When I’m reading, I find that it’s often the smaller characters that help to build up a sense of place or tone in a story; the ones who live in the background, the walk-on non-speaking extras if you like.  The inclusion of bit-part characters can add depth and symbolism to whatever it is that’s going on in the life of your main protagonist, particularly when those characters are seen through the protagonist’s eyes.

To write well, I guess you have to be interested in people and the world around you.  I enjoy watching the mini dramas of other people’s lives – from the strained body language of a young couple drinking Sunday morning coffee in Starbucks to the full rage tussle of two small children fighting over the see-saw in a playground.  These little events are all stories in miniature and they can bring life to your fiction in many different ways.

In Glasshopper, I wrote a scene in which my main character, Jake, argues with his mother on board a ferry to the Isle of Wight, and he fumes off to walk around the dark stormy deck alone.  The morning that I wrote the chapter, I had been walking through town, past a cafe, inside which a small child was leaning into the window pressing his chubby hands upon the glass.  He looked at me as if he wanted me to put my hands up too.  I smiled and carried on walking.  Later, as I wrote, the little child made his way into my writing, as Jake passes the outside windows of the ferry:

” In the lounge seats in the next room along, lots of kids and mums are huddled around tables, colouring pictures with crayons and eating biscuits.  There’s the odd dad here and there, reading a paper, leaving the children to the mums.  One little kid sees me as I go by and presses his grubby hand against the window, smiling like he knows me.  I wave back at him, and press my hand against the glass on the other side.”

In Glasshopper, the little kid wasn’t an important character, and we never see him again.  But he presents us with a moment in which we can get a more profound insight into Jake.  Just the fact that Jake puts his hands up against the glass for the child tells us that he is a particular type of boy: we would read him quite differently had he ignored the child and marched on in his fury.

Don’t forget your peripheral characters.  As brief as might be within your work, if their appearance is crisp and memorable, they will enrich your story and make your fictional world all the more real.

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