Everyone else

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.