A Character's a Character, No Matter How Small

In this post I want to express the importance of 'small' characters; those extra characters that our MC meets throughout their journey.

Many authors seem to forget them. They forget to take time making them real, which makes them seem flat and useless. When you write a story, every character needs personality. At least jot down the basics (appearance, stronger positive trait, strongest negative trait, religion, and influence on the MC). Get to know them. In my opinion, you can't write about someone you don't know and make them seem real.

Granted, you should spend the most time creating your Main Character, but that doesn't mean ditch the others and make them up as you go. Have a plan for them. Give them a purpose. Otherwise, they're just dead weight in your story.

One way to study this is to watch movies and TV shows. Now, before you get all hoity toity with me, hear me out. Movies are stories that we watch, instead of read. When you watch movies, you can understand characters faster than when reading. It's all in their expression, body language, tone of voice, appearance, and personality. In books, it takes time to know a character, but in movies it usually doesn't.

Take The Hunger Games, for example.

-In the book, we slowly begin to know Katniss. Her talents. Her lifestyle. Her government.
-In the movie, you need only to watch ten minutes to know all of those facts and more.

Or, perhaps even a better example is one of my favorite shows: Once Upon a Time.

-Each character has a purpose and sometimes that purpose is even greater than you had expected. 
-Even when the characters don't have a huge impact, we still get a sense of who they are.
-You can make almost every character related to each other in some way, just to make things amazingly complicated.


Also, character profiling is always good practice. My very first blog post was an outline I found online and it has really helped me when I'm creating characters!


Here's the link:

Character Profile Outline


I hope that this post has either helped or inspired you to flesh out and spend time on ALL of your characters.