To see me talking about secondary characters, see my FB live with Owl Hollow Press (minutes 2:15 to 5:45)
https://www.facebook.com/owlhollowpress/videos/320235005738233
Secondary characters are characters that appear repeatedly in your story but aren’t the main character(s). They serve to add to the depth of the world, reveal something about the main character, or generally just progress the story in some way.
Secondary characters are crucial to world/story feeling realistic—imagine a story where only the main character is described in detail and a nameless mass of people populate everywhere the main character goes. Or imagine a world with a main character who has four friends that are clones of each other in action, looks, and word. Neither is a very exciting or rich place.
Secondary characters in action, as seen in These Wicked Waters by Emily Layne
Main character Annie is working on an island resort and meets a group of other maids during breakfast on one of her first mornings. The way the author, Emily, wrote the interaction between the maids and Annie made me excited for future interactions, but then they were never mentioned again. No other coworkers were really mentioned either, despite the fact that Annie’s main role was as an employee (of sorts) at the resort.
I asked Emily if these maids she had introduced could fit in other scenes to make them more a part of Annie’s life on the island—does Annie see them in the halls? Does she work with them later in the book? Could they play a part in the final battle scene? Emily worked them in really beautifully and her story was stronger for it.
So look at your story and consider the following:
-Who are your secondary characters? If you don’t have any, why don’t you? How could your plot be strengthened if a secondary character was introduced as comic relief or as an unexpected ally or as a mysterious benefactor? How can a secondary character enrich your story?
-If you do have secondary characters, be sure they are each serving unique purposes. Make a list of their physical attributes, their personality traits, and their role in the story. Is one secondary character really similar to another? If so, cut one or combine them.
-Another way to tell if your secondary characters are distinct and unique is by looking at their dialogue. If you can read at any line of dialogue in your story and identify who is speaking without looking at the dialogue tag, or the he said she said, then your characters have distinct, unique voices that your readers will love. If you find that some characters sound the same, consider their purposes in the story and either make them more distinct or cut one.