Thread by @TJStiles_Author

Writing thread: Secondary characters in biography and history.

When writing a biography, it's easy to fall into the trap of focusing relentlessly on your subject. Writers of narrative history sometimes treat people not as characters but inanimate objects. Let's fix that.
1/11

When Jean Strouse turns to the creation of the Morgan Library, she does so through the librarian, Belle da Costa Greene. After a glorious description, she springs a surprise that makes the library chapter also about the rising Black intelligentsia in America. Stunning.
2/11

A secondary character allows an author to expand the book's scope while preserving the narrative—it's still about people & their fate. Strouse uses Greene to open a door we expect—the great Morgan Library—which turns out to lead to an unexpected door. She writes it so well.
3/11

Robert Caro is a master of this, as we see in "Master of the Senate." He doesn't just tell us about the liberal movement, or how LBJ used Hubert Humphrey; he switches the point of view, giving us Humphrey's story. He invests the reader in this character & his priorities.
4/11

That's the thing about really getting into the heads of secondary characters. It turns narrative from a progression of inevitable events into the story of intersecting agendas. We see people wanting different things, & why. It leads to deeper knowledge *and* more suspense.
5/11

But when I was teaching this chapter once, a writing student pointed out a problem, in this excerpt. Caro failed to ponder Cyril King's perspective. Did King want to be the center of a conflict in the Senate Dining Room? Did Humphrey use him to burnish his own righteousness?
6/11

Good point. We have to remember that everything looks different to different characters. What seems Good and right may not be good for everyone. Onion in James McBride's "The Good Lord Bird" doesn't want to be in a crusade—he's just trying to survive.
7/11
jamesmcbride.com/good-lord-bird/

In "Custer's Trials," I consider the points of view of Libbie Custer and Eliza Brown, a self-emancipated woman who ran the Custer household. They expand the book, taking us into slavery, woman's lives. But they had their own agendas, & a fraught, complicated relationship.
8/11

When you step aside to delve into secondary characters—and new themes in the book—it's important to invest the reader in them. I'm not always clever at this. To explore the culture of deference through Vanderbilt's only boss, I kind of said, "Hey! This is going to matter!"
9/11

Sometimes secondary characters just makes the story better. Also in "The First Tycoon" is the tale of how Vanderbilt aided Costa Rica's costly war against William Walker, the "filibuster" who seized Nicaragua. Vanderbilt's agent was Sylvanus Spencer. I'd cast Jason Statham.
10/11

That's how I think about it, anyway. Secondary characters, treated *as characters*, can correct the tendency to cast events as ineluctable. They can organically expand the scope of a book, naturally bringing in important issues & themes. And they just make things more fun.
11/11