Sunday, October 3, 2010

How Many Characters is Too Many?

Some books have scores of characters, providing the ensemble cast through which the author tells the story (for instance, the Lord of the Rings trilogy has loads of characters, most of them minor).  How many is too many, though?


How many char­ac­ters do you have? Do you pre­fer males or females?

I try to keep the number of characters in any story to a "manageable" amount.  Too many of them and they begin to fight for the reader's attention as well as beginning to vie for page time.  Too few and it becomes boring (in my opinion) as the story begins to read like a monologue.

Lately, I've felt you need to have at least two characters in any meaningful scene, otherwise you can't have any decent dialogue.  I hate writing paragraph after paragraph of exposition and descriptive prose.  If it bores me to write, it probably bores people to read (assuming anyone actually reads my work).

The lead character usually has a small group of friends, somewhere between 2 and 4, that are tangentially involved in the main story.  They provide some grounding and serve to show the protagonist is functional in some regards.  This is important, because all my main characters tend to be "broken" in some way; either through mild mental illness, physical issues, or social problems.  Even the most social inept person has a small network of people (not necessarily friends, usually family) that help to ground them in some fashion.

My main protagonist is almost always male.  Why?  Because that's what I am, I know how they think, and I feel more comfortable writing from their perspective.  There are always female characters involved in the story, but I don't get into their heads as much, because I'm not always exactly sure what they'd be thinking.  I think I can handle their dialogue and their actions fairly well -- I've never been told that my female characters do or say "unwomanly" things -- I'm just not as comfortable writing their thought processes.

In my last several stories, the female character has also served as a "co-protagonist".  She represents the driving force that takes the main character into the "other world", bringing him from his every day life and dumping him into the "hidden world" that the story revolves.  Some times this has been not so subtle (for example, she gets helps him to get hired for a job that puts him directly into the "hidden world"), other times it's the result of simply knowing this woman (she's a part of the "hidden world" and weirdness surrounds her).

How many characters do you like to have in a story?  Is it easier for you to write female characters or males?

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