Characters in Remember When, 2. Another Counterfoil.

Supporting characters can be nearly as fully developed in a novel-length work as the main characters are. That's one of the luxuries of that style, but also can be one cause of word-bloat. (The other being some novelist's burning need to "show everything, never tell" and thus spend a page on the consistency of the eggs served on each character's plate at a breakfast.)

At novella-length, or in any work using traditional storytelling "like told while sitting around the room together" rather than literary techniques, there really isn't a good way to give all the details about all the supporting characters. So, I give more description to the characters the more central they are to the telling, with the exception of if their appearance or manner specifically needs to be known so that what they are doing as part of the story is plausible and apparent. Here is an example from Remember When:

"Jon" is quite tall. "Sherri" (a main character) is tiny. This leads to some powerful images when they are talking or performing together. In the After Party scene mid-story, The Roomie finds them talking in a side room. Excerpt:

     Jon was sitting on the edge of the bed in that side room, leaning slightly forward. The curved line of his posture made him look less like the tall beanpole that he was. He hadn’t changed from his stage wear other than to open the collar and lose the tie. He was explaining something about a song he was writing, or rewriting, ardently. Measured, but passionate, letting the words tell the story of how he felt about what he was writing. He was saying all this to Sherri, sitting on the floor on some pillows, with her knees drawn up to her chest. She had her head tilted back, making her a little star perched between the points of Jon’s crescent moon pose. She was listening, intently professional, to the nuances Jon was explaining were in his song because it was written for her voice to sing. Only her eyes revealed that she was becoming desperate to be somewhere else.


So, Jon being tall, and my saying so, matters a lot. How tall is "Ed", who we spoke of in the previous posting https://ldgarrettfiction.blogspot.com/2018/09/characters-in-remember-when.html ? Who knows. Well, *I* know, but the reader isn't told and that's because other than Ed being big enough that physical labor like roadie work doesn't give him pause, it doesn't matter.

Risk question #1 then: Does that work for the reader in this sort of Short Fiction / Novella style, or is it some glaring point of failure by the writer?

Jon also plays another role as a person present in the story, rather than just mentioned or referred to. He is the stand-in and "voice" for the rest of the band as a whole. Some of that occurred because I wasn't going to make the actual people in the band as characters. The story needs there to be a band, of a certain type, and that it reflect in some ways one of a couple bands I knew then in real life, but it need not be either a faithful fictionalization of any one band, nor a detailed creation. How Sherri relates to the band matters, a lot. How the specific people in the band interrelate with Sherri, and thus her part of the story, not so much. Who they are, even, isn't really important. So Jon gets to carry most of the weight either by being present and speaking, or by being referred to by Sherri in her own thoughts and words.

Risk question #2 then: Would telling more about the band and the members of it do more for some purpose? As in to fulfill some reader curiosity or add to the feel of the lifestyle in those days?