Have you ever wondered how to make your good story even better? Have you considered the part that minor characters play in the overall reading enjoyment of your story?

I was watching a little bit of Mr. Holland's Opus (an awesome movie that I highly recommend people watching) and though the story revolves around one central character, the minor characters are what really drive the story. If you didn't care about the minor character's you wouldn't care about Mr. Holland's interaction with them and the movie would fall flat on its face.

A lot of time we get into writing and we get wrapped up in the world of the main characters and everyone outside of them become second class citizens. But when we do that, it makes our writing two dimensional and flat. Writing cardboard cutout bit players turns our amazing stories into "blah, whatever" kind of stories.

Sometimes we try to overcompensate for cardboard cutout characters by giving them extreme looks (punk rock hairdos and piercings) but we still leave them two dimensional and their impact has no affect on the reader. I'm not saying you need to flesh out every single character in the story (like if your person hands change to a cashier you can probably fore go the back story), but each character should have their own personality. If a minor character interacts with a main character you should at least understand their motivation in doing so. If your character gives a dollar to a homeless woman, you could add a little bit about how she became that way. I'm not saying write another book, but a sentence or two can make your story powerful.

The key is to give some kind of glimpse into a life without devoting a lot of space to someone not completely important to the story. Take the song Piano Man by Billy Joel. It is a song about minor characters being held together by a central figure.

Bartender - John, friend of Billy, gives him drinks for free, aspiring actor.

The entire story told in eight lines of lyrics.

And, you never know how a character comes into play.

In Katie Leone's God Bless the Child we are introduced to a small pudgy boy who is kind of a brat. Very little was given to him in way of interaction, but later that "throw away" character would be pivotal to the series, culminating in a staring role of his own in the fourth book of the series Phenom. So take care of your supporting cast, because they can really add value to what you're writing.

I hope I've given you something to think about.