Episode At A Glance

Let’s talk about the characters who surround your protagonist.

You know your main character. You’ve lived inside her head for months. You know what she wants, what she’s afraid of, what she’s willing to risk.

But how much do you know the other people in her orbit? The husband. The best friend. The sister. The mother in law. The colleague who keeps showing up. The neighbor who knows too much.

Most beginning writers treat all of these characters the same way. They’re not the protagonist, so they get whatever’s left over. A name, a few traits, a function. They’re in the room. But they disappear. They’re often filler that makes your story thin. 

But these characters aren’t all the same. They have different roles in your story. And understanding the difference is what allows you to give each one exactly what they need — no more, no less.

And that quality — that sense of a world teeming with life, people in your protagonist’s orbit who have their own full, complicated lives — is something every novelist can build.

3 Levels of Character

1. Your Primary Character.The person the story revolves around. We see the world through her perspective. She undergoes the major transformation. You already know her better than anyone else in your story. That’s as it should be.
2. Your secondary characters. These are the people who live in your story alongside your protagonist. They appear across multiple scenes. The reader builds a relationship with them over time.They affect the trajectory of your story — they create friction, shift decisions, open and close doors.
3. Minor Characters. The store clerk. The cab driver. The stranger at the party who says the one thing that lands differently than anyone expected. Minor characters pass through a scene. Their job is to serve that one moment — to reveal something about your protagonist, create a brief friction, ground the scene in a specific world. Then they’re gone.

Secondary Characters

Secondary characters exist on a spectrum. Some are deeply woven into your protagonist’s story — they have their own wants, their own tensions, maybe even their own thread running through the narrative.

Others appear regularly but in service of a specific function — the therapist your protagonist sees every week, the neighbor who keeps turning up. Both are secondary. But the ones who carry more weight in your story need more behind them.

Common Mistake

You’ve done the work. You know who the husband is. You’ve given him a personality, a history, maybe even a moment early in the story where he feels completely real. And then your protagonist hits a crisis point in chapter nine, and she comes home, and he’s in the kitchen, and he hands her a cup of coffee and says something supportive. Or something dismissive. Whatever the scene needs.

And then he’s gone.

Not because you forgot about him. But because in that moment, you were so focused on what your protagonist needed from that scene — the emotional beat she had to hit, the decision she was moving toward, the thing that needed to happen next — that everyone else in the room stopped being a person. They became instruments. They said the thing. They did the thing. And they stepped aside.

The Scene Level Opportunity

This is different from the story-level work you did when you built these characters. You can know exactly who the husband is and still flatten him the moment your protagonist walks into a room with something urgent on her mind.

What’s true about every secondary character in every scene you write:

They walked into that room with something already going on. The husband has been turning something over all morning. He’s preoccupied, or quietly pleased about something, or he’s been waiting for the right moment to say something he hasn’t said yet.

That’s behind the page. It doesn’t have to be stated. But if you don’t know it’s there — if you haven’t asked the question — he will hand her the coffee and disappear every single time.

The Theory of Sonder

Sonder is the profound realization that every person you pass on the street is living a life as vivid, as complex, and as central to them as yours is to you. The stranger on the subway has a history, a fear, something she’s hoping for. The man at the coffee counter has been carrying something since this morning that has nothing to do with your order. You’ll never know what it is. But for one moment, you register that it exists.

That flash of recognition — that’s what your secondary characters need to create in your reader.

Not the full story. Not an interior monologue that hijacks the scene. Just the edge of it. Just enough that the reader senses the depth, feels the presence of a life being lived just outside the frame.

You don’t put it on the page. You bring it to the page. And the reader feels the difference.

What To Take Into Your Writing

Know which level each character occupies. Primary, secondary, minor. Know what their job is. And give them what that job requires — no more, no less.

And before you write any scene where your protagonist isn’t alone, ask yourself this question. Not about her. About everyone else in the room.

What is this person living right now, outside of my protagonist’s story?

You don’t have to write all of it. You just have to know it’s there.

That’s what makes the difference between a world that feels inhabited and a world that feels built around one person.

Links Mentioned In This Episode

Episode 47: Even Minor Characters Play A Major Role

The Perfect Couple by Elin Hilderbrand

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