An opera house would seem to be the last place an aspiring young fiction writer would frequent for inspiration. Opera—that melodramatic, hopelessly old-fashioned, sentimental art—has always gone to literature for inspiration, seldom the other way around. And yet there was a time when I was younger, living in New York, that I went every chance I got, finding in the full-throated passion, the swelling crescendos, the no-holds-barred plottings a welcome catharsis from the tighter, leaner emotions I was spending my mornings trying to pin down on the page.
The downside was that I had bad luck with the leading voices on the nights I could afford to go. Luciano Pavarotti’s throat was sore, or Beverly Sills had to cancel, and I ended up watching the second-string cast.
To keep myself interested, I began focusing on the chorus, the supernumeraries, the minor characters, finding they were often done perfectly and brought the performance to life. Opera is rich in these, from Ping, Pang, and Pong in Turandot, those jeering mockers, to Coline in La Boheme, going out to sell his treasured overcoat to buy medicine for the dying Mimi. Done well, they give opera a charming verisimilitude—a depth, variety, and richness the main characters can’t always provide. Conversely, one lazy spear carrier in Aida, slouching, mugging at the audience, can ruin an entire production.
This was the literary lesson I took from all those performances—the potential that resides in fiction’s minor characters, what they can bring to a story or novel, especially if done with imagination and verve. Moving the plot along, bolstering the main themes, adding a touch of humor, even, in lucky circumstances, bringing a quick dose of profundity. These are a few of the aesthetic benefits minor characters bring to the page. Nathaniel Hawthorne can have his young Goodman Brown, walking through the dark Puritan woods, see “the slender form of a veiled female, led between Goody Cloye, that pious teacher of the catechism,” and Martha Carrier, “who had received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell,” and they jump off the page at us, come alive in all their evil hideousness, though they’re mentioned nowhere else in the entire story.
Anton Chekhov. Charles Dickens. Ivo Andric. Eudora Welty. Saul Bellow. Any character who appears in their writing is vivid, believable, and memorable, even if they appear for the flash of a single line. One of the reasons we read fiction is for the delight of good characterization, and it can be done in minor ways just as in major. How much poorer would literature be if it didn’t include, not only the major Madame Defarge of A Tale of Two Cities, but the minor Mr. Cruncher, the affable grave robber raiding London cemeteries, who likes to describe his occupation as being “a tradesman in Scientific Goods; something of a Resurrection Man.”
Just as so many vivid minor characters swarm into our everyday lives, so do many drab and anonymous ones, those who we hardly notice or notice only as a type. The temptation in writing fiction is to brush these off with the quickest label we can find—”a soldier,” “a baby,” “a waiter”—and move on without a second glance.
This is a pity and can be worse than that—the sign of lazy writing that simply doesn’t give a damn about characters who are only passing through, though these are a story’s essential workers. Writing minor characters involves making them fully-fleshed and believable, motivated, interesting in their own right, cliche-free (no mere grotesques), credible…all these things, and yet briefly so, bit players who must take maximum advantage of their fleeting moment in the sun.
Often, focus alone is enough to make a difference. Let’s take a simple walk-on character, one who will only appear in our imaginary story once, and show some alternate ways of description.
Something passed by on the street.
A nothing line, the only purpose being to shift the reader’s attention out the window. The character, the something on the street, has hardly been noticed by the writer, and will not be noticed at all by the reader.
Someone passed by on the street.
The something, personified, immediately becomes vaguely interesting. It awakens in the reader the first stirrings of voyeuristic interest, if nothing more than this. An advance on the first line, but not by much.
A woman passed by on the street.
Gender is added, which helps a little; at least we have one particular to go on now, and yet how many women are in this world for the reader to guess which is she?
An Arab woman passed by on the street.
Okay, nationality. The reader’s curiosity has been piqued, especially if our story takes place in a small rural town where Arab women are not an everyday occurrence.
An Arab woman with luxurious black hair passed by on the street.
This is the first sentence in which we actually see her—a big improvement over the previous four, thanks to that tag of descriptive detail.
An Arab woman with luxurious black hair and a purple shawl passed by on the street.
Added details equal added interest; the purple shawl is just the kind of particularization that helps make her visible.
An Arab woman with luxurious black hair and a purple shawl passed by on the street, rolling a plastic hoop.
We’ve added action, which adds a fluid quality, curiosity, oddness, even suspense—uh, rolling what?
An Arab woman with luxurious black hair and a purple shawl passed by on the bomb-shattered street, a child’s plastic hoop around her neck, her hands over her eyes, crying.
Lots going on now, a suggestion of tragedy, a whole political/historical element—big stuff indeed, at least compared with the generic line we started off with. This is a walk-on who matters.
Once you’ve got the details of a minor character, it’s helpful to think about what function she may have in a scene, what will be her relevance. Is the Arab woman meant to reflect a sadness that the main character, watching her, cannot feel at his own losses? Is she meant to contradict some happy event from a previous scene? It’s important to take every opportunity in a short story to make details that happen in the background reflect or refract something that is happening in the foreground.
Since every good fiction writer does minor characters well, it’s not hard to find good examples of the art.
Dylan Thomas wrote some funny and poignant stories that are largely forgotten today. Perhaps because of his poet’s eye, he sees his minor characters with remarkable clarity, as evidenced by this passage from “Who Do You Wish Was With Us?”, two boys playing a wishing game to pass the time in their drab Welsh town.
“George Gray is the most curious man I ever met, queerer than Oscar Thomas, and I thought nobody could be queerer than that. George Gray wears glasses, but there’s no glass in them, only the frames. He’s a cat’s doctor and he goes to somewhere in Sketty every morning to help a sour widow put clothes on. He’s only been in town a month. He’s a B.A. too, with a love curl on his forehead. The things he’s got in his pockets! Pinches and scissors for cats and lots of old diaries. He used to go to bed with a policewoman in London and she used to pay him. She used to go to bed in her uniform. I’ve never met such a queer man. I wish he was here now. Who do you wish was with us, Ray?”
It’s tempting to say that the only difference between minor characters in short stories and minor characters in novels is the size of their minor-ness. Obviously, in novels a walk-on can have several paragraphs devoted to them and still be considered minor. The chief tactical difference seems to be that in novels the minor characters tend to be running characters, appearing at regular intervals.
Willa Cather’s beautiful My Antonia abounds in great minor characters. There are the two farmhands who take the narrator Jim under their wing, Jack Marpole and Otto Fuchs, foolish, naive, hardworking, and generous; Antonia’s violin-playing father, Mr. Shimerada, pining for his native Bohemian woods; Mrs. Stevens, the personification of sensible, no-nonsense neighborliness; the itinerant piano player, Blind d’Arnault, who, growing up as a sightless young slave, gropes his way to his master’s piano.
It’s clear that in novels many major characters started life as minor ones, striking the author’s imagination so forcibly that they were promoted into starring roles—Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers being a prime example.
It can also work the other way around. Herman Melville, outlining Moby Dick, apparently didn’t intend to make Ishmael the point-of-view character, but, instead, a lonelier, sparer figure, the one who occupies the whole of tiny Chapter Twenty-Three, and is only mentioned elsewhere once.
“Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newly-landed mariner encountered in New Bedford at the inn. When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unresistingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.”
A grave? Not quite that, since, having Bulkington loom so large in his original conception, Melville isn’t quite ready to abandon him as a cameo character without his contributing his mite of profundity and weight.'
“But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, then be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety…Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing, straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!”
I’ve saved my favorite minor character for last. Gordon Weaver, who left us in 2021, was one of those talented novelists whose work is ludicrously ignored, despite his writing much better than almost anyone who was better known.
That said, Weaver’s The Eight Corners of the World has gained, in the 30 years since it was first published, an underground reputation as one of the comic masterpieces of World War Two. (If Kurt Vonnegut’s name was attached to it, it would be considered his best book.)
It tells the story of one Yoshinori Yamaguchi, better known simply as “Gooch,” who grows up during the 1930’s in love with everything American—jazz, Hollywood, baseball, hipster slang—and goes on to epitomize in his life everything that’s ironic, bitter, and comic in the long love-hate relationship between the U. S. and Japan.
Early in the novel, Gooch is enlisted to translate by the visiting New York Yankees on their famous goodwill trip to Japan in 1934. The baseball stars are taken to meet the emperor, and a bigger cannon is needed to translate the baseball chatter into the proper high-court formulations.
“Ambassador Joe Clark Grew’s interpreter (prep-schoolish W. D. Wetherell, reet?) steps forward, renders fair-to-middling full fifty-degree kowtow from waist, delivers riposte (natch) in incompetent High Court, eyes downcast (natch!) to avoid straight look at Son of Heaven etcetera blah. To wit: “On behalf of all worthy personages gathered in the presence of God’s sunshine, in the mouth of Franklin Roosevelt, and in the mouths of the American League warriors of repute here, I extend my congratulations to your heavenly reputation. I now demand to speak the names of the legends who reside in our midst, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Connie Mack.”
Interpreter Wetherell drones on, making a fool of himself, personifying, as Gooch does himself, all the mutual incomprehensions that divide Japanese and American culture.
A great minor character—and not just because Gordon like to have fun with his friends, interjecting them into his fiction, especially a buddy who’s known for sometimes bringing out a malapropism of his own.
And maybe that’s the chastening conclusion to our survey of this neglected aspect of the writer’s art, the one lesson we need to keep in mind when we’re searching for just the right perspective: that while we are all major characters in our own lives, to the rest of the world we’re strictly minor characters all the way.
Brilliant!