WHY SECONDARY CHARACTERS ARE SO MUCH FUN…
In my new Angel’s Bay series, SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER, I not only had the opportunity to create the fictional town of Angel’s Bay but also to develop an entire community filled with interesting characters. While I loved creating the central hero and heroine, Jenna and Reid, who have all kinds of interesting secrets and an emotionally compelling story line, I must admit that I had a lot of fun developing the secondary characters.
Minor players in a story can be quirkier. Their personalities can be more extreme. They can be flawed without any redeeming qualities. They can be saints or sinners or somewhere in between. There’s a certain freedom to writing a secondary character, because there aren’t any expectations. They don’t even have to be particularly likeable; they just have to be interesting.
In SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER, I introduce several characters who will have continuing story lines through the series. One is the chief of police, Joe Silveira, who is half-Hispanic, half-Irish, and you know with that combination, he’s going to be trouble. Joe has come to Angel’s Bay after years of working vice for LAPD. While he’s thrilled with this new change in his life, his wife, Rachel, a realtor to the rich and famous in Beverly Hills, is nowhere near as happy. Rachel is brittle, ambitious sophistication, and finds fitting into this idyllic seaside community a definite challenge. But she loves her husband, or at least she thinks she does. They’ve been together a long time…fell in love as kids…but now find themselves wondering if their love can stand the test of time.
Joe also finds himself reluctantly attracted to the charming, beautiful OB/GYN in town, Charlotte Adams. Charlotte has her own problems. After coming back to Angel’s Bay after her father’s funeral, she is dealing with her mother and a strained mother-daughter relationship that continually tests her patience. She’s also shocked when her old boyfriend, Andrew, turns up in town as the new minister. Charlotte has secrets in her past that she doesn’t want Andrew or anyone else to find out.
The challenge of writing books with multiple characters is to make sure the secondary characters stay in their place and are used to enhance the feature couple and at times echo themes in the plot. Sometimes the secondary characters demand their day in the sun and become a feature couple in another book. One of the secondary characters in my book, SILENT RUN, was an eccentric painter who had a beautiful ethereal personality but painted monstrous grotesques pictures of murders, usually after awakening from a nightmare. Catherine eventually got her own story in SILENT FALL, but she originally started out as a throwaway character who could provide a clue to a crime. Who knew those horrific paintings would make me want to write her story? I certainly didn’t. But then I’m a writer who loves to plot out only the basic story line and find additional inspiration along the way.
So who are some of your favorite secondary characters? Anyone stand out?
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Please leave a comment to enter to win a copy of SUDDENLY ONE SUMMER. To read the back cover copy and Barbara’s bio, visit yesterday’s post. To learn more about Barbara and her books, please visit her website.