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It's generally fine for minor characters to be shallow, especially if their impact on a scene is minimal, and putting more effort into your main characters than your side characters is perfectly no...
Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-16T20:14:38Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48948 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T13:14:33Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48948 License name: CC BY-SA 4.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
#2: Initial revision
It's generally fine for minor characters to be _shallow_, especially if their impact on a scene is minimal, and putting more effort into your main characters than your side characters is perfectly normal. However, when you say: > Really I just need him to get in the way of my protagonist in minor situations. ...that's a bit more worrying. If you don't have a reason apart from 'the plot requires it' for this character's behaviour, it's not unreasonable to expect the readers to pick up on that. He doesn't need a great deal of depth, but at bare minimum I'd say what he should have is a **motivation.**'He's insane' isn't really sufficient; even insane people generally have an _internal_ logic that makes sense to them—they don't simply stop thinking. It doesn't need to ever be made explicit in the text, but as long as _you_ know why he keeps getting in your protagonist's way, and write him accordingly, his actions are much more likely to be internally consistent—and thus, much _less_ likely to break the reader's suspension of disbelief.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2019-11-14T17:53:10Z (about 5 years ago)
Original score: 2