Cardboard cut out

Incedental characters are more difficult than I would have expected. Although most of Echo is set in the closed environment of a starship, on occassions the crew of the citadel class have to interact with other people. How detailed should those people be, given the fact that most of them have a limited life expectancy. Some of the incidentals have names, mainly because it's a fairly natural thing to introduce yourself to people, but also because it's easier to write Joe Bloggs said, rather than the man in the raincoat said, over and over again. But, once they have a name, do i have a responsibility to make then slightly more real? No, of course not. Is it helpful to round them out a bit? I don't really know. When writing Echo I asked one of the First Readers how individual I should make the Bad Girls and they said they were disposable cannon fodder rather than main characters. Shame as I quite like them, probably more than some of the other main characters and might struggle if some of them don't get to survive E2? Just to make life more difficult, I'm writing several real people into E2. How many words should they get? Professor Helms, genetic engineer is in chapter 4 although I'm not sure I've got the voice right. There's a conversation with Echo which gets interrupted - considering she got a couple of pages, is it going to be weird when she just disappears? However that will be difficult as she doesn't survive past chapter 8. Sorry Cat. On a complete aside, am I the only person who noticed that a minor character in the first series of 24 caused the crash of a jumbo jet (for a reason that I never really figured out) and the fate of the jumbo never gets another mention? On another complete aside, I'm writing this on my new iPad :-)