FICTION FOCUS
MAKING FRIENDS
Margaret James looks at the role of friendship in your fiction
After the central protagonists in your novel, short story or indeed in any other kind of fiction have walked into your head and made themselves at home, it will be time to think about the subsidiary characters with whom these central protagonists are going to interact.
Today, I’m going to talk about the role of friends in fiction, defining friends very loosely to include not only best mates but also casual acquaintances, and every other degree of friendship in between.
This still leaves some central characters – for example, Sherlock Holmes – who tend to insist they have no friends. So let’s expand my definition of friends a little bit further to include people with whom the central protagonists are for some reason obliged, willingly or unwillingly, to come into contact.
After all, no characters in fiction can operate in a vacuum, can they?