of his magazine pieces on the art of writing have been anthologized in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing and in The Writer's Digest Writing Clinic. You can check out several of his articles and get other writing tips on his website.
Dave,
I haven’t enjoyed the video yet (people still sleeping here, and no earbuds) so I’ll save it for later. Meanwhile, thank you for talking about secondary characters and subplots. I have four characters whose lives intertwine with the main plot in different ways, and I love your suggestion of writing scenes in their respective POVs. I’m excited to see what new perspectives get revealed. When I think about all this, I think of a braid, which you can’t make with just one strand of hair.
A braid is another excellent metaphor.
Enjoy the video.
By the way, the instrument in the video is the 1883 Hook and Hastings in Trinity Church, Shelburne Falls. The nice people of Trinity let me use it as a practice instrument — and occasional illustration of writing principles.
Oh, and the piece is Vater Unser im Himmelreich by Heinrich Scheidemann (1595-1663).
Sounds like you have the good life! I’d love to hear that ‘in situ’. Must be awesome.
It really is. I’d also pulled a deep, rumbling stop (a 16-foot bourdon for those keeping score at home) on the pedals that really gave the ground line weight. Unfortunately, my phone’s mic and speaker weren’t up to recording something that low-pitched.
Dave, wonderful piece and music! You illustrate beautifully. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this amazing post. As a musician turned writer, you brought this home in a way I could not have imagined. Of course, is all I can say with a quieted heart and new understanding.
Thanks again.
I wonder how many writers out there are also musicians. I know that learning to listen to (and play) baroque counterpoint helps me think in terms of several threads going at once, interacting and harmonizing. It’s a habit of thought that helps me understand plot structure.
Especially helpful since I am currently working on a story with multiple characters and their story arcs. Love the music, too!
Terrific post. Reminds me not to leave my secondary characters hanging out and unresolved at the end. And the baroque piece is simply beautiful. Thanks!
Thanks. And thanks for the coffee.
I’m not sure this would be right for your piece, but there are cases where you can leave minor characters’ stories unresolved at the end — usually as a way to draw readers into the next book of the series.
Hmmmmm . . . there may be another article in that.
That’s probably why my favorite books, as a reader, have been those with multiple viewpoints. In spite of the prevalence of first person POV novels in the crime genre, I’ve always shied away from them. Imagine a movie with a single POV. I suspect it would seem rather shallow, unless really well done.
Naturally, the books I write also have multiple viewpoints. In addition to the three main characters in the series, I usually choose three or four more to use as viewpoint characters, and this leads to several subplots that develop organically within the main plot, since each viewpoint character figures in the mystery.
Thanks for posting! Love the music analogy. BTW, your book has had a prominent place on my reference shelf since 1994.
I loved how you explained the interweaving of characters and plots, but I especially liked how you related it to music. So clever! I will probably always think of that when I’m writing.
Hi, Dave:
Wonderful post — and musical interlude! Sorry I’m a day late — we were in the car for 15 hours yesterday, driving back from a workshop in Seattle.
I’ve heard the interweaving of the main and secondary characters referred to as the Character Web, and I like that metaphor. It suggests that all are interconnected — and can’t get away from each other.
When I teach secondary characters, I define dramatic functions they serve — usually how they support or impede, knowingly or unknowingly, the actions of the main characters. Yes, if you make them merely that, they become plot puppets. The key is to do enough background work on them to understand their own unique motivations for their engagement in the story. Poor secondary characters can’t help but diminish the main characters.
I’m always a sucker for musical metaphors, and the interweaving of melody lines is also a great analogy for how the character have to work together (or conflict with each other) over time, as in a narrative.
Great post. Muchas comidas a penser. Thanks!
I’m really surprised musical metaphors aren’t used more often. The interplay of voices, especially in counterpoint, really mimics the interplay of characters’ lives. Or our lives, for that matter.
Characters coming together for a single event brought to mind Man on Wire. I kept wondering how in the world the writer was going to bring all the stories together. But he did, and did it well.
Thank you for the music! I’m always a fan of comparing music to writing.
Thanks for these great ideas for using minor characters effectively and for the illustration from Practical Magic. And baroque music! Yes, although I’m a novice at music theory, I often use counterpoint as the way to think about characters interacting. What started me down that path was the film The English Patient. Many people found the story sad, but what made me cry was the music under the end titles: the English main theme (written by Yared but sounding like Vaughan Williams), the Hungarian song, and the Bach (German). The three tunes played separately and in combination provided a resolution–a fusion–that the characters in the story did not achieve. And the music made me realize that the true theme the story explored was not love but nationalism, how to come together without sacrificing national identity. Minghella did an amazing job pulling that theme out of the novel (which I loved for different reasons).