Secondary characters

[Coco82]

How much do you tell about your secondary characters when introducing them? Just curiois.

[Cardboard Tube Knight]

I'm not sure what you mean by secondary? Do you mean the people that are kind of in the background, like the friends of the main characters? Or just people that will pop up from time to time, maybe three times for a short period in a long story?

If you mean it in the first sense of the word I offered I try to make them three dimensional, at least. So that I can give my reader the sense that if they were to leave my main characters and follow this secondary person around then they would find out that there is a whole world out there, that these people have friends, family, and lives outside of the boundaries of what the story shows. You have to kind of allude to the whole thing.

[Jamesaritchie]

Secondary characters, huh? I don't know. If I have a problem with characters, it's the secondary characters. I tend to introduce them by feel, and reveal information about them by feel.

I do think secondary characters come in all levels of "secondarianism," so to speak. Some are far more important than others.

But I guess I just reveal whatever seems nevessary to a given story.

[SRHowen]

Supporting characters--those who are there with the main characters in several scenes. I think you need to give the reader bits about them that reveal things about the main character.

Minor characters--the ones who show up in one chapter, the mailman, the package delivery man, even someone who saw a murder or called 911, if they only appear once or twice or only in one scene, I don't think you need a lot of info about them. And adding names and (unneeded--doesn't advance the plot) info about minor characters can many times serve to make the reading confusing.

I only add what has to be to understand the story and make it interesting.

Shawn

[Nateskate]

This may not help. But I break it down into "key" characters and throw-away characters.

A throw away character is introduced only to move the story along. In a fantasy, you may need a foil simply to help introduce back story, or push the story forward. Their personality is going to come out in their dialogue. They may be funny, cantankerous, or mean, but it's in their voice.

A key character is one that may not be the protagonist, but is seen repeatedly throughout the story. If you are going to make them a love interest, you have to describe something appealing about them. If you are going to make them heroic, you might want to add background that makes their deed stand out in a context.

However, most of the ways that I do that may be incidental, "He was much taller than she expected, fit and trim, and not at all like the fat son of a king that she expected...and very much in command..."

[katdad]

Depends on how secondary they are, I suppose. I have a small supporting cast of continuing characters in my "Mitch King"private detective novel series, and those I flesh out with some detail. I give them a "bio" and spend time coloring them in, as I go along (not all at the same time however, which would be boring). These are:

Detective David Meierhoff, my protag's best pal. David's smart, educated, an interesting guy.
Det. Lt. Joe Duggan, the mentor and fierce top cop.
Antonio Villarreal (Tony Vee) a big ex-Oiler lineman who's an enforcer.

Other continuing characters are more tertiary, such as Mitch's attorney Donna Boudreaux, his college buddy Gregor Yevshenko, and others.

The "real" secondary characters are less meticulously drawn. These are the people involved in the case, like informants and victims and supporting-cast cops.

But in all cases I try to make them believable, since I'm writing a very realistic series of novels.