Supporting Characters – Window Dressing or Critical Feature? (And my list of 10)
When you begin the process of writing a book you do a lot of study; either officially at a school, or unofficially by reading all you can get your hands on from people who have done it. Actually, if you do it the ‘official’ way, you also do it the unofficial way. Trust me, you do. In both types of study there are several topics that pop up repeatedly, and for good reason.
Plot – can’t have a good story without it
Conflict – every story needs a reason for being
World building – sometimes you can go too far, but the reader has to feel in tune to the place
Hero(ine) – Somebody has to win the day
Villain – Ain’t nothing finer than a well-written villain with some serious issues and just a sliver of room for a possible redemption arc.
But this blog post isn’t about any of that – it’s about the characters who do the heavy lifting, the expositionists, the sidekicks, and yes, the redshirts. Supporting characters lend life and perspective and necessary grey areas to counter the good hero vs. the evil villain. They also give your hero and/or villain a reason for being, or a reason for being who they are.
Think about it. Growing up we all had a cast of friends and those friends had different traits. Some were jocks. Some got good grades and sucked at sports. Some shared their drink and/or weed. Some mooched said drink and/or weed. Some drank vodka Slurpees in first-period study hall (that last one is a real dude I went to school with back in the day, by the way). All of these people, regardless of their own story, played a role in either rounding you out, or screwing you up – or perhaps, if you’re really lucky, a bit of both.
The main character of a story is no different than you or I were in high school. They rely on the influences of other people to help shape who they are and what they care about. More importantly, those influences help determine who they are as people and that, in turn, has everything to do with what decisions they’ll make as the story progresses.
Sometimes, supporting characters get a little limelight of their own, and that’s ok too. When you get down to it, supporting characters have more range to be goofy or hedonistic, or morally ambiguous than the main character. There are rules for main characters. There are expectations of what (s)he will be, but supporting characters are not confined by those limitations. Indeed, the lack of limitations on supporting characters is super important because it allows the main character to be surrounded by a variety of different people, each of whom shows the world in a light the main character might not see. They also provide different opportunities and pathways the hero might not be able, or may not be willing, to take.
(SPOILERS AHEAD FOR BOOK 4) Even in a relatively small part, a supporting character can be a guiding light for the story or for the main character or other supporters. In my own series, there is a character called Lyle in Magic’s Genesis: The Grey. Lyle exists for the sole reason because I wanted to give a shout out to my best childhood friend. He was meant to have a couple lines in book one – just enough where I had to mention his name. That was it – pure window dressing for the sake of the author.
Jump ahead to book 4, Red Priest Rising, and Lyle became a conveniently useful character – a key element of getting the main character out the door and doing something. As it happened, Lyle needed saving and when Mieragon (pronounced: meer-ih-gone) saved him, it seemed all was well. But then Lyle did something stupid, and quite honestly, it caught even me by surprise. My fingers moved across the keyboard and when they stopped moving he had done the stupid thing and I stopped and said out loud, “dammit, I didn’t mean for that to happen.”
This kind of thing happens with supporting characters who are more than window dressing. You see, Lyle despite being a supporting character, had agency. When he and Mieragon met with the baddie-of-the-moment who was providing some much needed exposition before his imminent demise, Lyle, having just been saved from torture that probably sucked several years of his life away, accepted drink and food from the aforementioned baddie who was eating and drinking the same food. Minutes later, Lyle is frothing at the mouth and spasming his last on the floor. He never saw it coming. Neither did I. For what it’s worth, the bad guy followed suit minutes later. The main character was saved, not from any special intelligence or foresight, but rather just plain dumb luck.
In turn, the action of Lyle had an impact on a major supporting character – his mentor, Krieger (kree-ger) in book 5, Ascension. Lyle’s untimely and unfortunate (and, again, unplanned) death, led to Krieger doing something that was important, and necessary being done. And this thing could only be done by a supporting character.
All of these actions carried emotional weight for the main characters across multiple books – despite the characters having no more than supporting status.
So, supporting characters are not (always) window dressing. If done well, they can be the linchpins upon which success or failure rests. To find an example, you don’t have to look further than the Lord of the Rings (which is a useful example for damned near anything…) Sam Gamgee is not a main character. He’s an important supporting character without whom Frodo would be eating raw fish in a cave somewhere and Middle Earth would look like an Ansel Adams post-apocalypse photo. Likewise Merri and Pippin were integral to the story in rousing Treebeard and the Ents, thus destroying Saurman at Isengard, a second front the others would have been hard pressed to defend against.
I will leave you with this – a list of 10 Secondary Characters I think are, if not more important, almost definitely more interesting, than the main characters…in no particular order and for little comprehensible reason.
1 – Sam Gamgee (over Frodo). Frodo was the pack mule here, carrying the ring. All the intestinal fortitude and stick-to-it-tiveness, necessary to do the job – that was all Sam.
2 – Almost anyone (over Harry Potter). The more I look back on Harry Potter, the less I like Harry Potter the character, not the series. I love the HP series. Harry was nice and all and I don’t dislike him, but he kind of let things happen around him. Any sympathy he gets for living with the Dursley’s was used up by the end of book one. Hermione was pretty important in a number of key places, and even Ron had his moments.
3 – The Rat. (See Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Endgame). Without that Rat running across just the right sequence of buttons Ant Man would have stayed in the Quantum Realm and Thanos would still be picking prickly pears. (And a big shout out to whatever brand of car battery was in that van for holding a charge for five years!)
4 – Barney Fife (Andy Griffith Show). Showing my age a little here, but Deputy Fife was far more interesting than Sheriff Andy Taylor. Anyone law enforcement officer who is only allowed one bullet has a story to tell and that’s the guy I want to have a beer with.
5 – Baldric (Black Adder) – Going way back to the ‘80s for this one and if you’ve never seen Rowan Atkinson’s hilarious comedy series Black Adder, you need to finish this article, subscribe to my mailing list, and then go watch it. You have to watch the four 6-episode series in order though. It’s British comedy at its best. And Baldric’s role as Robin to Blackadder’s Batman makes the whole thing work.
6 – Humphrey (Yes, Minister) – Continuing with ’80s British comedy – if you’ve never seen Yes, Minister or the follow on series, Yes, Prime Minister do yourself a favor. If you are a fan of wickedly clever wordplay, the character of Humphrey, stunningly well played by the late Nigel Hawthorne, will have you rewinding and rewatching him wax loquacious in adroit displays of verbal acrobatics.
7 – Hans Gruber (Die Hard). Oh, come on, it’s (the late) Alan Rickman! He was awesome. Admit it, the first time you saw Die Hard, you thought to yourself, ‘you know, I’m not bothered if Gruber wins.’
8 – Anyone near Superman. Superman is boring. His ‘disguise’ is a pair of glasses. His powers are so over the top as to make him invincible and he’s just … blah. He’s the guy knocking on your door selling encyclopedias…or religion. Now that I think of it, the only thing that makes him watchable is that everyone around him is equally vanilla.
9 – J. Jonah Jameson (Spider Man). He wasn’t evil and he wasn’t a hero, but JJJ was interesting. He had grit and determination no matter how ill-placed. As a supporting character he filled an interesting niche as an antagonist who wasn’t as much dangerous as he was disruptive or annoying. But he had swag, no doubt and J.K. Simmons was the perfect casting choice. The only other character who was as well or better cast for their role was Alan Rickman as Snape in Harry Potter. In fact when HP came out, my wife and I read the first book and agreed that should they ever make a Harry Potter movie, Rickman had to play Snape. When it happened, we were thrilled.
10 – Han Solo (Star Wars). No one wants to be Luke Skywalker for Halloween. Han Solo is awesome. He’s a smuggler, he’s a ladies man, he has a shaggy friend, he speaks multiple languages, he shoots first, and best of all, he’s not a whiny little beatch.
Thanks for hanging out – see you next week.
