Supporting character: definition, 6 types and how to write them

A supporting character is a character who matters to the story without being the protagonist or the main antagonist: the best friend, the mentor, the love interest, the rival, the comic relief. Supporting characters help or hinder the main character, show the reader who that person is by contrast, and often carry a subplot of their own. The good ones want something for themselves, so they would still have somewhere to go if the hero left the room.

“Secondary character” usually means the same thing. Below: how supporting characters differ from main and minor ones, the six kinds you'll meet most often, how many a story needs, and how to keep each one from turning into furniture. For the plot jobs a character can do for a single scene, such as the herald or the threshold guardian, see character archetypes.

Main, supporting and minor characters

Characters sort into three tiers by how much the story depends on them. Pride and Prejudice (1813) makes a good test case:

The line between supporting and minor is whether the character changes what happens. A supporting character has scenes that would go differently without them. A minor character fills a role that any similar person could fill: the cab driver, the clerk, the guest who leaves early. That doesn't make minor characters disposable. It means one sharp detail is all they need.

The most important supporting character is sometimes called the deuteragonist. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the actor taking the part of second importance in a classical Greek drama,” and, in a second sense, “a person who serves as a foil to another.” Writers use it for the character with nearly a lead's weight, such as Dr. Watson or Sancho Panza. In a romance, the love interest is usually a second lead rather than a supporting character, because the reader needs to know what both of them want.

Six kinds of supporting characters

Most supporting characters do one of six jobs for the protagonist. A character can do two at once, and many switch jobs partway through. Gilbert Blythe in Anne of Green Gables (1908) begins as the schoolroom rival Anne refuses to forgive and ends the book as her friend.

The sidekick

The sidekick travels with the protagonist, supplies what they lack and gives them someone to talk to, which spares the narrator from explaining the hero's thinking. Sam Weller, the inn servant Mr. Pickwick hires as his manservant in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), meets every crisis with a streetwise comparison, a habit that gave English the word “Wellerism.” Pickwick is an innocent and Sam knows exactly how London works, so each needs the other. Passepartout, the French valet in Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), is a different model: a sidekick whose mistakes, such as walking into a temple in Bombay with his shoes on, keep costing his master time and money.

A sidekick works when they bring a temperament the hero lacks and have a stake in the outcome. One who only agrees can be cut.

The mentor

The mentor teaches, protects or advises the protagonist, then usually leaves the stage so the hero has to act alone. Miss Temple, the superintendent of Lowood school in Jane Eyre (1847), feeds the half-starved Jane, clears her name in front of the school after Mr. Brocklehurst has branded her a liar, and becomes the model Jane grows up by. When Miss Temple marries and leaves, Jane soon decides she wants a new life too, and advertises for a post as a governess. The mentor's departure is what sends the heroine out into the plot.

A mentor can also do the whole job in one scene. Bishop Myriel in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862) gets the novel's entire first book before Jean Valjean arrives, so that when he covers for the theft of his silver, the reader knows exactly what kind of man is making the offer. Mentors fail too. Friar Laurence's plan with the sleeping potion in Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) collapses because one letter isn't delivered, and both lovers die of it.

The love interest

The love interest is the character the protagonist falls for, or is meant to, and their job is to raise the stakes of every choice: what the hero wants now includes a person who can judge them. The weak version exists only to be won. The strong one has opinions, including opinions about the protagonist: Mr. Knightley in Emma (1815) is the one person in Highbury who tells Emma she is wrong. Laurie in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69) shows a love interest with an arc of his own. Jo turns him down, and he goes abroad, drifts, and comes home married to her sister Amy. Readers still argue about the match, but it is possible at all only because Laurie had a life that didn't revolve around Jo.

The confidant

The confidant is the person the protagonist tells the truth to. On stage, that solves a problem a novel solves with narration: how to let the audience hear what a character really thinks. In a novel, a confidant earns a place by doing more than listening. Mrs. Gardiner, Elizabeth Bennet's aunt in Pride and Prejudice, warns her against falling for Wickham, takes her to Derbyshire and Pemberley, and finally writes the letter that tells Elizabeth what Darcy did to rescue her sister Lydia.

A confidant who changes sides is a gift to a plot. The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet carries messages between the lovers, then, once Romeo is banished, advises Juliet to forget him: “I think it best you married with the County.” Juliet stops confiding in her, and from that scene on she is alone.

Comic relief

Comic relief releases tension so the next scene can tighten it again, and the best comic characters also do plot work. Dogberry, the pompous constable in Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–99), mangles his words (“Comparisons are odorous”), yet it is his night watch that overhears and arrests the men behind the plot against Hero. Wemmick, the dry law clerk in Great Expectations (1861), lives in a tiny house in Walworth with its own drawbridge and dotes on his old father, “the Aged.” When the convict Pip is hiding is in danger, Wemmick is the one who leaves him a note: “DON'T GO HOME.”

The foil

A foil is defined by contrast: a character whose choices show up the protagonist's. In Jane Eyre (1847), Helen Burns, Jane's friend at Lowood school, accepts every punishment and tells Jane that “It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself.” Jane, who believes that “When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard,” learns from Helen without becoming her.

Tom Sawyer plays the part in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His storybook scheme to free Jim in the last chapters looks worse once he admits that Miss Watson had already “set him free in her will.” Tom's games show up Huck's conscience, which had to do the real work.

Combining two jobs in one character helps when the jobs pull against each other. Mr. Knightley is Emma's love interest and the one person who tells her she is wrong, so every rebuke risks what he wants from her. The Nurse is Juliet's confidant and the play's comic relief, which is why her advice to marry Paris lands so hard: the character who has been the comedy is the one who abandons her. Combining hurts when one job needs a distance the other can't give. A mentor who is also the sidekick never leaves, so the hero never has to act alone.

Other jobs turn up too: the rival, the henchman who serves the antagonist, the trickster who knocks the plot sideways. The test is the same for all of them. Name what the character does for the protagonist's story, in one line, and check that no one else in the book does it.

How many supporting characters you need

There is no standard number. A more useful rule of thumb is one supporting character per job. List the jobs the protagonist's story needs done, such as someone to confide in, someone to push back from the inside and someone who shows the road not taken, then give each job to one person. If two characters do the same job, try merging them; the one who survives gets twice the page time.

Length sets the ceiling. Ernest Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) has an American, the girl with him and the woman who brings their drinks, and needs nobody else. The Great Gatsby (1925) is a short novel, and the characters who matter can be counted on two hands: Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Jordan Baker, Myrtle and George Wilson. Big Victorian novels such as Bleak House (1852–53) carry dozens, and Dickens helps readers keep track by giving many of them a signature phrase or habit.

Here is the job test applied to a cast list for an imagined novel:

The merged sibling, now June, gets Ned's jokes and her own resentment at having stayed, which makes her more interesting than either of them was alone, and the cast is one name shorter.

Make them more than props

A prop is a character who exists only when the protagonist needs them. Five habits turn one into a person.

• A want in every scene. Even a small one, and ideally one that rubs against the protagonist's. The guide to developing characters shows how to tie each supporting role to the protagonist's false belief.
• A life offstage. In her first scene, the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet wanders into memories of her dead daughter (“Susan is with God”) and repeats her late husband's bawdy joke about Juliet as a toddler three times. None of it moves the plot. All of it makes her a woman with a past rather than a go-between.
• One contradiction. Sydney Carton, the brilliant, dissolute lawyer in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), does the real work behind his colleague Stryver's cases and drinks away the credit, and in the end he dies in another man's place.
• Right when the hero is wrong. In King Lear (c. 1606), the Earl of Kent tells the king to his face that banishing Cordelia is madness, is banished himself, and comes back in disguise to serve Lear anyway.
• Change, or a refusal to change. A static character can be vivid, and a dynamic one shows the change in a choice, as Sancho Panza does in the second part of Don Quixote (1615), when he gives up the “island” a duke made him governor of as a joke.

Same scene, same advice. In the second version June wants something of her own, the sale and the lease, and she is already working for it: she fetched the papers and flagged every line. Her advice bends around that goal, so Cass has to weigh it instead of obeying it. The last line gives June a history with their father that the scene doesn't need and the character does. There are now two people in the room.

Common mistakes with supporting characters

• The cheerleader. A friend who agrees with every choice the protagonist makes adds a voice and no pressure. Give them one thing they'd rather the protagonist didn't do.
• The delivery service. A character whose only lines are facts the reader needs is an info dump with a pulse. Give the facts to someone with a reason to hold them back.
• Killed for motivation. A love interest or a friend who exists to be hurt so the hero can grieve. If the loss matters, give the character a want and a choice of their own before it.
• Twins. Two friends with the same voice and the same job. Cover the names on a page of dialogue. If you can't tell who's talking, merge them or change how one of them speaks.
• The vanishing act. A character introduced with weight in act one and never seen again is a broken promise, the people version of Chekhov's gun. Bring them back with a reason, or cut the introduction down.

Supporting characters are also where continuity slips first: a sister's age changes between chapters, a mentor's dog disappears, a rival goes unseen for twelve chapters. Keep a cast table with one row per supporting character: their job, their want, the chapters they appear in and the details you've fixed, such as age, looks and the way they talk. The story bible template has room for all of it.

With that table attached, the Strokes Assistant can review the draft and tell you which supporting characters vanish for long stretches and where two of them seem to do the same job.

Practice: name the job

Each of these supporting characters does one main job. Name it, then check the answers below.

1. A retired jockey teaches a stable hand to ride the horse nobody else can handle, then refuses to come to the race.
2. A suspended detective tells only his sister, and only after midnight.
3. The heroine's cousin accepts the safe marriage the heroine refused, and seems content.
4. A hotel bellboy keeps losing guests' luggage during a murder inquiry and finds the weapon in the last bag he lost.
5. The baker who loves the heroine argues her out of selling the shop, for reasons of his own.
6. A cabin boy follows the captain everywhere, learns the ropes at his side and covers for his drinking.