PDA

View Full Version : How many characters are too many?



ShadowFireLance
2013-11-07, 11:43 PM
I'm writing a novel, and in most novels, they have a set amount of characters, some people have lots, some have few. How many would you say is too many? At what point do you stop caring?

Just wondering.

No brains
2013-11-08, 12:07 AM
Accordion to War & Peace, you can have as many characters as the population or Russia! :P

But seriously, the most important thing to parse out first are the 'tiers' of the characters. Who are the characters the scenes usually follow? Are they antagonists or protagonists? Who are ancillary characters who have lines and roles but don't have scenes centered on them? Do these characters duck in and out of the story due to going places and or dying? All these factors give characters worth beyond a simple numeric value.

The Oni
2013-11-08, 12:15 AM
There is no right answer to this question. Is it a long book or a short one? Is it fast-paced or slow and steady? Is it character-driven or story-driven? What genre is it? Does your story kill major characters like LotR or like Game of Thrones? All of this affects the "right" number of characters.

Mastikator
2013-11-08, 12:16 AM
A song of fire and ice has a bajilion and that works out fine.

So, anything more than a bajilion is too much, anything less is fine.

Anxe
2013-11-08, 12:59 AM
Social studies have indicated that people can't keep track of more than 150 people within a larger social circle (the school grade of 2010 for example). I wouldn't go over that limit. As for how many I enjoy? About 20 I think.

Studoku
2013-11-08, 01:21 AM
A song of fire and ice has a bajilion and that works out fine.

So, anything more than a bajilion is too much, anything less is fine.
A Song of Ice and Fire needs all those characters or George R.R. Martin would have run out of people after a couple of books.

Anxe
2013-11-08, 01:34 AM
Also, realistically Song of Fire and Ice has too many. I'm always flipping to the appendix in the back to keep track of characters.

Sith_Happens
2013-11-08, 01:50 AM
I'm writing a novel, and in most novels, they have a set amount of characters, some people have lots, some have few. How many would you say is too many? At what point do you stop caring?

Just wondering.

Depends, is your name Ryohgo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baccano!)Narita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durarara!!)?

TuggyNE
2013-11-08, 01:59 AM
A Song of Ice and Fire needs all those characters or George R.R. Martin would have run out of people after a couple of books.

A better example is probably Wheel of Time, which has IIRC around 2000 named characters, several dozen of which or more are viewpoint characters at least once. And most of them survive multiple books.

I will, however, grant that that is probably the very outside of manageable. A few hundred is quite a lot normally.

kyoryu
2013-11-08, 03:18 AM
I'm writing a novel, and in most novels, they have a set amount of characters, some people have lots, some have few. How many would you say is too many? At what point do you stop caring?

Just wondering.

I think it's more a question of how many characters you can keep interesting, distinct, and memorable.

If you can write a hundred distinct, memorable characters, great. If you can write 5, great.

But don't write a hundred characters if you can only write five interesting ones.

17arkOracle
2013-11-08, 04:54 AM
Assuming you keep all of them for most the story, I'd say a couple dozen should be the upper limit. About a quarter of that for the main protagonists, a quarter of that for the main villains, and a dozen or so for reoccurring/named minor characters. There's not really a limit on truly minor characters (such as Inn Keeper A and Mook B) since they tend to be around for a scene and then forgotten.

Something like Game of Thrones might have more since it changes perspective, effectively making it more like multiple stories even if they tie in with each other (although I haven't read it, so I can't say for sure). In addition, characters that get more or less permanently removed from the story free up space.

Don't treat these as hard numbers though. You shouldn't be trying to fill a quota; you generally want just enough characters to keep the story interesting while having enough time/space to keep them interesting too. Less is more, and I think authors tend to have too many characters rather than not enough.

Gavran
2013-11-08, 05:47 AM
I don't know anyone that is annoyed when a book has a single main character with a supporting cast you can count on one hand. I know lots of people who won't read certain series because of the characters. Personally, I'm comfortable with a pretty large cast. I never finished A Song of Ice and Fire (for other reasons), but it came close to pushing. On the other hand Asimov's Foundation series is one of my all time favorites.

I am not by any reasonable definition a writer, but I do read a lot, and I have to agree that the right answer is "however many you need to tell your story." Which, I realize, is probably absolutely useless as advice and not even necessarily true. So, in addition to that, I will say that you shouldn't worry about it too much, as there are people who don't mind even a staggering cast, and many more who will enjoy a good story regardless.

Vitruviansquid
2013-11-08, 05:49 AM
It's not so much that there's a quota of characters that you have to fill, like 17arkOracle said.

My guideline would be that every character in your story needs to have a purpose in the audience's experience. A character can have a very important purpose, like being the character that your audience is supposed to identify with, or being the main protagonist or antagonist. Characters can also have less important purposes, such as existing in order to lend the story a certain tone or for the effect of realism, like all the minor nobles in Game of Thrones that don't do much in the central plots. If you ever make a character and can't think of exactly why that character gets named or described in the story, consider cutting him/her out.

Also consider that as the reader is encountering different characters in your story, he/she will be sorting them into categories of important and unimportant, hero and villain, and so on. When you want a character's position in the story to shift, it will be up to you to get the readers to understand what is happening. Of course, if what you want is ambiguity or to make something difficult to pick up on purpose, understand that only a few target audiences will really have a stomach for it.

Lorsa
2013-11-08, 06:42 AM
The answer, as always, is 42.


I think it's more a question of how many characters you can keep interesting, distinct, and memorable.

If you can write a hundred distinct, memorable characters, great. If you can write 5, great.

But don't write a hundred characters if you can only write five interesting ones.

This is basically the best answer you will find. The problem isn't really in the number of characters, it's in how many characters that are interesting and that you care about.

GungHo
2013-11-08, 09:30 AM
I think it's more a question of how many characters you can keep interesting, distinct, and memorable.

If you can write a hundred distinct, memorable characters, great. If you can write 5, great.

But don't write a hundred characters if you can only write five interesting ones.

Even if the examples are tuned down to writing five vs writing seven, this is good advice. I'm also a fan of revising by seeing what characters could be combined to make a better character or by killing/bussing away ones that may be overly similar or otherwise just not distinctive enough to stick around. There is no real sweet spot for any author or any story, but odds are if you don't really care that much about the character, no one else will either.

valadil
2013-11-08, 01:20 PM
I don't think it's so much about how many bodies your character occupies, as how much personality you're able to put into the book. If you've only got one interesting character's worth of personality, don't divide it up into 8 characters. As long as everyone has personality and a reason to exist, you haven't written too many characters.

AstralFire
2013-11-08, 01:33 PM
Uh... Is this relating to a campaign somehow, or...?

:smallconfused:

kyoryu
2013-11-08, 02:30 PM
The problem isn't really in the number of characters, it's in how many characters that are interesting and that you care about.


Even if the examples are tuned down to writing five vs writing seven, this is good advice. I'm also a fan of revising by seeing what characters could be combined to make a better character or by killing/bussing away ones that may be overly similar or otherwise just not distinctive enough to stick around.

It's very similar to Blizzard's concept of "concentrated cool". Take all the cool things you come up with, and jam them into a few things that then become *awesome*, rather than spreading them thinly over ten times as many.

To put numbers on it, five classes with five cool things each is better than twenty-five classes with one cool thing each.

DeadMech
2013-11-08, 03:16 PM
As others said there isn't a right answer. I think Bleach while not a novel is a fair example. Named, speaking characters are counted by the dozens. It's also fair to say that much of the supporting cast aren't the most developed or three dimensional. They do tend to be distinct enough that you'll remember them at least.

molten_dragon
2013-11-08, 03:44 PM
I'm writing a novel, and in most novels, they have a set amount of characters, some people have lots, some have few. How many would you say is too many? At what point do you stop caring?

Just wondering.

I don't think you can easily put a number on it and say something like "11 characters is okay but 12 is too many".

Personally, when there are so many characters that they start to become hard to tell apart, that's too many. A lot of that has to do with the quality of your writing, but eventually, you reach a point where no matter how interesting and distinctive your characters are, there are too many of them for your average reader to keep them straight in his head. A Song of Ice and Fire is a good example of a series that has both problems to some degree. Not all of the characters are interesting or distinctive, but even if there were, there would probably be too many to keep straight.

Jay R
2013-11-08, 04:47 PM
Also, realistically Song of Fire and Ice has too many. I'm always flipping to the appendix in the back to keep track of characters.

He's fixing it as fast as he can.

Anxe
2013-11-08, 06:20 PM
No he's not! Death is as permenant as comic book death in Westeros. Damn red priests.

Lorsa
2013-11-08, 07:07 PM
It's very similar to Blizzard's concept of "concentrated cool". Take all the cool things you come up with, and jam them into a few things that then become *awesome*, rather than spreading them thinly over ten times as many.

I didn't think they had a concept like that. Is that how we got World of Warcraft?

Newwby
2013-11-08, 07:55 PM
You should have as many characters as is necessary to move the plot along. Summarise the plot points - if a character doesn't advance the plot, are they truly necessary?

TheCountAlucard
2013-11-08, 09:22 PM
No he's not! Death is as permenant as comic book death in Westeros. Damn red priests.To be fair, there are characters who stay dead in comics. Aside from extras, it seems that one particular trio refuses to return to life, despite the teeming thousands that treat this mortal coil like a revolving door*: Thomas and Martha Wayne, and Ben Parker.


*As far as I know, anyway - I'll admit, I'm not a diehard fan who scrutinizes a dozen comic books a week and has little relationship webs made of string set up to keep track of plots, so it very well could have slipped past me.

kyoryu
2013-11-08, 10:47 PM
No he's not! Death is as permenant as comic book death in Westeros. Damn red priests.

The death count in aSoIaF is overrated. Apart from the obvious two shockers, there's not a ton of characters that actually die - and fewer that stay dead.

And once you figure out who the books are actually following, the two deaths were absolutely mandatory.


I didn't think they had a concept like that. Is that how we got World of Warcraft?

http://www.qj.net/qjnet/news/concentrated-coolness-the-secret-of-wow-success.html

Lorsa
2013-11-09, 08:52 AM
No matter how much I loved some of his books back when I was 12, I believe David Eddings is a good example of an author that always have more characters than he can distringuish in a good way. To be honest he should probably only have 2 characters, one female and one male or maybe 3 to add in the "young naive one" in the mix of his two older male and female characters.


You should have as many characters as is necessary to move the plot along. Summarise the plot points - if a character doesn't advance the plot, are they truly necessary?

The plot isn't necessarily the only thing that matters in fiction. Or more to the point; sometimes characters and their relationships and developments can be its own story.

Jay R
2013-11-09, 12:41 PM
For any character, if the question of whether you need him comes up, then you don't.

Lorsa
2013-11-09, 12:44 PM
For any character, if the question of whether you need him comes up, then you don't.

Is that true for roleplaying games as well?

Deaxsa
2013-11-09, 01:27 PM
Are you asking us how many protagonists, or how many named people in the book? Because i'd say that about 4 protagonists is my limit, it simply takes too long to completely flesh out more characters than that. On the other hand, as long as there is a distinct (and not insignificant) reason to remember them.

Deaxsa
2013-11-09, 01:35 PM
Is that true for roleplaying games as well?

Sure, but the definition of "need" changes: for instance, if a character appears to make the players laugh (and thus improve the game), he was necessary. If, on the other hand, you make some guard on the entrance to a town cajole and slow down the party for no reason other than to "add realism" or "show that this town REALLY IS lawful", then yes, that character was completely unnecessary.

Jay R
2013-11-09, 04:15 PM
For any character, if the question of whether you need him comes up, then you don't.

Is that true for roleplaying games as well?

Yes, of course. If you don't know why you're creating a character, the players won't know, either.