The Gods Nobody Believes In: How American Gods Teaches Writers to Build Secondary Characters That Carry Theme
Spoiler policy: This piece discusses character function and structure throughout the novel, including some late reveals about Wednesday. If you haven't finished the book, you'll still get value here, but a few things will be less surprising when you read it.
Most writing advice about secondary characters lands in one of two places: give them a want, or give them a backstory. Both are fine as far as they go. Neil Gaiman does something more interesting in American Gods. He builds his supporting cast so that each character is a working argument. Not a symbol exactly, more like a proof. By the time you've finished the novel, you realize the secondary characters aren't decorating the story about gods losing power in America. They are that story, and they're doing it scene by scene, not in summary.
That's the technique worth stealing.
Why Most Supporting Casts Feel Decorative
Here's the pattern you see in a lot of drafts: the protagonist carries the theme, and the secondary characters carry the plot logistics. Someone gives Shadow a job. Someone gives him a warning. Someone gives him a place to sleep. The characters exist to move the protagonist from scene to scene.
Gaiman doesn't do that. Czernobog, the old Slavic god of darkness who now works in a slaughterhouse, isn't there to deliver plot information. He's there to show you what it looks like when a being who once had genuine power accepts a diminished life and still can't let go of the old cruelty. He plays checkers with Shadow for Shadow's life. That's not logistics. That's a character enacting the novel's central question: what do you do with a self that no longer fits the world you're living in?
Anansi, Mr. Nancy, is funnier, warmer, and sharper. He tells stories. He laughs at the gods who are suffering. He understands something Czernobog doesn't: that you survive by adapting the performance, not by clinging to the original role. Same theme, different answer. Two secondary characters, same question, opposite responses. That structural pairing is doing enormous work without ever announcing itself.
How to Build a Supporting Cast That Argues
The move Gaiman makes is simple to describe and hard to execute: before you write a secondary character's scene, ask what position that character holds on your novel's central argument. Not what they believe about life in general. What specific answer do they embody to the question your novel is asking?
American Gods asks, roughly: when something loses the belief that sustained it, what can it become? Every significant secondary character is a different answer to that question. Bilquis, the Queen of Sheba, finds one answer. Media finds another. Mr. Ibis and Mr. Jacquel, running a funeral home in Cairo, Illinois, find a third. None of them are interchangeable. They can't be swapped out.
Compare that to a draft where the secondary characters are defined by their relationship to the protagonist (mentor, rival, love interest) rather than by their relationship to the theme. Those characters feel thin even when they're written competently, because they're pointing at the protagonist instead of pointing at the idea.
The practical test: take any secondary character from your draft and ask, "If I removed this character and replaced them with someone who has the same plot function but the opposite thematic position, would the novel feel different?" If the answer is no, the character isn't doing thematic work yet.
Setting as the Third Argument
Gaiman adds a layer that's easy to miss on a first read. The locations in American Gods aren't just atmosphere. The House on the Rock, the small Midwestern towns, the back rooms of funeral parlors: each setting reinforces the same argument the characters are making.
Roadside America, the actual tourist attraction that appears in the novel, is a place built on the human need to believe in something strange and slightly absurd. Gaiman puts a gathering of dying gods there. The setting and the characters are saying the same thing at the same time. That kind of doubling, where location and character both carry the theme, creates the feeling of density in literary fiction without requiring the prose to be dense.
For your own draft: when you're placing a scene, ask whether the location can do thematic work alongside the characters. It doesn't have to be symbolic in a heavy-handed way. It just has to be chosen, not defaulted to.
The Structural Risk Gaiman Takes (and What It Costs)
Here's the honest part. Gaiman's approach to secondary characters creates a pacing problem he never fully solves. The novel's "Coming to America" interludes, short chapters that show how various gods arrived in the New World, are thematically essential. They're also the sections readers most often cite as places where the novel slows down.
That's the trade-off. When your secondary characters are carrying theme rather than plot, they need their own space on the page. That space comes at a cost to forward momentum. Gaiman accepts the cost. You might decide your novel needs a tighter trade-off. But you should make that decision consciously, not by accident.
If you're working on a long novel with a complex supporting cast, this is exactly the kind of structural decision that benefits from being mapped out before you're 60,000 words in.
Where Nexa Fits Into This Kind of Planning
Writing Nexus includes Nexa, an in-app story coach built for the developmental editing questions that come up during drafting, not after. If you're trying to work out whether your secondary characters are doing thematic work or just plot logistics, Nexa can help you stress-test that. You describe your cast, your central argument, and where you are in the draft; she asks the questions a developmental editor would ask and helps you see the gaps before they become structural problems in a finished manuscript. She doesn't write the novel for you. She helps you make better decisions about the one you're already writing. For novelists planning a mythology-heavy or ensemble-driven story, tools like novel outlining software and a coaching layer like Nexa can save you from the kind of revision that requires rebuilding from the foundation up.
What to Take to Your Own Draft
Here are the specific moves worth trying:
- Assign each secondary character a position on your central argument. Not a personality trait. A position. They should be answering your novel's core question differently than the protagonist does.
- Pair secondary characters who hold opposite answers. Czernobog and Anansi are both old gods in decline; they handle it in opposite ways. That pairing creates meaning without a single line of exposition.
- Let setting double the argument. When you're choosing where a scene happens, ask whether the location can carry the same thematic weight as the characters in it.
- Make the thematic cost of secondary character space a conscious decision. If your interludes or subplots slow the main narrative, know that before you write them, not after.
If you're building a novel with the kind of thematic ambition American Gods has, the secondary cast is where that ambition either pays off or dissolves into a collection of interesting scenes that don't add up. Gaiman's specific achievement is making the supporting cast feel necessary, not because they move the plot, but because the novel's argument can't be made without them.
That's the goal. Build a cast where every character is load-bearing.
Start planning your novel at Writing Nexus and use Nexa to map your cast against your central argument before you're too deep in the draft to change course. If you're working in fantasy specifically, the fantasy novel planning guide is a good place to start thinking about how mythology and character structure interact.