New moon on June 6, 2024
Today begins the Flower Moon. The theme this month is stock characters. They’re easy to overlook, to misuse, and to underappreciate. So let’s give them some notice.
A stock character is a type or a class of participants in narrative fiction. Think of them as the character equivalent of a trope or story beat. In a detective story, someone is going to find a body; that’s a story beat. Imagine a dinner scene where a lightning storm knocks out the power, and when the lights come back on there’s a dead body face down in the soup. That’s a trope. And finally, imagine that there’s a shady butler we’re meant to think did it. The butler’s a stock character.
In the West, they were first introduced in Ancient Greek comedy, most likely during the late Classical or early Hellenistic period. In a world where a lot of narrative fiction is being produced, authors and audiences began to recognize recurring roles and their value. So a stock or inventory of types of people arose to populate stories. An author could take one off the shelf, use them to drive the story, and count on the audience to recognize the type without needing to spend a great deal of time developing the character. They are commodities of the storytelling craft.
That reveals one of the errors in judgment a creator can make when using a stock character. Main characters shouldn’t be pulled from inventory. They should be deliberately crafted to fit the narrow purpose, theme, and tone of the work. Stock characters are meant to pull the light duty of fleshing out a narrative. They add depth to a story without taxing the patience of the audience or the creative powers of the author.
If your main character needs to go from point A to point B between a couple of heavy scenes, maybe throw in a wisecracking ride share driver to lighten the mood and give the audience a moment to breath and internalize the last scene. It’s not necessary to add a bunch of backstory to that driver.
A creator can also misuse a stock character by not taking them seriously enough. Stock characters tend toward the stereotypical. In detective fiction, the femme fatale is a typical secondary character used to drive plot and twist the main character in knots. But a femme fatale need not be a woman. That’s a cultural relic of a time when detectives were written as cis gender men who reliably fall for a certain type of woman. Give some thought to what role the stock character plays with respect to your specific story goal and try to meet that goal with a variation on the stock.
Stock characters change over time. In Rome a common stock character was the witty and sarcastic slave. That morphed into the witty servant, which Jeeves so well embodies. In societies where there’s no servant class, that specific stock character hardly exists.
If you avoid those two traps—making the main characters stock and treating stock characters without care—the story will benefit. Also, keep in mind that stock characters aren’t archetypes. We talked about archetypes last Flower Moon (coincidence!), and you can read a little about that here.
Think about your favorite movie or story. Who were the stock characters and how did they help or harm the work? Where can a stock character add value to a story that you're working on now?
Wherever your medium of choice takes you, we hope this month’s prompts inspire you in your work!