We’ve all seen them, read them, and forgotten them… except when we didn’t.   Except when they became stand-out characters in their own right, sometimes with their own stories and character arcs…

One of the first pieces of advice I remember getting about background characters was to make them completely bland, other than one characteristic to hang on them like a janitor who whistled. This makes them memorable enough to make the scene feel real, without diverting excessive attention and detail to them.

This makes sense in a short story, as you’ve got a severe word limit on your space to unpack a rich world (though some authors manage anyway.)  On the other hand, when I was working sound & lighting for a play, I got enthusiastically swept up into the green room by a jubilant cast, and we all crowded around a TV to watch a cast member – who was playing a whistling janitor in the play – be a bit character in a tv drama episode. He was literally supposed to just be standing there as the main characters walked down a  pier, as scenery – but he’d come up with a schtick the director liked so much that he got away with it, and got either 2 or 3 words in the few seconds he appeared… which was a significant extra amount of SAG-AFTRA points as an actor than merely visually appearing.

This, they explained while screaming with delight, was a long tradition – working on taking your role and making it something so awesome that it made the movie or show better, the world richer, and the director more likely to cast you for something else – and if you look at older productions, before CGI was used to fill in the cast of thousands, you can start to see it everywhere. It’s part of why modern CGI worldbuilding feels so… shallow… in comparison: the background characters only show any spark of life if it’s intentionally coded in, and that takes far more time, money, and attention to do.

What about a novel? Background characters can flesh out your worldbuilding to make it feel real, can provide minor or major complications and unexpected grace, can create or resolve plot points… And if you hand them too much space, graduate to minor characters, have their own side stories, and may even grow organically over the course of the book into major ones. (In Romance genre, this is series standard – the minor character(s) introduced in one book will go on to be the Hero or Heroine of the next book, getting their own Happily Ever After.)

How to do that? Repetition. An extremely quotable line of dialogue is usually repeated 3-5 times in a story, each time in a different context, by a different person, and often with a different emotion and emotional weight attached (For movies, see: “The pirate’s code is more like guidelines”; for books, Prachett is the master at this. “Where’s my cow?”).  Similarly, taking a background character and turning them into a memorable, often minor character is a matter of having them show up multiple times, doing multiple things, presented in different contexts and different emotional states (whether the character’s, or the emotional state through which the main character views them… or both!)

Because sometimes the answer is just a whistling janitor, but sometimes it isn’t more background characters… it’s more interesting background characters. And like anyone and anything else, that takes time to get to know them.