Not Every Character Needs to be Original

Fiction is filled with easily recognizable characters. There’s the geeky kid who spent more time in high school in his gym locker than in class. The woman with breathtakingly bad taste in men. The absentminded genius with no commonsense. The bureaucracy hating veteran cop. Slimy lawyers. The list is endless.

The nice thing about these universal characters, you can drop them into your story as bit players and your reader will instantly recognize them. You don’t have to slow down the narrative and spend pages describing them. We know them on sight.