Wait! I Can't Shoot the Deputy! How Secondary Characters Can Break Your Novel (And Keep It From Selling)
Author: Ramona Richards
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: January 2005

The silence in the phone went on so long that I thought we had been disconnected. Then Eva, the author of the latest book I’d been hired to edit, said, “You want me to do WHAT?” She followed that with a few well-chosen, rapid-fire words in defense of the secondary character I’d just told her to delete.

I could understand her concern. “Kevin” had a significant role in her book. Eva introduced him in Chapter 2 and finished him up in C Chapter 40. He was a journalist who helped out her heroine a great deal — too much, in fact. He and the heroine became great friends and mystery-solving partners, and the chemistry between them was palpable.

Which was the source of the problem: Kevin wasn’t the romantic lead. He wasn’t just a sidekick; he was a distraction. He drove much of the action by making decisions that should have belonged to the heroine, and for 300-plus pages, the reader kept waiting for Eva’s heroine to give up the quest for her missing husband and hop into bed with clever Kevin. Which never happened.

Instead, I suggested Eva give most of Kevin’s duties back to the heroine and transfer his most attractive characteristics to the heroine’s best girlfriend, who was also a journalist. This was a change that wound up being very popular, not only with Eva and her editor but her readers as well. Since the book came out, Eva has gotten a number of letters praising the girlfriend’s support and the heroine’s decisiveness.

Secondary characters such as Kevin can easily kill a book, especially in romance novels, in two ways:

1) They take over roles and duties that should be carried out by the leads, thus weakening the lead’s character development.

2) There are so many of them, no one can keep them straight.In addition to having a secondary character who tries to take over, the easiest way to lose an editor’s attention is for your story to be confusing or annoying. By the time you introduce, describe and give a life history to the 20th secondary character, an editor is going to be both.

For instance, everyone knows that it takes hundreds of crew members to make a cruise ship run smoothly. But if you set a romantic suspense book on a boat that size, don’t involve your reader with everyone on the ship’s manifest!

Every book has to be judged on its own merit, of course, but a basic rule of thumb is that if you have more than three POV characters or five secondary characters in a 400-page novel, somebody’s probably suffering in the development department.

There’s a very simple exercise that can help you if you think your book may be swamped by distracting characters. Make a list of all your characters (I use an Excel spreadsheet for this), dividing them into three categories:

1. LEAD/POV
2. SECONDARY
3. TERTIARY/FRINGE

List as many characteristics and action points as possible for each in the first two categories. Leads should have the most, and they should drive most (if not all) of the plot action. Secondary characters are the support cast, the deputies. They listen, advise, crack jokes and provide much needed color. They help drive the action, but they GENERALLY don’t drive it themselves. Tertiary characters are little more than part of the scenery, necessary but not involving. They seldom need more than a line or two of description.

Remember: Good secondary characters are vital to the book. But if they weaken your leads or confuse your readers (and editor!), shoot them.

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Ramona Richards has been a writer and editor for more than 20 years and has edited fiction for five publishers. This article is based on part of a workshop she offers to writers conferences. Her romantic suspense novel, JACKSON'S RETREAT, recently sold to Steeple Hill, and her psychological thriller, WHEN ANGELS FALL (w/a Jamie Summers), will be available from Echelon Press in March 2005.

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