Secondary characters

Today's post was inspired by something I read over at Tabitha Olson's Writer Musings.  I'm not going to comment on her main points about experience and talent, nor about the book she chose as an example (first, because I haven't read it, and second, because the author herself commented quite eloquently on the post). Rather, I'm going to go off on the personal tangent that occurred to me as I read the post.

When I was in my early 20s, I took a short-story workshop in which we critiqued each oth...