When Secondary Characters Demand the Spotlight
By Martha Reed
When I’m introduced to a new series, it doesn’t matter if the storyline comes via a book, a movie, or TV, and I’m open to any setting. But if the crime fiction or mystery series is going to engage my active monkey brain and continue to hold my interest, it must offer a wide-ranging ensemble cast with plenty of individual and interesting character development. Cardboard cutouts and one-dimensional characters are not for me.
Developing a supporting ensemble cast is a creative balancing act because while it offers a fertile field of fresh and unforeseen possibilities, you don’t want to lose your protagonist in the crowd. You’ll need to invent just the right number of secondary characters to keep your story lively and fresh without confusing the reader.
And while individual crimes and misdemeanors and their solutions structure the plot, character development provides the necessary depth, conflict, drama, background color, and bodies for the suspect list.
The trick is that an inciting or trigger event not only impacts the protagonist and his/her world; collateral fallout cascades through the secondary characters as well, causing countless new conflicts and story sub-arcs. Say, for instance, your beat cop protagonist finally earns her detective’s badge, a cherished career goal. How does her left behind cop ex-partner feel about her promotion? Bruised feelings and damaged egos among secondary characters are 24K nuggets in any writer’s gold mine.
Of course, the protagonist and the antagonist should take centerstage since they’re the focus of the story, but what is an author supposed to do when a secondary character suddenly strides into the limelight demanding equal face time?
This has happened to me twice, and I’d like to share how you can use these events to strengthen your future stories.
In my Nantucket Mystery series, a secondary character CSI Specialist made an unexpectedly snarky remark standing beside a crime scene that was so wryly perfect with dry humor that I realized she was going to steal the focus from the corpse. As I continued drafting the chapter, I wanted to drop the existing narrative and follow her, and that is a fatal type of rabbit hole.
When you run into a strongly vocal secondary character who refuses to behave, don’t throw them out. Take that rampant character energy and move it into an entirely new story.
Use Shapeshifting as a Creative Writing Tool
To keep that CSI Specialist from derailing that established storyline, I softened her punchline and then moved the strength of it and her character into a primary character position using an entirely new setting and series. It worked. Love Power won a Killer Nashville 2021 Silver Falchion Best Attending Author Award as well as being a 2021 Silver Falchion Finalist in the Best Mystery category.
In another shapeshifting instance, a vibrant young UBER driving named Cleo got axed from one of my short stories simply because I needed to trim the word count to fit the submission requirement. After profusely apologizing to my fictional character, I pasted Cleo into a blank Word document and filed her for later use. She has been impatiently waiting for her turn on the boards and now, as I’m drafting my current WIP, I need a strong young new female primary lead. Viola! There she stood, waiting in the wings, already warmed up and ready to go, a gift.
How to develop a secondary character into a primary one
The best tool I’ve discovered is to write out the secondary character’s career and life goals. Every character, even secondary ones are the hero/heroines in their own lives. He/she will have their own aspirations, dreams, ambitions, and struggles, and this is important: their goals may not be in alignment with your protagonist’s main story but adding this level of depth is critical to character development.
For instance, when I life studied one of my secondary characters, a military veteran and career law enforcement officer, I learned that Ted expected to be given the Lieutenant’s position when it unexpectedly fell vacant. When he didn’t get it, Ted soured on the job, so I started sprinkling in quirky quips and sour asides into his normal day-to-day conversation. The bonus is in not explaining the new quips and asides; just as your other characters will start to wonder what’s gotten into Ted, so will your readers, and keeping readers guessing is one of our writerly jobs.
Primary and secondary characters break up over conflicts. Career goal differences or sudden political flare-ups can raise tension to a snapping point. Different responses to an accident or a crime scene can cause rifts in long-standing friendships. Use these events to add increased insight into a secondary character’s life or to the backstory, and it will pique your reader’s interest as well as signal that a shift in a secondary character may potentially move that character into a leading player position.
The payoff is that secondary character development leads to story growth which will hold the interest of your readers.
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Martha Reed is a multi-award-winning mystery and crime fiction author. Love Power, her new Crescent City NOLA Mystery featuring Gigi Pascoe, a transgender sleuth won a 2021 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Best Attending Author Award as well as being a Silver Falchion Finalist in the Mystery category.
Her John and Sarah Jarad Nantucket Mystery series garnered an Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Award for Mid-Atlantic Best Regional Fiction. Her short story, The Honor Thief was selected for the 2021 Bouchercon anthology, This Time for Sure, edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan
You’re invited to visit her website www.reedmenow.com for more detail.
