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Written by Paul
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Friday, 27 July 2012 08:55 |
A novel needs secondary characters, simply because that's the way the world works. We are all the main characters in our own stories, and there may be others in our lives who would also count as primary, but our lives are also full of secondary and even tertiary characters. They have to be there in a novel because they simulate that feeling of a real world - a world bigger than just your main characters. In a novel, the baggy hugger-mugger of life is imitated, so people come and go, they step in, say one line, and then are never seen again, like passengers on a train.
In porn you need even more characters, because you sometimes need someone extra for the main cast to have sex with. You want to be able to bring in the gardener, or a lusty young mattress deliveryman, or a trio of girl scouts - sometimes you just want or need extra bodies. But drama causes expectations that constrain this. You need smaller characters, but if you establish them too thoroughly, then you create the expectation that they will recur at some point. You can't just bring someone in, use them, and then have them never appear again. I mean, you can, but it feels sloppy. The reader keeps wondering, in the back of their mind, when that guy is going to pop back up and be important. Like, if you have been reading this novel, then you remember Zed, the gangster who made a couple of memorable appearances earlier, and somewhere a bit of you is wondering where he is, and when he will come back. It's like a mental mosquito buzz in the back of your mind.
Here we bring in Johnny's roommate. I mentioned him briefly before, so his appearance has a little setup, but now he's shown up in the flesh I will have to do something else with him at some point, or his presence here will seem odd, slightly out of balance. The care and feeding of secondary characters can be a delicate, annoying business. But without them, you'd be shit out of luck when you want to throw in a hot threeway scene, as here.
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