Amateur authors and established authors alike often struggle with creating good supporting characters. The modern novel has reduced them to overlooked, dull and artistically-devoid plot devices.
People ignore the need for authenticity in this area because they forget that everything matters in writing. They should know better. Anyone who has ever spent over an hour on a single paragraph should understand the importance of their building blocks. Ignoring “minor” characters to focus on “what matters” is akin to hiring a world-class construction crew, equipping them with expensive tools, and then giving them rotten wood, rusting metal and crumbling brick to work with.
Too often I see implausible solutions for problems shifted onto the backs of otherwise unimportant individuals:
“Isabella was poisoned! Thank God my cousin is the world’s foremost expert in exotic toxins!”
“I have no idea what to do with my life… I’m sure Madame Chavali, our town’s fortune teller can help!”
et cetera… et cetera...
These, for want of a better word, “characters” swoop in, save the day or cause trouble, and leave. Their sole purpose is to further the story... Lacking in individuality, without a spark of humanity, it would be better if they didn’t exist - and you can tell James Patterson I said so!
To the few who still appreciate all aspects of writing, I offer the following tips:
Understand Your Character’s Goals
View characters like people whenever possible. Don’t try to think about who you need to progress the story - think, instead, about who you HAVE, and figure out how you can use them to reach your story goals. Read that again. It’s important.
Do The Best You Can
Let’s say your story has a sort of fantasy/medieval milieu. For whatever reason, you absolutely need a character inside your hero’s castle to spy on certain private meetings, and report his finding back to the evil warlord hiding in the woods with leagues of soldiers at his disposal. Write this character if there’s no avoiding it, but don’t lose sight of WHY would she do this. This is an exercise in thinking that too many writers avoid entirely.
If this character lives in the castle, wouldn’t she have family in the castle or the nearby town? If the answer is “No”, why does she resent your hero - a presumably just, upstanding ruler - enough to betray him? Where is she going to live after his betrayal? Even if she does it for a large sum of money (a little bit of a cop out, but a perfectly fine motive), she needs to know that she can settle down somewhere with her earnings.
A lot of this character’s motivational questions might be answered through the broader question: why do the soldiers outside follow the evil warlord in the first place? Please avoid “money” as the chief answer to this question… but even that is better than the greatest cop-out of all: “Because they are evil.”
Introduce A Few Characters Without Story-Related Purposes
Sometimes, in life, you meet people once, and you never meet them again. That’s okay. The convenient character problem, mentioned earlier, is even more apparent when there aren’t enough minor characters without a necessary function. If there are only a few characters in our terrible fantasy novel, and one of them is a fantastic blacksmith, the reader is going to know that he (or she) is there to make weapons and armor. If there are a lot of characters - a baker, a horse trainer, a few farmers AND a blacksmith, that character’s important role may be somewhat masked.
Give Your Main Characters A Few Friends
This one is bound to offend a few people, but it must be said. A lot, if not most, of the main characters in stories have absolutely no family, and no friends whatsoever. Several even feature leading characters with amnesia who have forgotten who they are and who they know. This is because it’s easier to start from scratch and write about a single character in an unfamiliar setting than it is to fill in what a person’s world might actually be like.
There are exceptions. If your character legitimately would not have any friends (like The Underground Man in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Notes from Underground), that’s perfectly acceptable. If your character is a bubbly teenage girl in high school, this is a serious problem.
Avoid Stereotypes
I already got into this on my post about Seeking Originality, so I won’t say too much here. You know what stereotypes are. Avoid them whenever you can.
Don’t Write Too Much About Supporting Characters
At first, this might seem like a contradiction to what I mentioned earlier. It’s not. Just because you need to know WHY a supporting character acts in the way they do, doesn’t mean you need to go into depth on the various aspects of their lives. It’s sufficient for you as the writer to know that Ricky holds up a liquor store because he can’t afford his medical bills - it’s better if you don’t show the conversation he had with his wife about it two weeks earlier.
Let Your Main Characters Solve Their Own Damn Problems!
Don’t poison a character unless they are either going to die or find the antidote on their own. And if they can’t find it in a realistic way - it’s better they die.