One of the things that I’ve been told I’m good at, in terms of writing, is creating fully rounded secondary characters.

I’ve been going through “The Popcorn Thief” the last couple of weeks, reading every chapter out loud. This novel is all about Voice, and my ear will catch things my eye misses. But I’m also catching other things, like I needed to layer in an additional motivation for my main character, etc.

I realized that a couple of my secondary characters didn’t stretch as far to the wall as they should have. I talked with myself about it, asking what would take them further.

The answer was immediate: Secrets. I looked back at all my other characters and realized they all had secrets. Most of those secrets get dealt with as part of the novel, though some don’t. But the secondary characters that weren’t stretching as far had no secrets.

Because this is a very southern novel, many of the secrets involve death. (Or maybe that’s just me.)

But these secrets gave me the key to these characters, and they suddenly blossomed and grew in my mind, their whole backstories filling in nicely, which in turn, brought them more to life on the page.

Or at least I think they’re more there, now. We’ll see what my first readers say when I finish this and turn it over to them.