So when I think about secondary characters I think about them in their relationships with the primary characters because I think the relationships in fictional books are very key. You don’t think about a person in a vacuum, you think about them in relation to their family and their friends. And so when I create a world in which my character lives I always think about who she lives with and how that affects who she or he is. And then I learn things about my characters as I build my secondary characters.
Sometimes, in When Life Gives you O.J., when Jeremy enters the scene, who is a boy who lives in the same neighborhood as Zelly, he reacts to things that happens in Zelly’s life and it changes her. And I didn’t really see that coming. So I feel like a lot of times when I start to build the secondary characters I learn more about the primary characters in the process.
Oh that situation, Jeremy essentially showed up one day while I was writing and he started talking and everything I learned about Zelly through him was stuff I kind of never planned out. So it was a really fun shift to the book.