Tertiary Territory
minor characters can have major impact
Lesser characters sometimes get away from writers, receiving insufficient attention in the glare of the primaries. They can be complex to handle, especially when it comes to how deeply they should be drawn, how often they should recur, whether they should have names and how connected the reader should feel to them. Tertiary character pitfalls include the creation of too many forgettable or interchangeable characters, creating a sense of character clutter; naming various minor characters similarly, allowing confusion to bubble up in the reader; and the creation of character who seem like they’re going to be important, only to be abandoned as the writer and their main characters move forward without them.
Some simple dos and don’ts:
Don’t use similar sounding or similarly spelled names or even names starting with the same letter for two (much less more) characters unless you’re doing it with specific intent, say, in the creation of a doppelgänger.
Don’t be too quick to name tertiary characters. Giving a character a name is a cue to the reader that they should remember and track this person. If they’re going to be forgotten, don’t waste your reader’s energy.
Do maintain some sort of presence for any reasonably meaningful minor character throughout your narrative. If they die or are otherwise left behind, perhaps there are memories or other traces of them — or the language used to draw them — that nevertheless come up. Or perhaps there is a series of friends or bosses or waiters or lovers, each of whom play a role at different moments, none of them long lasting, in which case they could function as a kind of collective character, so that the presence of a friend does persist, even if different individuals take up the role at different moments of the narrative.
And finally, a few examples of notable tertiary characters from the stack of books on my bedside table:
I just reread Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, and was interested in, among many other things, the character of Rulag. She’s the main character, Shevek’s mother, but theirs is not a close relationship, as it is common for parents on Shevek’s planet, Anarres, to leave their children’s upbringing to the collective. We meet Rulag fairly briefly and then are allowed to forget her. Shevek seems to have done the same, though it is notable that he and his partner choose to raise their children themselves (to the extent their society permits). In my reading, when a female adversary to Shevek cropped up late in the book, her name seemed only vaguely familiar to me — just as it did to one of the characters in the story, who also needed to be reminded who this Rulag was. As I suspect LeGuin intended, this forgetting and reminding made the fact that Shevek’s mother became his enemy all the more devastating to me as a reader. It also illuminated an aspect of Shevek’s character, his loyalty, that had been called into question.
In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, we meet a number of vividly described, important but nameless side characters. The spangle-shirted queen who comes up to David at Guillaume’s bar with an unwanted acknowledgement of his sexuality is striking not just as an individual but as a representative of his — and David’s unacknowledged — community. He leaves David with a Sybil-like pronouncement: “You will be very unhappy. Remember that I told you so,” a prophecy we know from the opening pages will come true. Other tertiary figures, the ubiquitous restaurant cashiers, are evoked both en masse — “some are white haired, and some not, some fat, some thin, some grandmothers and some but lately virgins, they all have exactly the same shrewd, vacant, all-registering eye” — and in the particular. The big bosomed, big voiced old woman who welcomes David and his posse to the restaurant where they breakfast in Les Halles is not someone we expect to see again, but she earns the pages devoted to her because of how she reveals David to us — and to himself. He imagines she possesses that special discernment, the cashier’s vision, and so it is from the look in her eyes, from her “click of speculation” — presumably about David’s sexual orientation — that we see, once again, David’s truth. Though he may be in denial, these tertiary characters reveal his truth.
In Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel, there's a spurned love interest, the protagonist's childhood friend Louise, who gets fairly little airtime and almost no love from the protagonist, but she keeps cropping up. She provides tension, hope in the reader for a happy outcome, and ultimately is a key part of the surprise ending.
PROMPT:
Though they seem less important than the the primaries, tertiary characters play an essential function in many narratives, so invest some time in making sure yours are well balanced — not drawn too fully, nor too lightly — for the roles they have to play, and make sure they are in fact doing narrative work, not just adding color or anecdote. Try creating a tertiary character inventory, charting them all and tracking their appearances in your story, as well, perhaps, as any special language or imagery attached to them. Look for patterns, and consider further developing any that you find.