Homepage
Login
New Post
Profile
You've written yourself into a corner.
Yes, you should describe every character, to a degree of detail proportional to importance of their role in the story.
There's no way the reader will remember 50 distinct characters and not confuse the heck out of them if any return or become more important later.
Simply put, that doesn't work. It's a mess which makes writing stories with a premise similar to yours very difficult, and rarely good.
...especially if you're writing a short novella.
This can be made to work through straightforward, hard sequencing. Have many chapters. Have a small, memorable 'main cast' which occurs in most of the chapters. And have the background crowd, where each face appears and is detailed for span of one chapter, then harmlessly forgotten come next chapter. Maybe rarely return some of them, reintroducing them. Make them memorable and iconic if they are to recur.
(that doesn't imply 1 chapter per character. You can get groups of 3-4 'extras' besides the main cast in a chapter. More, and it gets confusing.)
As an example of a story with excessive size cast, I can give you Silver Glow's Journal. It has nearly 130 characters. And it's about a million words long. (KJV Bible is 783,000 words.) And it's still terribly confusing whenever secondary cast characters return. Especially when they advance to main cast after a couple chapters. It kinda works, it's still a lovely story, but everyone will admit the excessively sized cast is confusing and its weakest point. And it kinda-sorta works only because it's so damn long, giving enough time to flesh out anyone semi-important.
My advice: Discard this idea. If you don't have the experience to make it work (and the fact you're asking this question means you don't), you won't make it work.
(0)More posts by @Dunderdale623
Terms of Use Privacy policy Contact About Cancellation policy © selfpublishingguru.com2024 All Rights reserved.