All sorts of interesting things are happening to your primary characters. But what’s going on with the rest of the cast? How do they hear about the broad events in the lives of the main players? Do they pick it up from gossip? Do they read it in the news and discuss it among themselves?

If you want a bit player to show up on stage to sympathize with your hero in his travails, how does he even know about them? What about the cute shopgirl who’s just realized the hero’s available? Even the villains have to monitor their targets to track the progress of their plots.

Accounting for this offstage knowledge in the story without tedium is an art in its own right. Something as simple as “I heard about it from X” can illuminate the information trail, assuming that the speaker knows X and X has a plausible news source, too. That’s often the method used for groups of bit players, like servants in a household where gossip is presumed to spread.

Some of the news about a primary character may be common knowledge and thus known by random bystanders — the man who restored the prominent house probably has all sorts of stories told about him. The jewelry that was stolen may have appeared in a newspaper or posted notice. The search for the missing hero may have alerted the neighborhood where he was last seen. The local innkeeper may be a belligerent codger who spreads all the gossip he hears.

If you don’t pay enough attention to how the knowledge trails spread to the bit players, you may risk triggering the reader’s “but how would he have known that?” protest. But that’s not the thing I really want you to think about.

Instead, think about how to use this as a terrific opportunity to widen your story and give it local color. Bit players who are only onstage for a moment can emphasize your setting and world-building by demonstrating how news spreads. They can play critical one-off plot roles by serving as unwitting purveyors of important news to other cast members. They may know some crucial piece of information that urges them to intervene in a bit of action. (“You’ll be sorry if you kick that dog!”).

Some persistent bit characters are just scenery, but others come alive and volunteer. Most rewardingly, they may graduate from unnamed obscurity to significant parts and earn more time on stage. That organic feel of “important character appears from plausible world background” is one of the delights of writing, when you realize that the local bum you occasionally use is just the right person to do X to foil plot Y and to thus come to the attention of the grateful main cast, earning himself larger credits over time.

What tricks do you use to let your bit players stay usefully informed about main events? Have some of your own bit characters received unplanned promotions to stardom?