Ode to the Minor Character

For six months I have been trying to find my way through a crisis in my novel without much success. I have written three different versions with Giles interacting with a different major character each time. There were aspects of each version that I liked, but none of them delivered the ultimate closure to a pivotal scene. Each major character brought their own stresses to the situation that distracted from Giles’s reaction to the point of crisis. Because of this I could not make the following scenes run smoothly, the mood that lingered rang false.

Then, in the middle of the night (lying awake, listening to the wind), the answer came to me: the valet! Here is a minor character close to Giles who will not complicate the situation. He knows Giles with profound intimacy, but their dealings are ritualized and professional. The valet is the one person who in all likelihood knows what has transpired, but would never denigrate Giles for it.

Like a starburst, the scene formed in my mind. Giles, realizing his mistake, alone in a hallway, in despair. The fact that the valet is the first person to happen upon him keeps the reader’s attentions focused on Giles’s emotional trajectory. It also helps Giles keep those emotions under control. The interaction between them is no more than a few sentences long, but it feels powerful and, most importantly, honest. I think the reader will have a deeper understanding of what follows.

This brings up a chicken and egg sort of question. Do we create these characters knowing deep down they will pay off their presence at some point? Or by creating a few named minor characters does the writer’s universe bend inexorably towards using them? More simply, do we create them because we need them, or do we need them because we’ve created them?

Having posited that question as a difficult one, I will now take a side and defend the "intelligent design" case for minor characters in fiction. Writers of fiction are a bit deranged overall, but I think we are clever enough to know who stays and who goes in our work and we know it early on, even if we don’t know where everyone is going to end up. A novel doesn’t have extras in the sense a film does, but it needs a support staff to keep things plausible and we have to choose carefully who we name and who we skip past, lest we find ourselves spinning side stories into infinity.

I will close my ode to the minor character with this: don’t always look to your main characters to do the heavy lifting in a novel. Sometimes the elephant in the room requires a mouse to get it moving.

Amy