How a Secondary Character Becomes a Main Character in a Series
When I first wrote Julia in Trust in Magic, she was only three years old and very much a secondary character. At the time I had no idea she was going to grow into something much bigger in the series. She was simply this little girl in the story, yet at the same time she didn’t feel small to me.
What stood out right away wasn’t just that she was sweet or vulnerable, but that she was unusually bright in a very specific way. She could explain complicated ideas, she was fascinated by science, and she understood some things better than a lot of adults. At the same time, she still mispronounced big words because she was, after all, only three. That contrast made her feel real to me. I didn’t write her to be just “a smart child” in some generic sense. She felt like herself from the beginning. I hadn’t originally planned on making her a genius. She just told me she was. In Trust in Magic, she talks about microscopes, telescopes, Galileo, and science puzzles while still speaking with a child’s pronunciation, and that combination is what first made her stand out to me.
At the time, I didn’t think I was writing a character who would one day carry so much weight in the series. I was simply writing the scene in front of me and trying to make her feel alive on the page. Looking back, though, I think that’s often where these things start. Sometimes a character enters the story in a small role, but there’s something about them that feels anchored. They seem to have more life in them than the page count would suggest. I don’t always know what that means right away, but I feel it and just have to run with it.
I think that’s one of the trickiest and most interesting parts of writing a series. Not every secondary character is meant for something larger, and if you tried to expand every memorable side character, you would end up with an imbalance. But every now and then, one arrives with a little more pull than expected. They linger in my mind after the scene is over. They feel tied to something deeper in the world of the story. They seem to belong to more than the moment they first appear in. That was Julia for me.
A lot of people talk about long-term series arcs as though they must be fully planned from the beginning, and sometimes they are. There’s value in planning ahead and it’s innate to me. I’m a plotter, and I like structure. I like knowing where I’m going and how things fit together. But I also think there’s another part of the process that matters just as much, especially in a long series. You have to notice what’s happening on the page that you didn’t fully expect. You need to recognize when a character is carrying more weight than their role suggests. Which means you need to leave room for discovery.
That’s what happened here. I didn’t sit down at the beginning of the In Magic series with a perfect plan that said this three-year-old secondary character would become one of the threads helping hold the whole thing together. I thought maybe she could play another role later on, but I didn’t know what that would look like. What happened is that I wrote her, realized she felt unusually vivid, and kept paying attention.
The more I wrote, the more the world of the series opened up. More history came into focus. More consequences from the past kept rippling into the present. More of the emotional shape of the series became clear. As that happened, I started to see that Julia wasn’t just part of one small section of the story. She was tied to something bigger than I’d originally understood. Her story didn’t end where it began, and the deeper I went into the series, the more I could see that she was connected to the emotional core of it. Even if readers didn’t see it right away because she wasn’t always on the page. She was behind the pages until the end of book three.
I think this is one of the big advantages of writing an interconnected series instead of just interconnected standalones. In a standalone, there often isn’t room for this kind of growth. A character needs to do the job they were written to do, and the story moves on. In a series like this, though, you have time. You can revisit people. You can deepen connections. You can let meaning gather. A character who first appeared in a seemingly small role can slowly become more important because the world keeps expanding around them. Sometimes that expansion reveals what was there all along.
That doesn’t mean the process is effortless. Once you realize a character matters more than you first thought, you have to make choices. You can’t simply have the realization and expect it to work on its own. You must start reinforcing what you’ve discovered. For me, that meant paying attention to continuity, emotional significance, and connections to larger events. It meant asking whether this character was still being treated like a living part of the story world, or whether they were being flattened back into the role they first held. It meant looking at the series as a whole and asking what belonged, what deepened the story, and what was already quietly asking for more space.
For some writers, this probably happens naturally because they’re discovery writers, but for us plotters, this can be nerve-racking. If you’re a plotter and you didn’t outline a character as central from the beginning, it can seem risky to let them grow in importance later. But I don’t think the answer is to ignore that instinct. I think the better answer is to support it thoughtfully. Once you recognize that a character is tied to something larger, you don’t need to tear everything apart. You just need to strengthen what’s already there and keep the thread alive. You need to trust that discovery is part of the work too.
For me, there are usually a few signs that a secondary character may be carrying more story than I first realized. One is specificity. They don’t feel interchangeable. You couldn’t swap them out with another character and get the same effect. Another is that they stay in my mind after I finish writing them. They feel emotionally present even when they’re off page. A third is that they start connecting naturally to bigger questions in the story world, especially questions tied to loss, identity, history, or unresolved consequences. Julia had all of that. She didn’t feel generic. But like so much in writing, it’s a balancing act. A secondary character in my series, Cursed to Love, felt bigger than life, was fun to write, and stayed with me. But she wasn’t meant to be a main character and making her one, even in a later book, wouldn’t have felt right.
I think that’s the part worth paying attention to if you’re writing a series. Sometimes the clearest signs of future importance don’t come in the form of a dramatic scene or a big plot twist. Sometimes they come in the form of a character who simply feels more alive than expected and should you have to decide if it’s right for them to be more.
Not because every side character needs to be promoted into something bigger, but because some of them really are attached to the spine of the story long before you can fully see it. If you’re paying attention, you can recognize that early enough to let it grow instead of cutting it off.
Looking back now, that’s what I love most about Julia’s place in the series. She began as a three-year-old secondary character in Trust in Magic. At the time, that seemed to be all she was. But she arrived with a very clear sense of self, and over time I realized she was carrying much more of the emotional and structural weight of the series than I had understood at the start.
I didn’t know all of that on day one. I didn’t have every piece in place. But I knew she mattered, even when I didn’t fully know what the future held for her. yet explain why. You need to trust that sometimes a character tells you who they are before you know what role they’ll eventually play. If you listen, and if you keep paying attention as the story grows, something small can become central in a way that feels both surprising and inevitable.
Julia was one of those characters for me. She started small, but she never felt small. And by the end of the series, I could see that I hadn’t just written her into one corner of the story. I’d been writing toward her importance all along.
