The winning ingredients: other characters

Number of entries received for the 2007 InnermoonLit Award for Best Short-Short Story to date: 62

In addition to your main character, your contest entry is judged based on its minor characters. No man is an island, right? We use this category in a broad sense, in that sometimes the setting, an animal, or even an inanimate object can serve as a sort of character.

Especially in a short-short story, you may not have the luxury of fully fleshing out all of your characters. Your peripheral characters may be loosely drawn and two-dimensional out of necessity, but they must at least serve a vital function in the story, and the more little shots of individuality you can inject into them, the better.

Beware of stereotypes. If you find yourself falling into one, try doing one small thing to turn the stereotype on its head, and the payoff will be substantial. For example, a friend of mine who’s an avid reader recently mentioned how sick she is of the obligatory gay male sidekick in chick lit novels. Why not let the heroine have a gay male rival, or a lesbian sidekick, or an elderly woman friend? The world is full of strange bedfellows and unexpected relationships, and those are infinitely more fun to explore than the same-old, same-old stereotypes.

I’m not well-read as far as chick lit goes, so for all I know the examples above may have been done to death too, which raises another point: try to stay current in your chosen genre. Reading a lot always helps your writing, and if you read what your ‘competition’ is writing, you can see what works in your particular field, what doesn’t, how your work fits in with your contemporaries’ works, and how it’s unique.