Minor characters

I was skimming through the Writer's Digest website and I found two articles on minor characters. You can read the articles here and here. I have a bad tendency to vomit minor characters onto the page in my stories and then expect you to remember who everyone is. I also used to have a habit of naming characters with similar sounding names so it was easy to confuse who I was talking about.

Minor characters are important. Unless your character is all alone and doesn't interact with anyone, you're going to have minor characters. Whether they're just walk ons and part of the scenery or someone your readers will need to remember depends on what exactly you want them to do.

Walk ons are just that. They're part of the scenery. A guard, a cook, a maid, a valet, a priest. All of these characters can share scenes with your main character, but they don't play a major role. A line of dialogue or just having them there as part of the scenery to give us an idea what the stage your main character is playing on looks like, these characters are so minor that they'll pass from your reader's mind fairly quickly.

Then there are the minor characters that your main character deals with on a more personal level. A parent, a lover, a husband, a wife, a child, a best friend, a traveling companion. Your main character's going to have more contact with them than a brief passing in the hall or casually noticing them in the room. They're going to be named with at least a minimal amount of description and a few lines of dialogue. These characters you can make stereotypical, or you can make them stand out and break the stereotypes to make them three dimensional characters in their own right.

Your character is going to interact with a plethora of people in your story. Make sure the people who are important are memorable and those that are just part of the setting are unremarkable. Don't pick names that have similar sounds or are the same number of syllables. Give those characters that your main character interacts with regularly some personality quirks so they seem like real people instead of cardboard cutouts.

Writing Wednesday - Minor characters becoming not so minor

Has that ever happened to you?  A minor character you expect to play second fiddle to your main character suddenly steps up and demands your attention?  You find you like them better than you like your MC and even consider changing your story to let this minor creation take the spotlight?

I hope the answer is 'yes', because I know this has happened to me a few times.  I've got a couple stories that started out as something completely different but evolved into their present (roughly written or roughly plotted) form because of a minor character I fell in love with.  I've also written side stories that gave a secondary character his/her own storyline and their own chance on center stage.

In another one of my stories, a character who was supposed to be strictly in the background and only there to be the shoulder for one the MC to cry on has evolved into a major player in the story - to the point where she becomes closer to the MC than a lover or a parent.  She's become an incredibly complex woman who ultimately becomes the perfect partner for this MC.  She's the main force in keeping him from becoming a threat to the world...again.  It's not as complicated as it sounds but she was never meant to hold that kind of power.  She was just meant to be the kindly teacher who became a second mother to him.

Or how about Scat?  If you've seen my ONLY A NAME stuff, you know she's the main character of the story. Originally, Scat was a side character in a completely different story.  She was the slave who ran errands and carried notes for her mistress but that was it.  She wasn't even all that interesting - until I gave her the limp.  Then I wanted to know where the limp came from, where were her parents, had she been born a slave or as something else, etc.  Now she's the star of a book of her own, and her discoveries are pivotal in helping to change how an entire race is born.

For me, if a minor character is so demanding that I have to stop the story to take care of those demands, perhaps I was focusing on the wrong character to begin with.  Or maybe I should take a look at offering a side character a full time starring role in his/her own saga.  Either way, if a minor character wants more than a cameo I'll at least take a look at and listen to them.

What about you?  Has this ever happened to you?  What do you usually do when something like this happens?