Minor characters. It’s so hard for me to leave them minor. I want to know what drives them, why they do things, what broke them, and what good is left in them if they’re bad, what evil they can be pushed to if they’re good. They fascinate me.
This is problematic. (But also good).
Problematic because I write scenes that serve no purpose, only my own curiosity. They jar, they slow down pacing. Plus, I have to get all hard-core and mean before I agree with me that I need to cut the buggers.
Good because without my love of the Why of Minor Characters, I would frex, never have written Sea Rose Red. Felicita and Jannik began as two characters in Hob an Lam and one day I asked myself why the hell they were together, and what were they on about when they mentioned meeting behind umbrellas.
So I wrote a little meeting scene. And a year or so later I pulled out that little scene, and wrote a book around it.
Today I was busy drafting and organising wtf I’m going to do with Nulled & Void, where I have 5000 pov characters (9, actually, but dear god that’s just too much to ask of a reader). I didn’t want to cut any of them because I want the reader to care about them as much as I do.
Only, that’s not fair. That’s about me, and not about the reader.
So at least 3 of those povs met their death today. More might still fall. And that’s a good thing, because somewhere on my mess of a harddrive is going to be a folder full of stories waiting to seed.
This list is the big picture stuff.