Villains, Love-Interests, Best Friends, and Rivals
Create strong supporting characters to subvert common sidekick tropes
Whether you’re writing epic fantasy, period romance, a contemporary thriller, or anything in between, bringing your side characters to life on the page is a key piece of storytelling. Yet writers in the early stages of novel-writing often generate pages and pages of details about their main character and then offer up a supporting cast filled with stereotypes, cardboard cutouts, or ultimately forgettable characters.
You’ve likely encountered this yourself, even in published books. How many times have you come across the sassy sidekick, the mustache-twirling baddie, the nerdy best friend, the annoying younger sibling, the bad boy/dark lover, the hooker with a heart of gold?
These stereotypes exist for a reason—they can be the beginning spark of an idea that leads to crafting a memorable character. But you can’t stop with the stereotype. Consider these examples that take the stereotype and craft a memorable character from it:
sassy sidekick - Nurse Ratched in TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets elevates this trope to great effect.
mustache-twirling baddie - The Woman in White from NK Jemisin’s Great Cities series turns just about every trope here on its head.
nerdy best friend - ART takes “nerdy best friend” to a new level in The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
annoying younger sibling - RF Kuang built a whole fantasy world around Robin Swift as the annoying/clueless younger sibling in her sublime Babel: An Arcane History.
bad boy/dark lover - I’m pretty sure Rebecca Yaros’s Fourth Wing proved we have a taste for this trope! #TeamXadan
hooker with a heart of gold - Julia Roberts’ iconic performance in Pretty Woman
So what makes these characters memorable rather than cardboard cutouts that can be discarded two minutes after you put the book down?
"...every single character in your novel fervently believes he or she is the protagonist with the same unquestioned assuredness that we all do, and as such, everyone else is there to facilitate their agenda...and a character without a clear, subjective agenda is neither believable nor engaging..."
—Lisa Cron, Story Genius, p 232
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