Letâs start with the often-cited WriteOn where SenShoe spoke of making even momentary characters real,yet not side-track the story. Sadly, I havenât been able to re-find it yet. But, IIRC, she brought an example from Heyer (whom she more or less called a master at it). As best I recall, it was something like this: in a mid-Georgian, England, setting:
Wealthy socially prominent protag hails a cab-driver waiting for fares, instead of taking his own. The cabbie is rubbing his hands together. After he helps the protag up into the creaky carriage, he sweeps the shabby blanket off his horse...
Iâm not doing the moment justice, but the point is how telling are a few brief details. Besides the weather and the cabbie as person (not a wind-up doll or human piece of scenery) weâre alerted to the protag behaving secretively, taking lower-class transportation instead of their own recognizeable, fancy, conveyance. We donât get told how the cabbie came to be so poor, or whether his care for his horse is personal or merely practical, or anything else. Because the story doesnât need us to know, But itâs a very communicative moment.
How real to make characters depends on serving the story.
A story rarely benefits from major side-tracks where tertiary, redshirt, plot-fodder, momentary and background characters are concerned. More likely, the story will suffer.
In contrast, how real to make secondary characters depends on what the story âand protagâ need FROM them in order for the story to roll. Itâll be less than the story needs from protags, but more than the story needs from characters who are only momentary/temporary in the plot.
SenSho used to remind us that ALL characters, even the most minor, are where they are and doing what theyâre doing for their own reasons. E.g., that cabbieâs reason is to earn a living. They all have their own life pressures or aims that put them there, and itâs only the protagâs story being told because thatâs the one the author chooses as most worth telling. At least for now!
What stories usually most need from having temp characters is COMMUNICATION to the reader. Basically, the writer has 2 questions to answer for using temps or not:
<big>[1] precisely WHAT is achieved FOR THE STORY or FOR THE MOMENT by having this temporary person be visible at all? Usually itâs one or both of:</big>
- the temporary-to-plot/tertiary character operates as âset dressingâ, hinting at or symbolizing background facts when necessary for the reader to grasp the moment, the setting/environment, other characters, etc. E.g., the society and its workings, the specific place ditto â a briefly real servant or commanding officer or minor criminal illuminate the situation and how a key character fits in: whereâs the wealth or power lodged in this place or culture, how oppressively ordered or loose and flexible it is, how extravagant, arrogant, or warmly friendly people are here, and so on.
- the tempâs presence makes something possible to happen to, or be done by, a key character when that event implicitly requires another human being in it. E.g., when the author needs the reader to know something the key character knows but canât have the key character baldly narrate, that information is often better transmitted by a brief conversation between key-char and temp than by the author narrating it: authorial narration can be too âas you know, Bobâ obtrusive. Temps spare the reader or viewer having to be told things about setting, backstory, major characters, locale of the moment, whatever, by the narrator stating it. Example, rather than inform the reader that such and such an environment of the moment is the manor/castle of a rich aristocrat or the battlefield of an alien planet, have a coupla servants or commanding officers there to do or/and say things that implicitly â or if absolutely necessary, explicitly â convey the needed facts .. and then they discreetly bow themselves out, exuent stage left.
- There might be more categories of what can be achieved for story or moment by having temps present and real. Please addâem in the comments if they come to mind!
Meanwhile, the corollary probably is, if having a temp be there serves no story-or-moment function, DONâT putâem on the page.
<big>[2.]</big> Another communication issue is what outlook toward human beings do we want the reader to see from us, the writers?
- THE ATTITUDE OF KEY/MAJOR CHARACTERS TOWARD OTHER HUMAN BEINGS is part of their personality, and it shows most when they interact with a character whoâs of no significant importance to them. The same as, in real life, we know what kind of person weâre dealing with especially by how that person treats insignificant people around her/him/em. CallowYouth, for example, may easily be arrogant or (contrarywise) easily unnerved, or overly optimistic about other people, or quick to take other people at face value for good or for ill, because Cal is young and inexperienced. We handled, it wonât make Cal ebil or dull. StoutCompanion may be more realistically skeptical yet less judgemental, more noticing of small details or actions by others, in having learned from experience to pay attention to whatâs going on, not be too selfâinvolved, and wait for enough data to reach conclusions. We also learn what kind of person The Least Grebe is by how s/x/he treats others. And so on.
- THE ATTITUDE OF THE AUTHOR TOWARD OTHER HUMAN BEINGS is getting communicated too. Not only for in the story. Because with a novel, the author kind of is god, all powerful. Does the author callously abuse people in the story âe.g., by making them be cardboard cut-outs, stereotypes, wish-fulfillment wind-up dolls to be used and discarded like trash? Or does the author make them real, whether protag or temp, and treat their fates compassionately? Or with detached objectively, a trickier way to tell stories. Or whatever. Awarely or not âso please be awareâ the authorâs treatment of characters of every kind âincluding âthe least of theseââ sends a message about how to regard and treat human beings in the real world. True in fiction on the page or fiction in film, or in television, or anywhere.
<big>Episodic fiction requires yet another kind of temporary character.</big> Used to be, nearly all fiction television was episodic, and a lot of it still is. A lot of films in franchises too, of course. And book series.
StarTrekTOS is nicely illustrative about this. The main cast was âthe big threeâ âKirk, McCoy, Spock (all with staccato names, an effective attention-director)â and the secondary âgang of fourâ: Sulu, Uhura (whose full names are never told, for reasons on which speculation abounds), Montgomery Scott, and eventually Pavel Chekov.
Yeoman Rand briefly made it into the gang, but perhaps being imaginable solely as a sex/romance wind-up doll left too few plot uses. Or maybe the budget for recurring female cast didnât stretch beyond Nurse Chapel with Uhura on main cast. Or whatever other factors.
More intriguing, the stoic female pilot character ânamedâ Number One, toweringly rational, imposingly competent ... perhaps too strange and challenging a concept not to SIDETRACK from the hero/protag because of endless possibilities never explored before. (A direction that for-profit television was NEVER boldly going in! As the superbly if kinda stereotypically acted, inherently misogynistic final episode, inadvertantly proclaims.)
So we saw the plot-worthy traits of Number One transferred into the body (ha!) of the retained male Vulcan (originally as excitable as humans) as more believable, apparently, and a foil/competitor for the Stout Companion role of the opinionated, caustic Dr McCoy ⊠who replaced a bland, generic, father-figure medic of little plot-usefulness at all.
(Some fans say Spock became an equal protag. Iâll let other folks hash that out.)
Two things about character tend to happen in episodic television and other fiction with the same nature/structure because they need very real temps:
- lots of disposable âguest starâ roles made substantial enough for the episodeâs story to matter, but not so engaging or heroic as to throw shade on the protag[s] or need to be kept recurrent, far less permanent. And
- the use of temp âstarsâ helps more sides of the main cast to show so the audience stays interested in them. Even though episodic fiction tends to be more about what happens than anything else. Action, basically.
Weâve seen some real abuses of secondary and temp characters In earlier tv adventure series âmostly westerns and cop showsâ it was perfectly okay to have continuing characters like Hop Sing, in Bonanza (1959-1973), be essentially a cardboard/wind-up stereotype existing to serve the story and moment alright, but allowed no reality of his own. Racial and sexual cardboard stereotypes were rampant (and in films, too). What changed wasnât the goodness of the industry but exec recognition that you canât profit from ticked-off audiences who have money in their pockets. Advertisers want to be able to pick all pockets, not just some.
Anyhoo, an on-paper story makes itself episodic via a pattern in which temps keep being brought in for disposable use across several paragraphs or a chapter or two or ten, without retained effect on the protag[s] or plot. Theyâre made just real enough to enable excursions and side-trips by the main cast that may be entertaining but donât actually advance the story along its plotline, and donât illuminate character or setting beyond whatâs already well established.
These âguest starsâ are often recognizable by the author getting inside their heads as brief POV characters. And then killing them off. Or discarding them some other way, perhaps as simply as by the main âcastâ moving on and leaving them in the dust of the road.
In a novel, that might be because someone (author, agent or editor) wanted more of a word/page count than the actual story organically generated on its own. Or it might be because a tangential setting or incident ran away with the author! Or there may be something about the protag[s] that the author considers valuable but couldnât put across any other way.
Terts, red-shirts, temps etc used for any mechanical purposes, or to manipulate audience emotionally, are plot-fodder, trotted out and consumed, sometimes quite violently, with the same attitude of disregard as generals happy to see entire armies slaughtered for the sake of a chance at a victory of some kind.
A lot of readers/audiences like episodic fiction. Temporary characters give the primary and secondary characters opportunities to strut their stuff, and those are the characters the audience is most invested in â the ones the author works to get the readers most invested in, because that main cast, esp the protag, is whose story the author is telling, for whatever reason that choice may be.
<big>CHALLENGE: Using main-cast characters from Characters, Sets & Props in the Quest for the Sacred Los Jewel of Togwogmagog and our other standard practice genresâ or characters you invent for the evening, or from your WIP â
Write a couple of paragraphs or so in which the paths of a main-cast character and a temporary/momentary character cross.
Make them both real, even if only for an instant. Make it clear, too, which is which!
The âfeelsâ can always help: include two or three. But show, donât tell, and donât head-hop.
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Thought
ya might enjoy this gif of a cat treating bits of stuff the way itâs often too easy to treat other human beings, real or fictional.
Temptations will always arise, of course! Weâre all only human. Or feline, as the case may be.
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