by Chuck Wendig
Supporting characters are just characters.
Which means you should treat them as you would Luke Skywalker or Hans Gruber. Figure out who they are. Look to the same elements that you’d give the main characters: What are their problems? How will they tackle those problems? What limitations and complications stand in their way? Every character is facing a maze. A labyrinth separates even the most meager character from the thing he most wants, from the end of his quest. We may not see it all, but like the peak of an iceberg we should still see some part of it poking out of the water.22
Who are some great supporting characters? From Die Hard, we’ve got Argyle, the limo driver who brings McClane to Nakatomi Plaza and gets trapped there when Gruber and the Gang take over the building. Argyle doesn’t get a great deal of screen-time, but he feels like a complete character because he’s given shape and dimension: We know he’s got a girlfriend, we know he’s lying to his boss, we can see him enjoying the high life in the limo in total ignorance (he raids the minibar and talks on the phone, using all the luxuries available to him). He also has a small character arc in that originally he seems like a bit of a screw-off (he’s not your typical buttoned-up limousine chauffeur), but at the end he’s called upon to play the hero. When he sees Theo, the hacker, prepping an ambulance for escape, Argyle slams the limo into it, thus foiling the bad guys’ plans. The movie treats Argyle like he’s got a complete life, and it even gives him a little climactic moment all his own.
Further, Argyle pulls double duty because not only does he have a life of his own, he also helps us understand McClane. Some characters work in parallel or perpendicular to one another, but others serve as mirrors—they reflect the characters with whom they interact. (Think Smithers and Mr. Burns in The Simpsons.) Argyle challenges McClane, teases out information about him, his wife, his overall situation as a cop in New York City. He’s a sounding board, a reflective surface, and an agitating element all in one.
The goal is to make them seem as complete and as interesting as you would any other character. They may have a limited role in this particular story, but we should feel like they have unseen, complicated lives off the screen or off the page.
As noted earlier:
Characters aren’t just architecture—
They’re architects.
And Argyle is a supporting element of this story, but he’s also an architect in his own right. He supports McClane’s story and helps us to understand it, but he gets beats that are his alone, and he actively affects the story. (We talk more about beats as a narrative measurement on page 86 of this book.)
Want an even better example of a character who functions as a mirror?
Wheezy the penguin, from Toy Story 2.
If you don’t know Wheezy, he’s a squeaky toy penguin that belongs to the human boy, Andy, along with the panoply of other living playthings that form the cast of characters. Wheezy, though, he’s an old toy. The squeaker has gone out of him. And now he, well, wheezes.
Wheezy reflects the problem that the main character, Woody, has throughout the film: Woody’s afraid of being an old toy put up on the highest shelf and forgotten—
Just like Wheezy.
See, Andy has forgotten his old toy. The high shelf is a special Hell for those toys, where they go into effective exile.23 Woody gets put up on that shelf when he is himself busted. It’s up there that he meets the raspy toy penguin—a penguin with some history, a character who has clearly had a long life that he fears is effectively near his end. It’s the glimpse of the iceberg’s peak: We don’t see the details of Wheezy’s history, but we know it’s there.
Wheezy is an avatar representing the theme of the film: that we all risk being forgotten. Wheezy is also an agent of foreshadowing, reminding Woody and the other toys of their own effective mortality.24
Wheezy, though, has an arc, because eventually a happy ending is in store for him—he has his squeaker and his Robert Goulet–provided voice restored. And the other toys earn the same happy ending: None are forgotten, all are beloved, and they can go back to forgetting their mortality (until the next movie, that is).
THREE TIERS AND THREE BEATS
Characters fall into three arbitrary, I-just-made-these-up-to-help-you-determine-their-importance-in-the-story, tiers:
ESSENTIAL CHARACTERS. These are characters without whom the story really doesn’t exist. In Die Hard, it’s John McClane, it’s Holly, it’s Hans Gruber. But it’s also a so-called “supporting” character Sergeant Al Powell, whose presence is vital because he’s McClane’s single ally in the film—he’s a desk jockey cop who shows up and serves as John’s only connection to the outside world. Powell is a tent pole. Without him, the whole thing falls down.
USEFUL, BUT NONESSENTIAL. Argyle in Die Hard is useful, though you could write that movie without him. These characters push on the plot and help generate (or resolve) both drama and conflict while nevertheless not being critical components to the overall narrative.
FUNCTIONAL ONLY. Gruber has a few guys in his crew that are there just as obstacles to be overcome—they have little-to-no inner life; they offer us nothing in terms of who they are or what they want. They may affect the story, but they do so in a fairly linear, singular way. They are, in the words of culinary wizard Alton Brown (see next sidebar), single-serving “unitaskers.”
Now, even the most meager, walk-on characters should be given at least three beats (a beat is a form of narrative measurement that we’ll talk about in the next chapter). It amounts to giving them three moments to exist, but ideally to do something that emblemizes the character or furthers the plot.
In Die Hard, the mighty Al Leong plays a minor character—a terrorist, Uli. He has very little to do in the script except, you know, to be a gun-for-hire. Even still, he has little moments that add up:
He is among the terrorists who take the thirtieth floor of Nakatomi Plaza hostage.
In the middle of a shoot-out, Uli stops long enough to eat some candy bars he found in a food stand. (Which is amazing, by the way. If I’m ever in a shoot-out with the LAPD SWAT, I hope to be awesome enough to steal and eat a Snickers bar as bullets zip past my head.)
Later, he helps plant the C4—and is then shot by John and blown up by the explosives he planted.
Again, it’s not much. But it’s just enough to give him the glimmer of a personality, to allow him to appear more than just a houseplant.25
UNITASKERS VERSUS MULTITASKERS
Alton Brown identifies certain appliances or gadgets in your kitchen that have one narrow, niche purpose—like, say, a garlic press, or maybe a banana slicer. It’s not that they don’t do their job—it’s that they take up space when you could use another object to perform the task competently. You don’t need a banana slicer because you can use, oh, I dunno, a knife. A knife is a simple, elegant multitasker. It does whatever you need it to. You can cut bananas. You can slice garlic or use the flat of the blade to smash the clove. You can use the knife to stab whoever tries to steal your sandwich.26
In fiction, we also have unitaskers and multitaskers, though they are a little harder to see—sometimes, we refer to unitaskers as “darlings,”27 meaning elements inserted by the author that serve little to no purpose except to please the author. A character you put into a story who has no connection to the rest of the story is, at best, a unitasker. A plot point that exists just because it seems cool is, again, a unitasker. It serves only itself.
Narrative multitaskers, though … ahh, there’s some good stuff. A character who pushes on the plot, who ably represents the theme, and who isn’t just a precious peacock there to preen and look pretty—that’s what we’re looking for. Elements should be able to do more than one thing. To go back to the architecture metaphor, a unitasker is nothing more than a model home—it has no function except its own display. You can’t live in it, there’s no electricity, no running water. A real house becomes a home by dint of its many functions. Your story can’t just be a model home. And the el
ements within have to be more than that. They have to be more than just some single-use, bullshit object lost in a kitchen junk drawer. Each element must be an essential tool with many functions.
Begone, narrative banana slicers.
For our stories, we seek only sharp, shiny knives.
BEHOLD: THE ARC
So wait, what the hell is a “character arc?” Isn’t it that boat, where Noah put two of every animal except the unicorns because apparently Noah, that jerk, had a thing against unicorns? (Answer: No, that’s the Ark.) Is it a piece of architecture? (Answer: No, except maybe yes if you count architecture in the narrative sense.) The arc is the shape of a character’s development through the story. And key to that idea of “development” is also one of transformation—the best characters end a story changed. They leave the story a somewhat different character from when they entered it.
Sometimes the assumption is that the arc is connected to plot—it charts literal events crucial to the character, or it charts the decisions and actions made by the character—but that’s not precisely right. Eschew plot. Think about story. Think about the emotional makeup of the story. Think about who that character is and what she or he represents.
An arc can be pretty granular, with subtle shifts in a character from chapter to chapter. But for our mileage, I like to at least give a character three tent pole transitions that mark her journey through the story.
Who is she when the story begins?
Who is she in the middle of the tale?
And who is she when the curtains finally close and the story ends?
Some of this can be pretty surface, right? Luke Skywalker in A New Hope goes from farm boy, hungry for adventure to not-quite-getting-this-Jedi-thing to rebel pilot who trusts in the Force and saves the day. Those descriptions chart his journey in short, easy-to-grok beats. Note, too, that we’ve tied in his problem here: that he wants to be free of Sandy Crack Junction and have some proper fun out in the larger galaxy. More to the point, he wants to be like his father. The arc factors in the problem and charts the character’s beats in dealing with it.
His arc gets more interesting when you factor in all three of the Original Saga movies, right? He goes through even more stages:
I’m going to be like my father and be a Jedi!
I’m going to get revenge for my father’s death and stop Darth Vader and his oppressive Empire.
Wait, whoa, what? Darth Vader is my father?
Change of plans: I’m going to save my father’s soul.
That charts a huge emotional turn for Luke. He goes from being eager and naive to impetuous and angry to, finally, self-actualized and incorruptible.
Or, in shorter beats:
He goes from impatient to selfish to selfless. And, along the way, he also struggles with his own faith in the Force—and his own faith in himself.
It’s important to realize that a character’s arc is not set in stone, nor is it artificially or externally driven. The changes in a character—the transitional movement in the arc—aren’t like a clock where the tick-tock is automatic. The character learns things, sees things, and does things—all of which change who the character is. These gradual transformations don’t happen because the story needs them to happen or because some PLOT BEAT WORKSHEET tells you that you’re Half-Past a Change-O’-Heart. Yes, sure, of course, you might as the storyteller be aware that you have to get the character to that transformation, to that change-o’-heart. But it’s your job to convince us of the reality of the change, and one of the ways you do that is by building it into the story, by making the journey there an organic one driven by the character and those around her. It’s not external, not artificial.
YIPPEE-KI-YAY: OR, HOW EVERY MOMENT CAN SPEAK TO STORY AND CHARACTER
In Die Hard, when John McClane and Hans Gruber first speak—which is the pivotal, vital moment where your Hero and your Villain first encounter one another, dun dun dun—they have a short exchange. It goes like this:
HANS GRUBER: Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there?
JOHN MCCLANE: Yeah, I’m still here. Unless you wanna open the front door for me.
HANS GRUBER: Uh, no, I’m afraid not. But, you have me at a loss. You know my name but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?
JOHN MCCLANE: Was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually. I really like those sequined shirts.
HANS GRUBER: Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?
JOHN MCCLANE: Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
Let us speak now about the amazing amazingness of yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
In a lot of action movies—really, in a lot of movies, TV shows, books, and comics—the hero says some cool shit just to say some cool shit. It’s part of the trope: whip-crack smart-ass hero protagonist who is funny and entertaining and edgy, tormenting the villain with his quick wit. (Sometimes it’s the villain who gets the quips, and sometimes the hero and villain try to out-quip one another.) It’s part of the package simply because it’s part of the package. Tropes are like that, sometimes, just a lazy reiteration of a narrative element whose presence is justified by all the other times people have used this exact lazy reiteration.
Ah, but! With John McClane, the quip isn’t just a quip.
It tells us about his character, and it grows organically out of a conversation. He isn’t just saying cool shit to say cool shit. He’s matching wits with Gruber, and we’re learning that McClane sees himself as a classic American cowboy in this situation. So classic that he’s not like John Wayne, but rather like someone farther back, back in an era of sequined shirts and a horse named Trigger. McClane is telling Gruber—and us!—that he’s one of the good guys, that he’s not part of some “bankrupt culture”; he’s an old classic, the kind they don’t make anymore.
Gruber snidely asks him if he thinks he’ll win, then he calls him “Mr. Cowboy.” McClane’s response is, of course:
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
The yippee-ki-yay component speaks to how he sees himself: as a hero, part of a legacy of old cowboys. He’s using a word that echoes back in part to Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Bing Crosby. It’s almost an aspirational thing to say, and it’s immediately one he corrupts with the addition of that final word: “motherfucker.”28 Because McClane isn’t an old-timey cowboy, strumming his guitar around the fire. He’s a grime-streaked New York City cop, trapped in a Los Angeles skyscraper like a rat in a maze—he’s not the kind to saunter in on a horse, but the kind to kick a dead body out of a window to catch the attention of a retreating police officer. And yet, despite that, he’s still a hero, still the good guy.
He’s the cowboy, he’s the good guy—but in his own blood-soaked, mercenary, get-shit-done way. It’s a modern retrofit of a classic mode. McClane is a hero for us, of that time.
Say it with me, now:
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
That line grows naturally out of a conversation and it reflects who McClane is. It’s not just some clever pun meant to indicate the smartness of the hero. It’s a short phrase, but provides us a deeper dive.
It is bound to the character because it comes out of the character.
The arc is like this: Our characters do not transform because we the writers demand they do. They transform because we build that into them, because we give them a journey that is difficult, that challenges them, and that changes them organically. Further, it changes them gradually, too: If a character changes too dramatically, the audience will suffer the whiplash of disbelief. It’s our job as storytellers to earn their belief, to gain their trust, and to prove it with every page.
That emotional journey has to feel justified.
Furthermore …
WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
Simple is better. Clarity is king. It’s true for almost all aspects of your story.
In this con
text, it means that you should keep the emotional journey of the character—and, really, the problem that inspires this journey—simple to understand.
Like I said in the last chapter, we often look to others’ stories to find our own story hidden within. More to the point, we’re seeking to build an empathic bridge with the characters: We want to go along for the ride. Further, we want the story to give us something we recognize in ourselves or in our own lives (even if “what we see” is really just an illusion or otherwise lines up with the aspirations of our own warped, circus-mirror self-image). We need the audience to relate to the characters and to the story those characters help to tell.
If we give the characters an emotional throughline—a through-line being the invisible rope we use to pull ourselves through the narrative—that is unfamiliar to most, then we have given the audience little opportunity to connect to the characters and that story. And note, I don’t say plot. It’s fine to have some, or even many, plot elements in play that people don’t actively understand. I’ve never tried to explode a moon-size battle station or save a skyscraper from a gaggle of mostly German terrorists. But I have keenly felt Luke’s problem of being trapped in a nowhere town, and his problem of confronting a father who seems to be an enemy. I totally grok John McClane’s problem of being in a relationship in which two people seem to be going in different directions and the hell you might go through trying to mend that widening gap. The rest of it—Wookiees and explosions and gunplay—is all just the cool stuff you use to frame the core emotional journey.
We all understand the fundamentals: love, hate, revenge, grief. We know what it’s like to have loved ones die, to have relationships fracture and end, to lose things we adore. We know pain. We know what it is to be hurt, emotionally and/or physically. We may not know the precise version you’re putting on display in the story, but we can extrapolate. The audience is eager to do work. We don’t need everything fed to us. We’ll dig the hole.
