A red and blue graphic which reads Day Five: Secondary Characters

HEA Writing Week 2025 | Day Five: Secondary Characters

Welcome to the final day of HEA Writing Week 2025. You did it! Give yourself some props for challenging yourself this week.

As we’ve discussed this week, your protagonists are the stars of the show—particularly in a romance. But while secondary characters may be more comfortable on the sidelines of your story, they’re not to be forgotten! Used effectively, secondary characters can be fantastic literary tools to drive the plot forwards, reveal details about your protagonists, and add dimension to the world you’ve created.

Below, we’ve outlined some of the ways secondary characters can be used in your stories, as well as our top tips for creating impactful, purposeful and three-dimensional secondary characters.

How can secondary characters be used in your story?

Every time a secondary character is introduced or featured on-page, it needs to be purposeful. Otherwise, you risk their presence feeling unnecessary, and the pacing of the story being impacted. So, always carefully consider why you’ve created them and what they’re bringing to the story.

When they are used purposefully, however, secondary characters can enrich and add great depth to your story. Here are a few examples to get you thinking about how you can utilize them effectively in your writing:

A scene from The Idea of You, with the main man has his arm around the female protaganist

To advance the plot… Whether they reveal pertinent information to a protagonist, or give them a new outlook on their situation or feelings towards the love interest, the actions of secondary characters change the course of the protagonist’s journey. There are many ways to use secondary characters to drive the plot forwards. For example, in The Idea of You by Robinne Lee, Solène’s daughter Izzy asks her mother to accompany her and her friends to Coachella. This action leads to Solène meeting Hayes Campbell, the boy band singer she goes on to have a love affair with. In this example, secondary character Izzy is essentially the catalyst for the romance. 

To create conflict… A secondary character might intentionally cause conflict by directly interfering in the main characters’ relationship, throwing barriers in their way. In other cases, the secondary character might not even be aware that they’ve caused any conflict. Perhaps they say something innocently that triggers the emotional fears and conflicts of one of the protagonists, causing them to pull back from their relationship with the other main character. There are endless ways you can use a secondary character to amp up the tension between your protagonists and drive conflict in your story!

Photograph of the main cast of the movie, Crazy Rich Asians

To motivate or aid the protagonists… Secondary characters might be used to prompt particular behaviour from the protagonist, help them work through their emotional conflicts, to overcome conflict, or look at a situation differently. For example, in Crazy Rich Asians, Nicholas’s mother reveals to Rachel that her own mother had lied about her father’s death, which motivates her to confront the truth about her family.

To add depth and realism to the world building… Secondary characters can add authenticity and detail to the characters’ worlds. For example, you’ll see secondary characters being used to immerse readers in the world of “The Ton” in a Regency romance, or medical staff being used to create a community environment at a hospital in a medical romance.

A scene from The Hunger Games movie, where Katniss cradles Rue as she dies

To change the tone… It might be a funny sidekick who brings humour and levity to heavier moments (think Donkey in Shrek!), or a beloved secondary character’s death taking a high stakes, dramatic scene and slowing it down with an emotional loss (Rue’s death in The Hunger Games comes instantly to mind). Secondary characters can be a great device when you need to shift the tone of your story quickly.

To tease connected editorial… Writers often have connected characters in their work. Introducing readers to the protagonists of a future book is a great way to grab their interest, hopefully driving them to seek out their next book!

What makes a good secondary character?

Make them three-dimensional: Whilst they’re not the focus of your story, it’s still important that your secondary characters are fully developed and believable, otherwise you risk drawing readers out of your story. If they’re an afterthought, it will be obvious to readers! So take the time to carefully consider who your secondary characters are and what you want their backstories to be. You don’t need to give readers all of that information (nor should you, as you’ll risk detracting focus from the protagonists!), but it will help you to write more rounded, convincing characters and keep their role in the story clear.

A cartoon image of an angel and a devil

Don’t make them all good or all bad: When using secondary characters as a friend or foil of the protagonist, it can be very easy to present them as almost a caricature of a good or evil presence in the story. For example, making an interfering parent or ex cruel without provocation or developed motivations, simply because it serves the purposes of the plot and creates the necessary conflict for the protagonist. But that will create a character who doesn’t feel very believable, and risk undermining the protagonists’ conflict as a result. People aren’t perfect, nor entirely evil without motivation—so your side characters shouldn’t be either!

Keep them consistent: This comes back to planning out your secondary characters again. By having an idea of who they are and what their role is before you start writing, you can ensure they’re being portrayed in a consistent way. If their behaviour or characterisation feels too changeable or erratic, you may risk confusing readers or eroding the believability of the character.

Make them memorable and unique: Giving your secondary characters a unique voice and/or a unique role in the story will help to set them apart and make it easier for readers to keep track of them. It will also support you to present them as three-dimensional characters in their own right! For example, if your heroine has three sisters without distinctive voices, who don’t serve different purposes in the story, then it will be easier for them to blend together in the mind of the reader. (Top tip: it’s always worth considering whether you can combine secondary characters who serve similar functions—including too many secondary characters will distract a reader and make it difficult for them to follow who’s who, so make sure you’re not including additional characters unnecessarily! In the above example, could one sister have served the same function as three?)

Secondary Characters at Harlequin

How you use secondary characters will very much depend on the specific story you’re writing. When writing a submission for Harlequin, this is especially important to bear in mind. Every Harlequin series has different requirements when it comes to the inclusion of secondary characters. Harlequin Presents, Romance, and Medical Romance are couple-focused, delving into the protagonists’ emotional journeys and internal conflicts, rather than external interference, but allow some space for secondary characters to support world building. Harlequin Intrigue and Harlequin Romantic Suspense have scope for a slightly larger cast of secondary characters to create the suspense plot and build mystery around the identity of the perpetrator. At the other end of the spectrum, Harlequin Special Edition wants to see not just the main characters but where they come from–their parents, siblings, children if they have them, the friends and co-workers that fill out their world.

This is why it’s crucial that you carefully read the submission guidelines for the series you’re interested in!


The Final HEA 2025 Challenge

Today’s challenge is to put everything you’ve learned this week into practice! We’re running a live Writing Sprint event on Zoom today at 1pm EST. If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time. Come and join us for an hour of writing and wrap up HEA Writing Week!


Thank you so much for joining us this week to craft your characters! We’ve had such a great time, and we hope that you learned something along the way. We can’t wait to read what you’ve come up with.

Happy Writing!