The Breathtaking Power of Secondary Characters

By Ed Protzel

Do you feel blocked because your hero and plot are played out? Simply need to add power and verisimilitude to your completed work? Secondary characters can inject lightning into your novel, screenplay, or short story when you adopt some of these principles and secrets.

The Hero’s Reflection & Subplots
The most basic minor character is the hero’s reflection: a best friend, spouse, pal, or loved one. Of course, the reflection gives the hero a sounding board, enabling the writer to reveal the hero’s character, motives, and inner thoughts dramatically and economically, without introspective narratives. Further, because the reflection closely parallels the hero, if you put him/her in the same or a similar situation as the hero, you’ve created a viable subplot. Note how Shakespeare uses minor characters and subplots in every play—fantastic! A good subplot will not only give depth to your themes, but also can add humor and irony to a dramatic story, poignancy to a comedy, and, importantly, conflict.

Juice it Up

For dramatic purposes, you want to increase the conflict in every scene to juice them up, right? To succeed, your reflection should be the relative opposite of the hero. In the historical novels of my DarkHorse Trilogy, I gave my protagonist, Durksen Hurst, two major reflections, creating a dramatic triangle of allies who are always in intense conflict. Durk is a creative hustler, prone to wild schemes. He secretly partners with a group of escaped slaves, including a distrustful, angry Isaac, who expresses what the others are only thinking. Standing between these two combatants, representing reason, is wise Big Josh, the natural leader of the group. Every development scene in the novels is, thus, made dynamic.

Fueling the Secondary Character

If a secondary character doesn’t intertwine with the hero, however, it won’t work.

The more functions your secondary character serves the better; the trick is to combine them. For example, early in the next novel (Something in Madness, set in post-Civil War Mississippi), one of Durk’s partners, Long Lou, sets out to find his family, as many freedmen did, creating a poignant scene. Later, I wanted to illustrate the Vagrancy laws in the South’s Black Codes, where freedmen were arrested on the roads, fined, and their fines auctioned off to planters seeking a supply of labor. It was slavery without the name.

How best to illuminate this injustice? At first, I thought about creating a new minor character who would be auctioned off. Instead, I had Durk discover that his friend, Lou, had been scooped up and was being auctioned off to the novel’s ruthless antagonist, a racist with a vendetta against Durk.

Suddenly, by combining the two minor characters into the person of Lou, an illustrative event is transformed into a major conflict between the primary characters, forcing a clash that must be resolved immediately. Thus, a plot point with innumerable possibilities is born!

Want to enliven your tale? Perhaps rethinking a minor character or two can make your work more emotionally charged and meaningful.

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Ed Protzel lives in St. Louis, Mo., where he writes imaginative fiction filled with plot twists you won’t see coming. Following years as a screenwriter, Ed turned to novels after earning a master’s in English literature/creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He is the author of the Civil War-era DarkHorse Trilogy: The Lies That Bind (antebellum Mississippi), Honor Among Outcasts (Civil War Missouri), and next year Something in Madness (Reconstruction Mississippi). Look for Ed’s futuristic mystery/thriller, The Antiquities Dealer, coming soon. Connect with Ed:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edprotzelauthor/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/EProtzel Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14757802.Ed_Protzel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-protzel-6b215299/

Website: http://www.edprotzel.com/

Writing Powerful Dialogue

By Ed Protzel, Author of The Lies That Bind:DarkHorse Trilogy, Book 1

One of the things that originally drew me to classic Southern fiction was its compelling dialogue. From Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, we’ll never forget broken Blanche DuBois’ pitiful “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” nor even Stanley Kowalski’s simple, desperate “Stella!” In Faulkner’s great Absalom, Absalom!, Charles Bon’s “—So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you can’t bear” reveals in one sentence the novel’s social themes with authority.

In my interview on LA Talk Radio’s “The Writer’s Block,”  hosts Jim Christina and Bobbi Bell asked how I created such powerful dialogue in my antebellum South thriller, The Lies That Bind: DarkHorseTrilogy, Book 1. Frankly, my reply to them wasn’t very revealing, and I’ve thought about what I should have said ever since. So, expiating my sin of omission, here are some keys to writing memorable dialogue.

Characters with Strong Points of View

If you have strong, intelligent characters with strong points of view—obsessions are especially excellent—they’ll tell you, the writer, what they want to say. All you’ve got to do is transcribe their words. I generally find my characters telling me what they desperately need to express in a scene I’m working on when I wake up in the morning, when taking a shower, or even exercising. These often prove to be the best lines in the book.

For example, in The Lies That Bind, the wealthy Missus French runs the town, but because of her traumatic past with men, she is now a recluse who disdains people. So when her heir, Devereau, cajoles her to make her [dreaded] annual Easter pilgrimage to the church in town, she reveals her complete estrangement from society and its institutions with: “I don’t see why I have to go to church simply because That Man rose from the dead.”

Limitations Lead to Irony/Humor

Novels also contain dialogue that, because the reader has superior position, makes the character’s misstatements ironic, humorous, and fraught with meaning. In Faulkner’s masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom!, Wash Jones’ never-say-die exclamation about the Southern war effort, “They kilt us…but they ain’t whupped us yit, air they?” is unforgettable. In my novel, minor character Ellen is a young innocent who believes she is being guided by God to free all the slaves in town, so she secretly sews a ridiculous gown she believes is seductive. When her naive scheme takes her unannounced into Devereau French’s bedroom, revealing the terrified Devereau’s most awkward secret, Ellen is so confused and self-conscious, all she can say is, “Don’t you never tell nobody you seen me wearing this”—which readers often quote to me.

When you write a novel, you live intimately with your characters for a long time. If you listen closely to their needs and desires, they’ll write some unforgettable dialogue for you. But be sure you quote them accurately and honestly—it’s only fair :)

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Ed Protzel has the unique perspective of a mixed-heritage Jew-Cherokee, who lived for a time in an orphanage and later as a teen runaway, gives Ed Protzel special insights into characters that are outsiders, men and women on lonely quests seeking justice, love, and fulfillment against society’s blindness. The Lies That Bind, a darkly ironic antebellum South thriller, is the first book in Ed’s DarkHorse Trilogy. Ed has also written five original screenplays for feature film and developed scripts/projects for 20^th Century Fox. Ed earned his master’s degrees in English literature/creative writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and his bachelor’s in English at the University of Hawaii. Ed had a dual career for over twenty years, working as an investments advisory manager for Fortune 100 firms, while writing screenplays and novels. Ed’s expertise as a novelist and screenwriter is in the American tragicomedy movement (Faulkner, Twain, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Connor), science fiction, Shakespeare, and a variety of historical periods, including World War II, the American Civil War, and Fourteenth Century Europe. The final two books in his DarkHorse Trilogy include many of the same major characters as the original: Honor Among Outcasts, set in Missouri during the Civil War (2017), and Something in Madness, set in the 1880s (2018). Ed is married and lives in St. Louis, where he writes full time and teaches college English as an adjunct. His social media links are website: http://www.edprotzel.com/

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