I have given similar advice to the last few novelists with whom I’ve worked: Invest emotionally in the secondary characters. They don’t have to spend as much time on the stage as your main players but they have to be compelling; their relationships to the primary characters have to be complex and intriguing enough for the reader to care about them. This was true for the work I did on The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. Frida is obviously the heart of the novel but her relationships with the mothers with whom she is sharing the experience of being “retrained” had to be credible, moving, and complicated. Same with Song for Another Home, a novel about two cousins who are geographically separated at the onset of the Korean War. The author, Bora Lee Reed, and I worked on making the cousins’ story compelling and their characters fully rounded, but we also put a lot of editorial work into making sure the people the cousins met in their search for each other were also fully developed.
In my experience novelists are so obsessed with their main characters that those surrounding them can fall a bit flat in the first draft. And for debut authors trying to find representation and then an acquiring editor, it’s the first draft that is read the most in the submission process, so give energy and thought to those secondary characters as well.
—Dawn Davis, senior vice president and publisher, 37 Ink, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Photo credit: Marissa Alper