Let Supporting Characters Exist Offstage

Practice. Choose a secondary character and write one offstage day for her, about 350 words in thirty minutes, set within your story’s timeline. The protagonist does not appear and is thought of only if this character has a reason to. Give her a goal with a deadline and one obstacle that has nothing to do with the protagonist. Then find one scene in your draft where her behavior should change because of that day (a late arrival, a refusal, a hurried answer) and revise it in fifteen minutes. Look for whether she now does something the protagonist cannot fully explain.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, after Charlotte Lucas accepts Mr. Collins, the narrator gives her reflections (chapter 22): he is “neither sensible nor agreeable,” but marriage had always been her object, “the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune.” Visiting the parsonage in chapter 30, Elizabeth notices that the ladies sit in a less pleasant back room rather than the better dining parlor, and works out why. Charlotte has arranged things so that Mr. Collins will spend his days in his own book room, at the front. Charlotte is carrying out a plan of her own, one that was in place before Elizabeth arrived.

Supporting characters often fail by being functions, the wise friend or the rival, who appear when needed, say what the scene requires, and leave. A private logic is the account a character would give if asked why; with it, she can act in ways the protagonist did not cause and cannot fully predict, and the protagonist’s plan runs into someone else’s. Charlotte gets no chapter of her own, only reasons. Because Austen has shown them, the reader can see what Elizabeth’s harsh judgment of her friend leaves out.

The maxim says major characters. A cast in which everyone has a full offstage life would likely be hard to read, and for minor characters a plausible logic that stays unseen may be enough, provided their actions do not contradict it.

In memoir and reportage the obligation is ethical. The mother in a memoir had a Tuesday the writer did not witness, and she is also a real person who may read the book (79).