“…don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t.” – Anne Lamott

I’m currently working on my next novel, What the Hell Ever Happened to Yuri Rozhenko? I’m not spending as much time on the work as I would like at the moment, but I’m filling in more of the details here and there, fleshing out the story.

Part of the fun is making up the supporting cast and the bit players. I have one gutter punk who’s taking over a whole chapter of this current work when she was supposed to be just a fulcrum for a plot turn. I made her too interesting, and now she’s taking on a life of her own.

It’s happened to me before.

In my novel The Clubber the punk Annie was supposed to be a bit character, a hit-and-run participant in a scene or two during my main character Andre’s complete nervous breakdown and drug binge. She was supposed to be just a stereotypical obnoxious punk, but it turns out I made her too obnoxious. She ended up becoming a major part of the story, wrapping herself around and inside the head of my main character, something I had not planned for the work at all.

For What the Hell Ever Happened to Yuri Rozhenko my main character is Skye, who is also the main character of my novel Crash Shadow, and also the main character of a lot of short stories I’ve written. The beginning of this current work in progress has Skye going to college part time while she works in a record store on the main drag. To that end I made up a couple of quick and dirty coworker characters, but the one stand out bit player is the manager of said record store, a tall and freaky gal who was inspired by some impressive and eccentric women I know.

This is the description I wrote for this store manager:

“Tandasil was a very tall and rigid woman. She always stood straight, as if she was made out of a two by four. Her frayed and untameable hair was always piled on top of her head, held together with chaotically placed hair bands and rubber bands, her gnarled locks close to becoming dreadlocks. It always exposed the tattoos on her neck, some of which were scary good work: Smalls symbols and skulls and intermittent pagan symbols. Skye knew she must have many more tattoos, but she always wore plain, long-sleeved shirts and long pants, keeping the surfaces her long and lanky forelimbs a mystery. One of her most prominent features were her large seeing eye glasses. The glasses, along with the plain long-sleeved shirts, made her look like a demented librarian.

She was also an unusual supervisor in that she was not overbearing, particularly demanding, or routinely demeaning, which were very rare traits for a retail boss. She was strict enough. She had fired more than a few people, but that was understandable considering what kind of people were attracted to the retail music business.

She was always very deadpan. All of her answers were matter-of-fact, even when Skye asked her about herself, such as where was she from, if she was in a band, and who the hell did her flawless Motorhead tattoo. Her voice and mannerisms were always as straight as her back.”

After having written this description, and maybe getting a little carried away with it, I want to make her a bigger part of the story. I cannot say where I would go with this character, but I can’t afford to make her role bigger. She’s just a bit part player who initiates a really critical part of the story, right before Skye goes on a crazy road trip. So I just have to have this fascinating holy-crap-what-did-I-just-cook-up character do her bit and then fade off into the distance.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll write a short story about her later on.