Secondary Characters

It's easy to get caught up in creating characters for the purpose of advancing a story.

The problem comes when you create too many characters.

I had this issue myself. Secondary characters, mainly. So I did my research: how much development does a secondary character need?

This is what I discovered...

The most important thing is that they need to have a purpose in the story, a reason for being.

Beyond that, a secondary character needs to have:

1. A history
2. Story Arc
3. Personality
4. Description
5. 3 Virtues/ 3 Vices

It gives your story a little more depth, and helps you write more scenes, if you have an understanding of all of your characters. You don't have to share everything about your smaller folks, but you do need to know these things about them. Otherwise, you're very likely to end up with some one-dimensional stereotypes. They need to be human, and if you give them those things I listed above, they will be.

This is a big thing for me, because I believe these are things I lacked in my first book. And until I did this research, things I lacked even more glaringly in this current book.

And really, in doing this, I actually was able to combine two characters, and develop another one quite a bit. That was something I found during my research. Don't be afraid to combine or completely eliminate characters. Your story will be worse off if it has a character with no personality, no motivations, and no depth. If they lack these things, then the odds are you can give their "important" scenes to someone else.