A Piece on the Side: the Fine Art of the Beloved Sidekick (Patreon)

Greetings, Mad Fictioneers! I am slowly starting to emerge from the deep waters of surgical recovery and new motherhood--which is to say that I am typing this with a sleeping (hopefully sleeping) infant next to me, hoping that he will not wake up for at least an hour or two, having played the entirety of Ghostbusters at top volume while rocking him because nothing relaxes this child of mine like a loud-ass soundtrack and a battle scene or two. 

I feel like autumn held back for so long—and then we did a speed-run through two seasons in November. There are still green leaves on the trees, and a good deal more orange and brown ones, but also three inches of snow on the ground. Windstorms have taken our power several times, and whipped the leaves down so fast we blinked and it was winter. Given that it was 80 degrees on November 3rd, it’s enough to give you pumpkin spice whiplash.

This month’s essay comes to you courtesy of a certain ancient space elephant. My Mass Effect tie-in novel came out this month, and the vast majority of the feedback I’ve heard so far have mentioned how much people love Yorrik, who is a Shakespearean superfan Elcor, a species of giant trunkless sort-of elephants who can’t modulate their voices, and thus append their sentences with emotional tags, like so: “Bashful pride: It would seem that everyone loves me.”

Now, I was pretty sure that even if I fucked up the rest of the book, everyone was gonna love Yorrik. I’m not totally confident of all my skills as a writer (I think about five writers working today are actually and comfortably confident in everything they do, the rest of us gnaw our bones to the marrow over our weaknesses) but I feel pretty good about being able to gin up a side character people go nuts over. I don’t even think my protagonists get quite the love my sidekicks do. Now, I’m going to offer up a recipe. Not the recipe—there’s no one recipe for a beloved character. You can do it a million ways. And I’m entirely reverse engineering this in order to science it out for you. I don’t think about this stuff when I’m writing, I’ve always just written it. But having taken some time off lately, I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I do, and I can see some patterns, and why they work. Why I knew that people would like this or that character in ME: Annhilation, but they’d love Yorrik.

I may not always be able to get you onside with my heroes. But I can do you a half-wyvern half-library with a heart the size of a house.

I’m also not necessarily talking about how to make the most brilliant sidekick or the best one in some holistic, objective sense. I’m not talking about how to make an immortal secondary character that some future Tom Stoppard will write whole plays about. Bravery, loyalty, intellect—none of these are particularly required or important. They can be added in in whatever ratios you prefer. I’m just talking about how to make a sidekick lovable. Which I guess is really, in the end, about what people want to love. Let’s not get too deep on that yet, though. What it is, is making a character that hooks people’s hearts, that gets in there and wakens something a stalwart protagonist can’t, because the protagonist has to worry about moving the plot and standing up to evil and kind of being an insert for the audience’s beautiful yet clumsy ego or whatever. There’s a reason that, in so many groups, it’s not the hero that people love, it’s the companions. Willow and Xander, Drax and Rocky Raccoon and Groot, Samwise Gamgee and Falstaff and all the rest. 

You be responsible with my secrets now. You gotta promise. Use these spells only for good.

Because look, it ain’t hard. You want people to squee over your sidekick and snuggle them and love them and call them a cinnamon roll too good for this world?

Think of everything you ever wanted your mother or your father or your ex-lover or your old friend you hardly talk to anymore or your mentor or your sibling to say to you, everything you wanted so badly to hear but never did, and then put those words in the mouth of some kind of amazing beast and make them say that shit to your protagonist. Or whoever. As long as they say it.

Oh, there’s more to it. I’ll get there in a minute. But that’s the easiest way to a human heart. Say what we all need to hear and never do and then paint it up with glitter and dragon scales and a long furry tail. (Warning: obviously this only works for speculative fiction, but if you’ve been with me more than a couple of weeks you know I have very little useful advice for people who don’t have amazing beasts in their stories, I just…listen, I know it’s no one-way ticket to the Western Canon, but I’m a good deal better with dragons than divorce, you know?) This is what I did with Naganya and Madame Lebedeva in Deathless—Lebedeva’s speech about makeup has got to be one of my most quoted passages out of all the reams of nonsense I’ve written, because it’s what anybody who wears makeup wishes someone would tell them when they’ve been made to feel silly and shallow and dumb for liking it. On any given topic, we all have things we know but can’t give any creedence to til someone else says it, because believing in our own wisdom is pretty tough until you hit the kind of age that involves whittling and not putting any mixers in your booze. The protagonist can’t say too many of these things because the protagonists job is to learn them, and grow once they know them. 

The other shortcut is to give your character a personality in opposition to their physicality. If they are big and powerful, make their soul fragile and vulnerable. If they are small and weak, make them fierce as fuck and belligerent or at least self-possessed. You know, like a pomeranian. Or Dumbo. Again, this is about making the audience love them, which is, in the end, partly about making the audience feel protective toward them. Want the best for them, fear for them, hope for them, the way we do for people close to us. But however you set this up, keep that truth-telling element in play, and you’ll have something. 

Now that we’ve got a stew going, we have to give our sidekick some actual personality. This isn’t really much different than any other character—the easiest way to give the audience an insight into a character, their motivation, their inner life, is to give them an obsession. Yorrik, for example, is crazy into Shakespeare, to the point of changing his name and dreaming of mounting the first Macbeth production in the Andromeda Galaxy. There’s a lot of comedy in that, but to him it’s deadly serious, because it is his obsession, his passion. (Taking ridiculous ideas/things seriously is about 50% of good comedy anyway). This also has the effect of making the character relatable to those of us of the geeky persusasion, since our obsessions lead us about by the nose most of the time as well. And we are just exactly the sorts of people who fall in love with fictional people the hardest. 

Finally, and this one is delicate because it can turn sour and lame SO EASILY, but giving them an interesting verbal tic is pretty much the shortest route to a delightful beast everyone wants to quote. Drax and Groot are far more beloved than Gamora who speaks normally and has normal behaviors. Elcor have their emotional tags, and Bioware used those to humanize droids in their Star Wars games before that. Consider the language in Everything Is Illuminated and how it makes you feel about Alex. He is endearing. He is endeared to the reader, because the way he speaks is so different than the usual English syntax. 

Our world is soaked in language. It is everywhere, and everything. Especially in this technologicsl age, text and syntax and grammar is the lifeblood of the universe. And spoken words are the vast majority of how we learn to love anyone—by speaking and being spoken to. So when someone is able to alter that vital fluid, it kicks our perception out of the usual flow and makes us think and feel, where otherwise we might just float along as we always have. It might be an odd example, but consider Alyssa Edwards from RuPaul’s Drag Race, a drag queen with a strong Texas accent who is constantly mispronouncing things (rigga morris instead of rigor mortis etc) and misunderstanding them in ways so amusing they instantly become catchphrases. Malapropisms, you might even call them, a word which is in itself a reference to a character from a play one year older than the entire nation of America. Mrs. Malaprop’s side-character game was just that strong. People love her because they can’t predict what she’s going to say next, because her language does not obey the normal rules. The other side of that is, as I’ve mentioned several times, someone like Groot, who is absolutely, ironclad predictable in what he will say next, so that the audience gets the pleasure of anticipating it, and being surprised by the context in which his repetition of I am Groot will make new and wonderful kinds of sense. Experiment with ways to tweak speech patterns—remove articles or some other common part of speech like “to be” verbs, create a character who only knows five words and combine and recombine those words to make surprising cognitive connections. There is an incredibly moving passage in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova that owes its entire effect to simply switching “you” and “me” pronouns in a single paragraph. A small kink in the way a character expresses themselves is basically everything. 

Keeping all of these shortcuts in mind, the real key to creating wonderful side characters is remembering that they aren’t side characters. No one thinks of themselves as secondary cast in their own lives. They are the leads in their own narratives, and if you had made another choice, they could be the leads in the one you’re telling. Treat them as though they’re protagonists when the lights and the camera shut off, and they will feel real. 

Ultimately, a writer cannot live on protagonists alone. You have to people your work with small characters and medium-sized companions and all sorts of peoples and beasts in the midst of their own stories, with all their own shit going on. Your job isn’t necessarily to illustrate all the shit they have going on, but it is to sketch it, loosely, with a broad brush. One breath, one stroke, as the calligraphy masters used to say. If your strokes are bold enough, you only need a few. People will admire a knight, or a detective, or a wizard, or any number of Big Ticket Mains. But they will adore the shy, emotionally-transparent space elephant who quotes Shakespeare. 

And, of course, given all the work you put into making these creatures magnets for people’s emotions, killing them can be extremely effective. 

BUT THAT’S ANOTHER ESSAY.