4 Questions to Ask About Your Supporting Characters

All through National Novel Writing Month, published authors will take the whistle, take over our official Twitter account for a week, and act as your NaNo Coach, offering advice, encouragement, and pep. This week’s NaNo Coach, Renée Watson, author of books including This Side of Home, shares just how much your supporting characters can reveal about your protagonist :

To know me, to really understand me, you have to know my family. You have to know my mother’s make-a-way-out-of-no-way type of faith. You have to know how my sisters and I lip-synched to Jackson 5 records in the living room putting on concerts for my mom.  How each sister taught me lessons—big and small: how to put on makeup, how to ride a bike, how to forgive, how to not make their mistakes. I am only who I am—good and bad—because of the people around me.

And so it is with my main character…

My main character is the heart of the story but the people in her life play an essential role to her development. I learn a lot about my main character by understanding the people around her. Someone in her life has an expectation of her, someone is judging her, or rooting for her, or wanting to see her fail. My main character’s personality and actions become clearer to me once I put her in the room with her best friend, a sibling, a teacher.

Developing my supporting characters helps me determine plot points. Who will be her ally, who is her antagonist? How do they create challenges that move the story forward? When writing supporting characters, I ask myself 4 questions:

1. Do I have too many supporting characters? 

I think of supporting characters as the inner circle folks. Either close relatives and friends or people who have the most impact on my character’s life. I only spend time thinking deeply about those people—not the teacher who only shows up in one scene or the stranger on the bus. 

I try to make sure each supporting character brings something different to the story. If there’s too much overlap, one of them has to go.

2. What is the backstory of my supporting character(s)? 

I don’t go into great detail, after all it’s not their story. But I do want to establish where they’re coming from. 

Why do they have the dynamic they have with my main character? We bring the past with us, always. Either we’ve learned from it or we haven’t. I need to know a little bit about each character’s past so I can better write about their current circumstance.

3. Are my supporting characters competing with my main character? 

I don’t mean competition in a way enhances the storyline. I mean am I spending too much time developing a side character, when really I should be writing about my main character.  I try to be careful not to let my side characters outshine the main star.

4. Am I creating realistic relationships between my characters? 

No one is always loving, always mean. Relationships are complicated—friends are sometimes jealous of each other, parents make mistakes, teachers don’t always have the answer. I try to make layered relationships that have both bitter and sweet moments. Even if I create someone who really is the “villain” I make sure I mention how they got that way (see question 2).

There are many more questions I ponder and other strategies I use when writing a cast of characters. But these are the ones I find myself going back to story after story. Answering these questions—especially when I’m revising—helps me fine-tune the story and better understand my character and her world.

Renée Watson is the author of This Side of Home , which was nominated for the Best Fiction for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Her picture book, Harlem’s Little Blackbird: The Story of Florence Mills , received several honors including an NAACP Image Award nomination in children’s literature. She is on the Council of Writers for the National Writing Project and is a team member of We Need Diverse Books. She currently teaches courses on writing for children at University of New Haven and Pine Manor College.