Secondary Characters and Beginnings

This past weekend, I read the final (?) book in a series I picked up in college. That's been quite a while ago, and few series that stretch that long have turned out well for me. But I found Ender in Exile to be a pleasure, and it set the wheels of thought in motion. In that series-- though it is arguably two separate series-- Orson Scott Card creates a story that is told from two different angles, and then you begin to truly wonder who the main character is or was. Maybe that was his intent. I began to wonder if I had secondary characters from whose point of view a story would be interesting to see.

While not all stories warrant the treatment of the peekaboo interrogation room mirror, it has made me look more carefully, to want to feed those secondary (and to some extent, tertiary) characters. It's worth thinking on more, and it's worth taking more care with. Readers care about characters not only because you make them, but because they see that others care for them, as well. Don't we all make decisions about people based on those around them?

So I suppose I wonder how other authors go about developing their secondaries without seeing them take over the story?

I began reading Ender's Game books immediately after graduating college. The reason still makes me smile-- a young man whom I had a tremendous crush on recommended them as we sat in our caps and gowns on the green (as he had months before in the campus library as we toiled together on a group project). Part of it was a desire to have something more to discuss with him; part of it was my genuine interest in juvenile fiction. And part of it is just because I like to read.

Of all the authors I read religiously, some got started quietly-- I can't remember what made me start reading Nora Roberts, for instance-- and others auspiciously; I began reading Stephen King because my older brother didn't want to do his book report on Firestarter. I was in grade school, he was in high school, and I ended up writing most of that report. So much for parental censorship. (I always knew right from wrong even as I was reading about homicidal cars and rabid dogs, no worries there.) Gregory Maguire was a result of a cover I liked, Neil Gaiman because of friends' recommendations... each writer, each book is like the start of a friendship, the story of "how we met" and "our song" and "that first kiss."

Now the trick is to figure out how to coax that first kiss out of an agent, a publisher, and more than anything, a reader. I'd love to be the other half of some reader's "how we met" story.

- A.