: Re: How to compactly explain secondary and tertiary characters without resorting to stereotypes? Sure, I understand the characters, but that's because I've been thinking about them. But how do I transfer

@Cody1607638

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Connect them to established elements
Even without stereotypes, you don't usually start with a blank slate. Characters don't exist in a vacuum, they navigate a - hopefully - rich and complex environment. Their relationship and/or reactions to another, more fleshed out character or setting element inform their personality and their place in the world or scene. If you want to characterize someone with as few words as possible, place them in a context they can bounce off of and allow the reader to infer what you don't explicitly state.
A good exercise is to write just a single, realtively mundane line of description or dialog and insert it into a variety of existing scenes. What does it tell you about the character when they say this line at a party, in church, at a funeral, while paragliding, in bed, in a firefight?
The more detailed (and the more relevant to the line) the scene is, the more you can generally infer about the character. You connect a poorly fleshed out element to a detailed one and create a context that the reader can draw conclusions from.
This is essentially how stereotypes work, too: They reference an existing bundle of ideas the reader/listener is already familiar with (or will learn through repeated exposure).
The same thing works with any established setting element. Anything you flesh out and reference frequently will become a "stereotype" of its own. A very blatant example of that would be the four houses in Harry Potter, but also note how easy it is for the reader to think they have an intuitive understanding of, say, wands or brooms or mythical creatures.

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