Second Fiddle
One of the proudest moments of my writing life occurred when a friend from Florida phoned my new home in the Pacific Northwest of the USA at midnight my time (3 AM hers) and screamed, “You KILLED HER! How could you kill her? How could you do that?”
She was talking about a main protagonist, and I would have hoped for a reaction like this for the demise of a character of that ilk, fully fleshed out and lovingly helped along the way to becoming as “real” as any flesh-and-blood creature ever encountered by the reader. More real, in fact, because this character was someone who, over the course of a novel, became an intimate, a friend, someone whom the reader cares about deeply – with far more passion than they would care about the identity, fate, or motivations of an arbitrary commuter with whom they might briefly share a few moments on the bus and then probably never see again. The degree of realness is not a variable of physicality. Novels depend on their success, to a huge extent, on how “real” their characters are to their readers.
But those are protagonists, the carriers of plot and story, and if the reader does not respond to them (or responds to them in the wrong way) the entire novel is at risk of imploding. There is nothing worse for a novel than the application of the Eight Deadly Words by the reader: “I Don’t Care What Happens to These People”. The readers have to care. They have to care with a degree of passion. Otherwise… it’s all just wind turning pages.
There are other characters who inhabit a story, however. On a recent convention panel, this kind of character was referred to in a cavalier manner as “The Third Spear Carrier On The Left” (or TTSCOTL for short); those who have a certain background might know some of them as Red Shirts; for the rest of the readers they might get lumped into a general corral which is labelled “secondary characters”.
Well, but that isn’t quite there, either. A true Red Shirt is a throwaway, possibly a character with no lines at all, somebody who plays the role of a witness in the crowd or a piece of cannon fodder, depending on circumstances. But a true secondary character has a little more weight than that – more engagement with the reader, despite being on stage for a very limited time in an extremely limited role.
And apparently I’m remarkably good at engaging heartstrings for a non-major-protag character only to have them shuffle off the mortal coil and out of the novel just because I’m, like, totally heartless and without feeling – at least according to an Australian friend, a devoted reader of my work, who has a perennial quibble about me and such characters. She and I have occasionally discussed what these secondary characters owe their creator, the story in which they appear, and the readers who encounter them in those stories.
I said that sometimes what such a character owes the story and the reader is… perhaps unfairly… a poignant demise, a manner of death which drives a story forward and builds the character of the protagonist in some way.
I look at that concept – “a poignant demise” – and kind of feel like a bloodthirsty Aztec deity waiting, slavering, for the human sacrifice which will ensure my power (or my survival). But there’s more to it than that, as always.
Secondary characters can sometimes be utterly essential, even pivotal, with an entire storyline turning on a word or a deed which was uttered or performed by a character who NEVER had center stage, nor wanted it. They can make things easier, or make things harder. But the most important thing about them is… that they have their OWN stories. Those stories are just not the story being told right here, right now.
There are a couple of secondary characters in my “Changer of Days” books who exemplify this idea, and they fall neatly into two convenient sub-categories – the under-hero(ine), and the under-villain. If you have not read the books and wish to, and don’t particularly want spoilers, now’s the time to look away…
Okay.
The one character whom my Australian friend has never quite forgiven me for is Queen Senena from “Changer of Days”. Senena enters as someone who is almost a non-entity – she is the replacement for a barren first wife, for an usurper-king who desperately needs an heir and a bride to produce it.
All he sees in Senena is a barely-budded, biddable child, old enough to bear him the needed heir, young enough to be cowed and bullied into being a compliant companion when wanted and relegated into seen-and-not-heard when the King had better things to do. And a lesser creature, an ordinary woman, a throwaway child-bride character, would have done just that, and faded away into the background. But Senena is made of sterner stuff, and she has a mind of her own, and a spine. When she finds out the unspeakable things that her husband has done she does not crumple on the floor and whimper – she steps up to the problem and grasps its thorny vine with both delicate hands, defies her husband, countermands his orders in his absence.
When the cruel King returns she will inevitably pay for all this – but at the same time she is finally pregnant and at the very least the punishment will have to be delayed, and his temper might cool with time. So she takes her chances, the little Queen, showing unexpected strength and moral convictions and taking control of something that she ought never to have even had any knowledge about – and yes, she pays for this dearly. She commands the release of an important prisoner – the novel’s protagonist – from the King’s dungeons, in order that said prisoner might have a walk under the free and open sky. The friends of the prisoner – the character whose name has been mine ever since I entered the cyberworld, Anghara, the rightful heir of the throne which the King has stolen – know this is their only chance to free her from the King’s clutches. They take it. There are inevitable casualties. One of them… is the little Queen who made it all possible.
Senena is a light in that novel. When that light is extinguished, the darkness is, for a moment, overwhelming. But she will ALWAYS be a light. Her memory will remain a light. Her spirit will shine like a star in the night, guiding others to try and aspire to be like her. For a secondary character, she has achieved a great deal.
The second secondary character of note is a young man by the name of Ansen. Heir to his father’s estate, a young aristocrat with a severe sense of entitlement, he sees it as his absolute right to take what he wants because it is due him. When one such act results in appalling consequences – he loses the sight of one eye – he becomes deeply embittered, and focused on only one thing: what he sees as his rightful revenge.
This takes the form of betraying his cousin, the same Anghara whose escape from the King’s dungeons caused Senena to meet her death, to the King who has long been seeking her – knowing that the King seeks Anghara for no pleasant purpose and that only her own demise might finally clear his own claim to the throne.
Ansen goes seeking the King, thinking only of how his news of Anghara and her whereabouts might impact on his own future – how the King, whom he idolises, will be grateful for the information that Ansen is bringing, how his reward will be status and power and a place at the court. Unfortunately, he reaches the King in the aftermath of a choice which, once made, has irrevocably scarred the King’s own soul. The King is not interested in Ansen, or in his news. He makes an instant and arbitrary decision and sentences Ansen himself to a traitor’s death – he is to be hanged at dawn.
Unaware of this – locked up by himself in a room overnight but expecting to be able to see the King in the morning – Ansen is happy, excited, to see the King’s minion in the morning, and asks for a comb, for a washcloth, so that he can make himself presentable to the King. Slowly the reality of it all sinks in, though, and the last we see of him is a frightened child – which, after all, is very much what he still is – being led off to his execution.
The King glances at the procession through his window, and looks away – and Ansen never knew that he had had even that much of the King’s attention.
“Who was that?” one of the King’s companions asks curiously as the King turns away from the window.
“Nobody,” the King says, and forgets.
Outside, a young man’s wasted life, filled with slaking an aristocrat’s appetites and the simmering resentment and fury when that ability was taken away, is over as a new day breaks. It seems that he had done nothing, achieved nothing, that even in his death he had no more status than being called a nobody by the King whom it had been his desire to serve.
He might be a villain… but in the end he is pitiful, and his despairing death manages to pull at a reader’s heartstrings even while they’re satisfied that he has finally got his comeuppance. And he does not die entirely in vain. His life, after all, might be taken… as a lesson to others.
That’s what secondary characters do, that’s why they’re there – good secondary characters DO have entire lives of their own, lives hinted at in the narrative where they are not the primary plot carriers but lives which could nevertheless fill their own books if they were to focus on such individuals.
In other words, the way I write, the way I see a story, there really are no “secondary” characters, no character who is unimportant, who does not matter at all. Lives touch in unexpected ways – and a “secondary” character in one novel is no more than a protagonist of their own story who happened to wander into the current tale just long enough to make their presence felt. It is important, to my mind, to have such characters exist because they are the eyes and the souls through which a protagonist measures him or herself; they are the history through which the protagonist’s own story is woven.
Guy Gavriel Kay uses this concept to wonderful effect in “Last Light of the Sun”, where he weaves in the histories of people you meet only briefly and in passing – who barely touch the lives of his protagonists, if at all – but whose presence in the book enriches and deepens the narrative, gives it a context, gives it soul, gives it a sense of not being “just a novel” but instead being a window into real lives and real troubles and real joys, something that happens in a real world, a world full of “other” people whose effect on the POV characters can sometimes be only that they exist, and that by their existence they prove that there is a true world in that novel, a world whose boundaries are not defined by the covers of a given book, and which lures the reader further in and deeper in and invites the total immersion which defines a sense of wonder and a willing suspension of disbelief as they step into a world created by a mind different than their own.
Protagonists – primary characters – carry a story on their shoulders.
Secondary characters make the story possible, believable, real. Yes, sometimes they die. But sometimes… their very death within the story makes them immortal.
Senena still has a hold on my Australian friend, years after she has finished and laid down the book in which the little Queen made her appearance. Senena was not, never tried to be, a protagonist – but in her own way she caused just as much drama when she died as the main protag whose own demise caused my Florida reader to call me at three in the morning in outraged disbelief.
And in some ways… Senena’s may be the greater achievement
