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I am writing a realistic-fiction novel set in the USA during the Great Depression. I intend to use some stock characters to make the story colorful and to flesh out the culture of the period.
Stock characters are types of fictional individuals who have one thing in common with another, like Dr. Frankenstien & Dr. Moreu. They're both mad scientists, from different stories and authors but in the same category based on what their characters are.
I'm not making ALL my characters stock characters, but I think stock characters would help my story because I think they make better sense than my own characters. Are stock characters still really useful to readers, or people of this century? Or are characters like this out of date?
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"Stock characters" are shortcuts to creating characters. As such, you want to limit their use to secondary characters that nevertheless play important parts in one or more scenes.
Doctors are examples of stock characters. They may play an important role in saving the life of the hero or heroine, for instance. But they do this in their roles as physicians, and not as human beings. So you want to portray them as generally competent, very knowledgeable in their chosen field, and reasonably sympathetic, but you don't need to give a lot of background details about their private lives or likes and dislikes for them to "do their job" in your story. That is, when people hear "doctor," it's easy for them to make the connection to "life saver," and that's all they need.
It's different with your primary characters, particularly hero and heroine. Here, you don't want "stock" characters but rather fully developed ones because they dominate the story. The doctors (usually) don't.
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