Side characters

I've talked before about how I'm bad with having multiple characters in a story, and how I tend to keep my number of main characters down because it makes it easier for me to keep track of what's going on. The problem that arises out of that is that I'm not particularly great at making side characters to exist around them, either. Like, I can say that a character is in a crowd of people, but if they had to pick one character to focus on for whatever reason or another, and that character wasn't integral to the plot, I would struggle. I'd want that character to have a purpose to being in the scene, to have a name, to have a history. All of which are things that I struggle with keeping straight in my head as I add more and more to a story. And if I add a character into a scene, well, why wouldn't I bring them back in a later one? I went to the trouble of giving them a name. What's the point of just letting them go after that?

There probably is one. It's probably the fact that it makes the world feel more alive, and like it exists for more than the express purpose of giving the main characters a plane in which to have their story told. I can't really argue with that, because it's true, and the more real the world is, the easier it is to get engaged in the story. But that doesn't make it any easier to make myself do it.

The simple fact that I'm not good at coming up with names is probably a huge part of it. It would be easier to make side characters if I could just pull names out of my ass that didn't sound samey, generic, or completely batshit insane. Those are my three modes when it comes to story writing. Which is why lately I've started to resort to stealing names from people I know, but that's another story.

This became increasingly obvious to me as I started working on my Nano novel this year, which started in a bar. There are all kinds of people in a bar, doing all kinds of things, and who did I name in it? The main character and the bartender, who I have full intentions of making into a secondary character. I could have named a bouncer, or some regulars, or the DJ, or any number of people who were there in passing, but I didn't. I talked very generically about other people to make it seem like there were people around, and then I went on to focus on the main character like I always do.

I suppose that's something that might be easier to fix in editing, to be fair. But it's probably something that I should think about more often.