One of the core tenets of writing advice is that everything flows from a protagonist’s motivation. It’s what inspires journeys to Mordor, jaunts through strange chocolate factories, and maniacal voyages to exact revenge on a white whale. Characters need to want something.
What’s often neglected: this applies to minor characters too! Every single character, all the way down to the most minor and seemingly inconsequential, should want something.
Every character should want something
Too often writers think of secondary characters as mere foils to the protagonist. The minor characters exist because the protagonist needs to receive a key bit of information, or they need to get to Point A or Point B, or they need to “bring something out” of the protagonist.
This ends up feeling hollow and transparent and it can quickly feel like the protagonist is surrounded by a series of cardboard cutouts.
A minor character who exists in service of the protagonist invariably feels flat and dull. Their banter will be hollow, and the reader will easily forget them.
Utilize differences in motivations
This is especially problematic when the protagonist is allied with the minor character, whether that’s a friend, family member, love interest, or comrade on a quest. When two characters march in total lockstep it doesn’t always feel believable, and, maybe worse, it’s not particularly interesting.
Even if two characters are aligned on the whole, there could be differences in methods, what they think success looks like, the rewards they hope to reap, and the world they want to bring about.
Differences in motivation result in conflict, which is a novel’s lifeblood. Conflict turns up the screws on the protagonist, it forces them to dig deeper, and it’s far more engaging than watching characters agree about everything.
Motivation is a powerful weapon in storytelling. Make sure every character has it.
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Art: Geflügel im Stallinterieur by Carl Jutz
The bigger the book, the more important showing the motivation for less important characters is. The smaller the book, the less important showing minor characters’ motivation on the page, but the author should know what that motivation is. A short romance, for example, should have a laser-tight focus on the two main characters, not their group of friends and confidantes.
People sometimes tell me my novels don’t have enough characters, but I feel they have exactly the right number of characters for the story. If a secondary character is in there as filler or as a prop, I take them out. I learned this trying to write a one-act play many years ago. I recommend that as an exercise for any writer; when you have only dialog and a couple of stage directions, you learn pretty quickly that it is a lot of work to make sure the filler has a reason to be there. Just take it out to begin with.
A character IS a motivation. I can’t imagine adding a person because “this guy needs a sister” without taking it to a sense of how that sister is more flakey or driven or angry or sensitive than other characters. Without that, they’re just a placeholder.
Note: what came to mind there was just a list of traits instead of true goals. And you’re right, a character has real momentum if we realize the sister is always thinking of getting away from the family and starting a band… or at least she’s just as devoted to the family store as the protagonist, but always bringing that flakiness to that “shared” goal.