If you’ve ever written something – a book, or short story, or screenplay – and felt like it wasn’t the world’s most interesting story, or maybe it was a great idea, but it just felt…well, flat…the problem may have been your secondary characters.
I just dealt with this very issue while working on the first draft of my current book. I had the entire plot outlined and had written somewhere around 15% of the draft before I realized that something was wrong. Now, to give myself some credit, this story is very different from what I’ve written before, so I assumed that it would feel different to write. But when I sat back and analyzed the situation, I realized two different things were wrong with the story.
One was the extent to which I was making the B-story manifest in Gothic tropes. I’ll tell you all about that in another post. The other was a problem with the secondary characters. When I worked through both of these, I sat back and found myself face-to-face with a story that’s incredibly robust. And so, so, so much better than what I had before…which had been a pretty great story idea to start with.
I’ll tell you how I fixed these things and hopefully what I learned will help you in some way.
I should have known better. I just finished a novel that I love and one of the many things I learned while writing that one was that in order to demonstrate the theme to its fullest extent, it needs to show up in all of the primary and at least most of the secondary characters.
What I mean by that is that if you’re dealing with a theme, any theme, it should play out in several different ways in the novel. Not just through the actions of the main character. Let’s say your theme is:
We carry the ghosts of our past relationships and there’s no way to escape them.
Ok. Fun theme. Obviously this is going to evidence itself in the main character’s story. Perhaps he is in a new relationship with someone. Everything is going well – better than it ever has with anyone. But as this relationship progresses, his former girlfriend haunts him. Not literally, although that would be awesome.
At first, everything his new partner does reminds him of her. When she chews her food, he sees his former girlfriend. When she walks, he’s reminded of the other one. It escalates and soon he no longer hears what his new girlfriend is saying. He hears only what he remembers the former one saying, or what he knows she would do or say in each situation. It escalates more and soon he’s seeing his former girlfriend everywhere he goes. Even when he’s alone. He’s becoming unhinged.
On the surface, you already have a great story concept. But it can be a million times better by using the secondary characters.
Who’s the antagonist here? Well, in one sense it’s his own mind. His inability to move past the prior relationship is threatening the current one. But you’ve probably introduced some other, more tangible antagonist as well. Perhaps it’s his mother. Mothers make great antagonists. Especially in the case of a young man in a relationship.
She doesn’t like the new girlfriend. She was – maybe still is – best friends with his last girlfriend. The one who’s haunting him. His mother is constantly comparing the two and finding the new girlfriend lacking. Maybe she’s even trying to reunite him with his former flame, or attempting to sabotage the new relationship. In that respect, she’s an opposing force in his current relationship. Why is she doing this? Maybe the new girlfriend reminds her of her mother, the main character’s grandmother, a woman who was controlling and demeaning in every way possible. That’s the ghost she’s still carrying.
But what about his friends? Let’s say he has a best friend and maybe another close friend. The three of them go way back. If you’re going to demonstrate the theme really well, you should show how it plays out in the lives of these other two characters as well. But in different ways.
Perhaps one of them is divorced. His wife has full custody of their kids. The alimony and child support are a constant stress on his life, not to mention the emotional strain of not seeing his kids very often. In that sense, those relationships are a ghost he can’t escape and doesn’t entirely want to.
How about the other friend? Let’s say she contracted HIV years ago from a man who lied to her and cheated on her. She’s carrying the scars of that relationship – physically and emotionally. Now she’s in a relationship with a woman and is trying to find in her everything that she could never find in a man. In many ways, the pain of her past is affecting her current relationship. It’s a constant struggle for them.
Do you see it? Through these other characters, we’re fleshing out the different ways that a past relationship haunts a person. The mother’s haunted by her mother. The one friend by his ex-wife and children. The other friend by her cheating ex who left her with a life-long illness.
Now the plot needs to work so that all of these threads come together and build up the main character’s journey to be free from the ghost of his prior girlfriend. But I think you get the point. Once you have the theme working from several different angles, the story will automatically feel full and interesting.
And that’s exactly what I had intended to do early in this current manuscript, but when I started writing, it wasn’t there. The other threads had fallen out and there were holes in the tapestry – motives that felt nebulous, conversations that felt more like empty words than like well-crafted subtext.
Once I worked those threads back in, I was able to pull the manuscript together in new and vastly-improved ways. As I said before, I also had to work out the manifestation of the B-plot in Gothic tropes. But we’ll talk about that in the next post! 🙂
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