Side Character

 You don’t set out to make a side character. You set out to make a person. And every person—no matter how small their role—believes, with every fiber of their being, that they are the main character of this world.

Take, for example, the girl selling flowers at the corner of the street. To the protagonist, she’s a blur in the background, a flash of color as they hurry past. But in her world, she has woken up before dawn, fingers aching from weaving garlands. The weight of her mother’s expectations hangs over her, heavier than the basket on her hip. She has dreams—ones that stretch past the narrow streets she calls home—but today, she is counting coins, bargaining with a sharp tongue, pretending not to hear when someone calls her “just a flower girl.”

She is not just anything.

Or take the old man who repairs shoes near the tea stall. His hands are cracked, stained with the polish he can never fully scrub away. He watches people rush past—his customers, the ones who only remember him when their soles wear thin. But to him, they are not just strangers. He knows the hurried man with the scuffed boots is late to a job he hates. He knows the woman with the delicate sandals will trip by evening—he saw the loose stitch she ignored. He wonders if the boy who used to sit cross-legged beside him, watching with wide eyes, will ever return.

They are his characters.

They are all main characters.

And yet, when you write them, they flicker in and out of the protagonist’s life. Their story exists in glimpses—a moment, a conversation, a passing thought. But if you listen closely, if you really listen, you can hear the echoes of the world they carry with them. Because a side character is not a prop. They do not exist for the protagonist. They exist beside them, walking their own path, lost in their own thoughts, carrying their own burdens.

And if you do it right, the reader will feel it—that weight of an untold story, just beyond the edges of the page.