There are no minor roles, only minor actors. Well, there are no minor characters, only minor writers.
How many times have you read a story and a plot device is thrown in? Perhaps all the time and you may not have noticed. Or mayhap you did.
Take for example the simplistic example:
Tanner walked into the tavern. He had a difficult time making his way across the ale stained boards through the moving throng of people to the cracked and partially burnt bar. He looked the barkeep in the eye.
“Where’s Stephen,” Tanner asked.
“Out back,” the barkeep replied with a jerk of his thumb toward the rear of the establishment.
Now I ask you, which has more personality: The bar or the barkeep? Shouldn’t people be more interesting than the places they inhabit? Your novel, after all, is about people and their interactions. Surely they must travel through locations and those places must be described, perhaps a history given, and maybe you’ll add a little back story for the reader.
If you’re going to go through that much trouble building up your world, why would you let go of an opportunity to get into the back story of a minor character? People, after all, tell a story much better than the land can.
In the above example we meet the barkeep for only a moment. Would it hurt to spend a paragraph or two in a four hundred page tome to describing this character? Giving a character like this a couple hundred words will not only enhance his life, but you may discover that he’s worth bringing back later? Tanner may end up in a fight out back and if we know enough about the barkeep, it may be in character for him to come out back and break up the fight, or not.
Here’s where you need to make a choice. Is this character only a plot device or is this person a viable character worth recycling? If you’re only using ‘the barkeep’ as a plot device, give him a little. If you’re going to bring Derek the scar-faced, bald-headed barkeep with a tattoo of a dragon across his forearm and a dagger in his tunic, then you may want to give more than just a simple description.
Now you don’t need to go all Stephen King on the reader here and supply a three paragraph background story on a character that you’re planning on killing in the next scene. In my opinion, that’s just a wee bit of overkill. But if you are going to kill off a minor character, having a little background on him/her/it will make the death a little more poignant because now the reader has something invested in the character.
That’s what writing is about, right? Getting your reader involved with your characters. It doesn’t matter how minor or major, if the reader cannot relate because there’s nothing there to relate to, you’ve lost the grasp of power over the reader and it’ll be a little (if at all) remembered event.
I know what you’re thinking right now. “But if I drop a couple paragraphs onto the reader, isn’t that an info-dump?” Honestly: no.
If you’re writing a novel, a couple of paragraphs will not make the slightest bit of difference in the reading experience if left out, but if you include it the reader will gain some insight to this person speaking. Even if it’s only one line, that character just became a little more memorable.
You may even ask someone “Remember that barkeep?” “Oh! The one with the scar down his cheek who almost killed Tanner?”
Hey, you didn’t write that in there. The barkeep only told Tanner where to go. But the reader may make the leap that Tanner was in danger based on some small key he picked up in the description of the character. You’ve now gotten into the reader’s head and they’ve made the leap to playing with the scenario. This is what you want. This is the dimension you cannot add to your writing, but is required of the reader. You must supply the cues for the reader to pick on, but you cannot predict how each person will translate those cues. All you can do is include them to assist the reader in making the leap.
