Let Your Secondary Characters Cause Trouble

Welcome back to Write Better Right Now. Last week, I talked about making sure you use your villains in your story. Today, I want to talk about other characters who can cause problems for your main character, even if they're not villainous or bad characters.

Parents Causing Trouble

In Haunted, The Ghost on the Stairs, Jon and Tania are traveling with their mother and stepfather's ghost hunter TV show. Tania can see ghosts but doesn't want anyone to know that. She wants to help the ghosts. Jon wants to help and protect Tania. In this situation, the parents cause problems because the kids have to keep their activities secret even though they are traveling with their parents.

Parents can often have different goals for their children. That's more obvious perhaps in books for children where parents may want to keep their kids safe while the kids want to go off and have adventures. Parents in a teen novel might want to keep their child from dating while the child is falling in love. Parents might want their kid to go to college, study a specific thing, have a particular career, while the child has different priorities.

But parents can also have different goals for their adult children too. Maybe a parent wants their child to get married, settle down, produce grandchildren, and the adult child is not ready for that yet. Maybe the parent wants the child to take over a family business, and that's not what the child wants.

So there's a lot of ways that parents can cause complications for their children of various ages. In The Accidental Detective humorous mystery series, in book one, Mom is in a nursing home where there have been some suspicious deaths so she directly causes Kate to investigate these deaths, even though there's nothing wrong with mom herself. She's not asking Kate to do this, but it is the impetus for her investigation.

But also, Dad is a big character in all of the books. He and Kate get along pretty well, but sometimes they keep secrets from each other in a desire to protect each other from knowledge that might be uncomfortable. That's something they have to deal with in the relationship, learning to trust and be open with each other.

Children Causing Trouble

Children can also cause trouble for their parents of all ages. Maybe you have a character who has young children and she's trying to investigate a mystery while also taking care of and protecting her children. Maybe you have a character with teens who are getting into trouble and distracting the character from whatever her priorities are in this book.

In the Billionaire Cowgirl’s Christmas (the Accidental Billionaire Cowboys sweet romance series), the family has won a billion dollar lottery. In the first four books, the adult boys find their love. In book five, mom is dating. She's been widowed for several years. Her children are quite reasonably worried about fortune hunters, so they're very suspicious of anyone mom dates, along with sort of the natural or at least common instinct a lot of children have to be uncomfortable with their parents dating.

The boys are acting out of the desire to protect their mother from harm, but they're not respecting her ability to take care of herself and make her own choices. And they're kind of insulting her by implying that a man wouldn't be interested in her for any reason besides money. So as she is finding her love interest and learning who to trust herself, she also has to deal with her adult children wanting to interfere.

So keep in mind parents and children as potential secondary characters who can cause complications for your main character.

Siblings Causing Trouble

Don't forget siblings! Siblings can be the driving factor in a book for young people. Maybe a child has to babysit a younger sibling or take them along on various adventures. You could even have a sibling who is bullying your main character or blaming them for things. In that case, I would say that sibling takes on more of a villain role. But even siblings who are not bad characters can cause complications. Maybe the sibling gets in trouble a lot, and that takes a lot of the parent's attention, so your main character can't really get the support they need.

In adult books, siblings can still be part of the story. I think as authors, it's easy to forget siblings and focus on your main character and the friends around her. But consider keeping those family members as part of it. In Something Shady at Sunshine Haven, Kate comes back to Arizona after 30 years as a war correspondent and discovers that her younger sister, Jen, has a lot of anger and resentment. Jen seems to think that Kate has just been having these adventures gallivanting around the world to war zones, leaving Jen behind to take care of things, including helping her parents as they age and need to move mom into a nursing home.

They deal with this in book one, and then they become really close. In fact, they become partners in investigating crimes. But Jen still causes some problems because she seems to be dealing with a kind of midlife crisis where she wants more adventure. She pushes Kate into doing things that Kate would not normally choose to do. Some of those are side things like paddle boarding or going to a stand-up mic night, some of those things are directly related to investigating.

In Coffee and Crushes at the Cat Café (The Furrever Friends Sweet Romance series), Kari is opening her cat cafe for several reasons. A big one is that her sister Marley could use a different job. She's currently waitressing weekends and evenings, which means she doesn't have a lot of time to spend with her nine-year-old son. Kari wants to open the Cat Cafe in part to give Marley a baking job that she'll enjoy more and which will have better hours. Marley has not asked for anything, but Kari just loves her sister so much that she wants to give her a better life. In fact, she's so motivated by helping her sister that when the love interest comes into the story,

Kari first thought is, “I don't have time to date, even though this guy seems really great. Well, maybe my sister would like him.” So she's putting herself second. That is part of her character development, and it is also a way that a sibling causes some complications, even though the sibling is a good person.

Friends Causing Trouble