Man, look at this place. Where did all the dust come from? I need
to have a word with the maid.
This is a story where nothing horrible happens. There are no
monsters lurking under the bed or in the closet. All the children's
imaginary friends are benign, and they don't really exist in the
first place. The babysitter is a sweet girl who's saving money for
college, and she's going to pledge to the best sorority on campus
when she gets there. Daddy doesn't keep body parts in the secret
freezer in the basement, and Mommy didn't accidentally run over a
hobo while she was on her way back from visiting the young stud she's
seeing on the side.
This is about all the people who are never going to be the main
character in one of my stories, Stephen King's, the late Richard
Matheson's, or the stories of anyone else who enjoys distributing
cold shivers. When something is happening to whoever's in Hell
House, Hill House, or the Overlook, nothing is happening to all the
other people of the world, and that's how they like it. So let's
spread some of our special kind of love their way, shall we?
Otherwise their lives would be so boring.
Unless a story is set on a desert island or a different planet, it's
likely to contain characters that are out of the range of action.
The sweet old lady who lives one street over from the haunted house,
the cop who used to patrol a certain area of town but who got
promoted before all the children in that area learned that new song
about the Donner Party, and the sorority sister (who once baby-sat to
earn money for school) of the woman who's hearing voices in her head
that tell her to add some rat poison to the cookies she's making for
the PTO meeting. Now all these fine people are (probably) going to
live happy, normal lives, but they're in our story. They're there
because as unique as it would be to have a haunted house set in a
huge, open space in the middle of a city, or a housewife who never
spoke more than five words to anyone while she was in school, if your
average reader learns about those things, their disbelief is going to
get very heavy.
These people are going to take up space in our story anyway, so let's
put them to work and make them earn their keep. I'm sure we can find
something fun to do with them.
Now if we, the writers, do our job well, then our protagonist, which
in this case will be a plucky older woman, will easily stand out from
all these literary extras. She'll have lots of small attributes that
combine to make an interesting whole, and make us connect to her.
But we have a limited amount of clay to use in putting her together,
because the polar opposite of that mute housewife, the little old
woman who's been everything from a nuclear physicist to a decorated
commando, is just ridiculous. If she's traveled during her life, she
might be able to understand how a new immigrant would have a
different sense of the way traffic laws work, but not if she's lived
a life of near-isolation in a small town. If that part of her life
is a key part of the plot, well then she can have a friend, someone
that's traveled a bit, and who can point out that our hero doesn't
know everything, despite all the self-confidence that she does.
Or maybe we've written ourselves into a corner. The words are
pouring out hard and heavy, and before you know it, the
little-old-lady Miss Marple clone that we've fallen in love with is
on top of a fifteen story building with the door to the stairs
blocked by generic slasher who's set his dog loose to play 'Fetch a
piece of the sleuth.' What now? Well, maybe she's wearing a coat.
It's summer, but the weather has taken an unexpected chill. Now
she's so dedicated to solving the mystery of the missing golden crock
pot, that she just ran out of her house that morning without
thinking. Her first stop was to visit her friend who once was a
long-distance runner, to ask how easy it would be to run three miles
with a heavy crock pot on your back. Her friend is a practical sort
of person, who loaned our absent-minded sleuth a jacket, the one she
has on now as a ferocious chihuahua is bearing down on her. As
Lullabelle is running up to eat our sweet little old lady, (it's my
scenario, so I get to name the dog) our heroine has one of those
moments where a person's brain moves faster than their consciousness
can follow. She reaches into the pocket without knowing why, because
the survival instinct in her has recognized the jacket she's wearing
as the same one she's seen her friend in before, when that friend
goes running. Our heroine's hand comes out clutching a can of pepper
spray. Lullabelle gets a face-full, and while that doesn't end the
peril it gives our heroine some breathing room. Plus, we've just
avoided getting a reputation as a writer who snuffs little old
ladies.
Now that's a good use for someone who would otherwise just drift
along as part of the background noise, but it's also an obvious use.
Often the best parts of a story are the ones that the readers fill in
for themselves. Let's take another look at our heroine.
What's her outlook on life? Is she optimistic? Jaded? Does she
believe in her local councilman but wouldn't trust the current
president if he said the sun would rise tomorrow? This is part of
all those quirks that make her distinctive. Now how do we convey
those quirks? Well, we can spend two pages or more on an inner
monologue and put our readers to sleep, or we can follow our heroine
through her day. When she gets up in the morning one of the first
things she does is get the paper. (Which is telling of itself. She
has a computer, but still likes the ritual of reading her newspaper)
Does she mumble something to herself about the paperboy because he
threw it under her car? Does she find a hand-written note inside the
paper, thanking her for recovering the paperboy's bicycle when it was
stolen last week? Or is the paper right in front of her door,
hand-placed there because the paperboy has learned the hard way that
this little old lady is a former cop, when last month he offered to
give her a special discount if she started paying cash and his
parents got a visit from a patrolman.
Now take all that possibility, and multiply by however many minor
characters your story will contain. The people don't even have to
have to have active parts in the story. In the above example we
showed what kind of person our heroine is by watching her do
something completely normal, but it was something normal that she did
in her own way. The paperboy himself never entered the picture.
There are no limits. All those neighbors, paperboys, and old
friends? They're yours, so make them fit.
Now if you'll pardon me, I have some little old ladies to kill off.
Still writing.
