Whether they are part of your main plot, or play a minor side role, the way you build your characters will make a massive difference to whether or not your readers connect with the story.

While I don’t make a habit of people watching, it can happen subconsciously. I absorb information from everyday situations; for example, sat in a café, or on a train, or walking through a shopping centre. The energy of people on mass gets filed away onto a mental mood board and reappears later, when a new character crops up in whatever scene I am writing.
Often things that I didn’t realise I had noticed at the time resurface, like snippets of conversations. These can include anything from an unusual accent, a specific phrase, a particularly ridiculous situation, or personality traits and physical habits, even distinctive laughs and facial expressions.
What I don’t do is build characters around people I actually know. That would bring with it a whole host of unnecessary problems.
In many cases, the sidekicks or minor characters in my books are some of my favourites, because I can really have some fun with them.
For example, in my recent novel The Mid-life Trials of Annabeth Hope, my absolute all-time favourite character is Barbara Trenchard; owner of the village store and general village busybody. The sort of person who, if you saw her approaching you with a clipboard and a pen, your heart would sink because you know that you’re going to find yourself signed up to run the hook-a-duck stall at the village fete whether you like it or not.
Barbara started out as my female main character’s nemesis. She wasn’t supposed to be remotely lovable, but during the drafting and re-drafting process, she developed such a personality that I grew to adore her. I think that’s why so many of my readers have told me that they adore her too. In fact, I have had several requests for Barbara to have a larger role in the sequel.
It was important to make her a recognisable character type. The sort of person that everyone knows someone a bit like her. Yet at the same time, it was also important not to make her a two-dimensional stereotype. For that to happen, she needed a sprinkling of flaws and redeeming features that readers could connect with. These extra factors make her human.
Hence, while Barbara is bombastic and annoying, an interfering busybody who barrels through any objection to get what she wants, you can see that she has a heart of gold. As a stalwart of the local community she spends hours of her own time making sure community events are a success. On a personal level, she thinks the sun shines out of her long-suffering husband Brian. She often starts her sentences with: ‘My Brian says…’ So much so, that people start asking her what Brian thinks about things, even though he isn’t there. This is something I overheard between two women who were deep in conversation on a long train journey, many years ago. At the time, I wondered what the absent and much quoted Brian was actually like.

Barbara and Brian are completely ordinary and that is why I love them both. She is possessed of generous proportions. He is slight, balding and barely says a word — which is ironic given the number of times Barbara quotes him as the font of all wisdom. Yet they have this incredibly love story all of their own going on in the background of the book as the two main characters navigate their way through the central plot.
It is the extra layers of subtlety that develop as a manuscript moves through multiple revisions that give the final manuscript depth. Which is why — if you are a writer and you are faced with yet more edits, and the very thought of re-writing any or all of your manuscript makes you want to throw your computer out of the window — I say, ‘Take heart. It will be worth it in the end.’
Love
Alice
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