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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37430
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37430
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Remember your own days at school? Some people you knew well - they were your friends. Some you didn't know so well - classmates you weren't close with. Perhaps there were the people you didn't get along with: you probably didn't know _why_ they were like that, you just knew their unpleasant trait, and to keep your distance. Then, there were the teachers; how much did you know about them, save whether they were strict, and whether their exams were hard?

It should be the same in your story: some characters you show in detail. Others - a little bit. Yet others - the reader doesn't need to know much about them at all. It's realistic to a school experience.

Look as an example at _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone_. (_Harry Potter_ being a series, we get to know some characters later in the following books, but that's not relevant to what you're looking for.) The main trio are characters you know well. Other students: there's Neville who loses and forgets stuff and gets bullied, there's Malfoy the Bully, and that's it. Crabbe and Goyle aren't really characters - they are Malfoy's satellites. The teachers - we get Snape and Quirrel, enough of McGonagall to know she's strict but kind and can be trusted, nothing of what goes on in Enigmatic-but-Good Dumbledore's brain, and the names of some others.

You see? We don't need a lot of details about every single character. We need as much detail as is relevant, as much detail as the MC(s) would have. Let me stress this again - not "as little as possible", not "each and every character with detail", but the relevant detail, as much of it as is needed and makes sense.

Another smart thing J.K. Rowling does is she introduces characters early on, in a brief line or a brief scene, and then "puts them on the shelf" to be used later. So when a character is needed, they don't "pop out of nowhere". Parvati Patil, for instance, is mentioned in the first book (during the sorting hat scene), reappears in the third book, and so on. It creates the sense that she's always there, the MCs just don't really interact with her. You can use the same tool in your novella: mention a character in one line early on, then later on, when they become important, it makes sense that they've been there all along.

Original score: 4