characters - First quarter friends

As I've mentioned before, I'm working on a military sci-fi novel.

Here's the trouble with the military: you don't spend all of your service, start to finish, with the same people. Not all the people you've done Basic Training with will proceed to the same Advanced Training as you. Not everyone who completes Advanced Training with you will be assigned to the same unit as you. In effect, after each transition, one is meeting new people and making new friends, keeping in touch with only a small sub-group of the friends from before. Like transitioning from middle school to high school, and from high school to university, only on a significantly shorter time frame. And that's before I so much as touch on drop-outs (and I do need those for tension - it could, theoretically happen to the MC).

The result of the above is I'm asking the reader to get to know a set of characters, only to lose sight of them several chapters later. The characters the MC was closest to in each stage do get further involvement in the story, but most drop out of sight. Similarly, in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, we don't hear about Bishop Myriel, his sister and his servant after their scene with Jean Valjean, nor about Félix Tholomyès and his friends after he abandons Fantine. Only, I can't think of more modern examples, which troubles me.

I would like to give my first-quarter-of-the-novel characters as much loving attention as Hugo gives Myriel and Tholomyès (and it's the recommendation I receive here), but I fear to lose the more impatient modern reader's attention. Much like the MC, I expect my reader would be eager to get out of boot camp and into real battle. How do I balance making the boot camp part interesting by way of having the MC develop various relationships with well-rounded characters, against the fact that most of those characters disappear from the story after the MC leaves boot camp?

Answer

Your issue is common to many novels and other long works. Your characters aren't just dropping into and out of your MC's life (like you often see in, say, TV shows where the MCs have friends for one episode then suddenly they have a big event and no one shows up). Your MC is changing settings. With set changes it's normal and expected to change supporting characters.

Making those secondary characters well-rounded without making the reader invest too much in them is indeed the hard part. I'm handling this by giving secondary characters full lives and backgrounds and individual personalities. But for myself. Very little of my backstory is getting into the book (a lot of the characters don't even get page time, let alone names, though I know them all). But what does make it through is personalized and not random.

My aim is to cut to the core of the character and bring that bit in. But really, they're there for the purpose of supporting the main character in service to the story. They have their own full lives and you will make that clear, but to the reader, they are there for a reason, not for themselves.

Your reader will invest emotional energy around the same level that your MC (or narrator) does. Something like bootcamp is an artificially close environment, so friendships get accelerated. But it's still only a few months. These are not lifelong friends, they're friends of the moment. Convey that and your reader will act accordingly.

Some of these friends might pop up later, or even become longer lasting regular characters. Or your MC (or others) might mention them. Doing this occasionally will help your reader feel that all that time spent getting to know people wasn't a total waste.

As long as you don't delve into a supporting character's backstory too much within the novel before ghosting them, your reader will go along with it. Changing casts is normal and expected.