Developing Supporting Characters

[Casey]

When I first started writing this universe, it occurred to me that my scope was pretty narrow. At the time, I had a grand vision in my head, but as I got going, I saw that it was pretty flimsy by itself. So, in an effort to keep the story alive, I sat down and created some side characters. Suddenly, I had an expanded cast that would act as already established characters to help flush out my story, but since the focus wasn’t on them, I had to try to give them personality without devoting a significant chunk of the story to them, and that is a seriously hard thing to do. You don’t realize how hard developing a character that isn’t meant to be developed in a tiny block of time until you try. You know the character, you have a backstory and information for this character, but how much of that do you really take the time to show the audience?

In my case, I’m lucky. I have complete creative control over my series, so I can dole out information as I see fit. When I put out the first novel, I knew I could get away with doing a lot of development work through these novellas. This helped me to get a rhythm that feels (to me) like writing a serial rather than a series. Yes, there is still a major, main character story, but in fleshing out smaller characters like Allison and Victoria, it helps to connect the reader and myself to this cast even more, and it provides a way to learn about the characters without taking up significant novel space. Plus, if you don’t like a character, their backstory doesn’t have to derail you from the overall story. Keep in mind, I wrote and finished the second novel before I even started Blood & Rust, let alone any of these short stories. While these novellas lend to the plot and do provide a heavy backstory, this series is written so you could just stick to the novels OR read everything and still get a great feel for what is going on.

Now Victoria…

It took me a bit to get to know her. She was pretty up-front and static in the first novel, and I hate that. I knew I could do more with her, but that wasn’t the place to get bogged down in side stories. She had a good history in my head, and her character always struck me as the legal-and-proper version of Alice (hence one of the many reasons for her underlying disdain). When I started to get into her early adventures and the problems she faced, her character really came alive for me, and I started adding more and more. Plus, I got to have fun with some new ideas (the Japanese death robot, for instance). I’ve found that even if you don’t know 100% where a character may go, it’s worth it to sit down and explore. In this case, I’m glad I did.

In writing this, I realized I could have very, very easily made this into a novel by itself. In fact, when I wrote Blackbird’s Song, I had to chop it down and split it up. There were going to be two stories running parallel; one was for Victoria while the other was for Alice. This idea was eventually scrapped, and this Victoria-centered novella was born. The Alice idea was kept, tweaked and shifted forward in the timeline, and will now be the novella that will be exclusive to Black Days when it comes out this June.