secondary characters?

[rae121452]

several times in the past and then again yesterday, i've gotten feedback asking for stories in which the secondary characters in a series get their own stories.
in the most recent instance the main character is someone i'm totally enamored with and the reason i'm writing the series. the other characters are background.
i did write one story in the past that expanded 2 of the background characters and then got feedback asking for the original characters to take center stage again.

has anyone done a separate series where previously used characters have their own adventures? how was it received?

 

[KeithD]

Yes, secondary characters in my stories often become protagonists in their own stories and series. In my CIA Candy Store stories, for instance, the head of the unit who just dips in and out of the stories already written, Sam Winterberry, will soon be the center of a marketplace book.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Yes. My worlds tend to join up, with a minor character in one story getting a story of their own. The fact that my male characters are usually different versions of me, at different ages, tends to encourage this, especially when they pop in different places and different times. As a consequence, my timelines go fairly loose.

 

[ausfet]

I've got characters that have appeared in several stories. Honestly, I don't think that many people realise. I read a stack of another author's work before I clued on that they were doing the same thing, and I'd read about half a dozen of another author's stories before I realised she used her username in the text of each tale. I do it mainly because it's easier for me to write stories about a 'pre-existing world' than to come up with a whole new story each and every time.

 

[RetroFan]

My favorite secondary character from my stories is Todd, who appears in my 'PTA Queen Bee & Teen Rebel' lesbian sex stories.

Todd, aged 18, is an enormously fat 300 pound bully, who is so stupid that he thinks about himself in the third person. When his skinny petite twin sister makes a jibe about Todd looking like the Hindenburg, it takes him about 15 minutes to work out why she would compare Todd to an airship (which might have exploded, Todd wasn't sure).

While Todd is extremely funny, I don't think people would really want to read erotic stories about stupid fat 18-year-old bullies. There might be a market for a fat female bully, with fat fetishism and female domination popular topics on the site, but not for a male character like this.

 

[lovecraft68]

Back when I wrote the Siblings with benefits series I did a Halloween one shot. In it I introduced Abigail Lefay, a witch who owns a fetish club in Chicago. She was meant to be a friend of the brother in the series, but....she wouldn't get out of my damn head.

I'm just finishing up the third novel in the Abigail series to get it in print for the upcoming conventions and book Expos

 

[MelissaBaby]

has anyone done a separate series where previously used characters have their own adventures? how was it received?

I have not, but I may at some point.

In my series, Mary and Alvin, I have never used a POV other than that of the two title characters. I have been asked a few times if I would write a chapter about Alvin's daughter Jennifer and her girlfriend. I'd love to, but it would be like breaking the fourth wall to me. But I might do a spin off sometime.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I've got one request for a side character spin-off so far, but that hasn't materialized just yet. That aside, I have switched POV's in my fantasy series on a per-story basis since many of my characters are protagonist material anyway and every one of them has brought new wrinkles into the story arc.

Granted, "The Temptation of Gheeran" is a shameless bit of self-indulgance. The eponymous character was meant as a bit of dark comic relief in "Shilana's Trial", but I couldn't resist the temptation of writing about the hijinx and misadventures a blind killer for hire would find himself in. "Write what you know" and all that. (The blind part, not the other...). Still one of my favourite happy little accidents, even if no one asked for it.

 

[BiscuitHammer]

Yup. Two of my secondary characters, married girls who are completely insane, are getting their own series. And writing about them is easy, because they're very in love, promiscuous, out of their freaking minds, and prone to forgetting to put on clothes.

It'll be like the Bing and Bob Road Movies, but with shameless bisexual girls in love.

The parents in my Alex & Alexa story got their own series, Mike & Karen, and it's been a hit. People really like well-established characters, so I just run with it. Tbh, I enjoy it.

 

[Kantarii]

several times in the past and then again yesterday, i've gotten feedback asking for stories in which the secondary characters in a series get their own stories.
in the most recent instance the main character is someone i'm totally enamored with and the reason i'm writing the series. the other characters are background.
i did write one story in the past that expanded 2 of the background characters and then got feedback asking for the original characters to take center stage again.

has anyone done a separate series where previously used characters have their own adventures? how was it received?

I have had more than one “supporting” character catch some of my readers eyes enough to ask me to do a series about them. I would, but the characters I create wholly belong in the world I have created for them with the exception of the main character since the stories are told from my personal diary. In life, people come and go all the time. With that said, I remind them that any character they fall in love with has relevance to the story in some way and, most likely, will appear again in future chapters.
Kant

 

[Bramblethorn]

Coming at this from the other side: I have ideas for a character who I intend to be a main character in later works, but I'm not ready to write those yet. In the meantime, I've introduced her as a supporting character in something I've just written, as a way of getting comfortable with her.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Coming at this from the other side: I have ideas for a character who I intend to be a main character in later works, but I'm not ready to write those yet. In the meantime, I've introduced her as a supporting character in something I've just written, as a way of getting comfortable with her.

Yes. I've had characters sneak in on me who get the next story, but deliberately allowing one to audition first, that's clever .

 

[KeithD]

Yes. I've had characters sneak in on me who get the next story, but deliberately allowing one to audition first, that's clever .

I think I've probably posted this before. I did a series of six mainstream espionage/international crime novels in the early 90s. I killed off a secondary character in one book and received an objection from my mother on having done so. So, one of the hooks of the next book was figuring out how she hadn't died and folding back into the plot line. (Luckily I had blown her up while she was tied to a chair in a Beirut souk copper shop, so I just had to figure out how she'd gotten out before the shop blew up.) Since my mother and I had "that sort of" needling relationship, I blew the character up in the next book too.

And, on secondary characters sneaking in and taking over, I had a female protagonist in the first book of that series, and a male detective sneaked in as an obnoxious presence toward the end of that book, married her in the next book, and then got equal billing for the rest of the series. That hadn't been intended.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Since my mother and I had "that sort of" needling relationship, I blew the character up in the next book too.

Just as well I was sitting in a safe, comfortable chair with the coffee on the side table when I read that .