: Re: How many characters are too many? I am plotting out a longish story, which would have the following number of characters: Main/ reasonably significant characters: Nine Characters still vital for

@XinRu607

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I'm going to point out that the named casts in Peter F Hamilton's works often top the 30 character mark. Having said that those works are huge, don't commit to more characterisation work than you can actually accomplish, if you can't actually flesh out characters enough for them to do their job, without overwhelming the story, there's not a lot of point having them filling the roster. This is an issue not only of writing material for the characters but also of fitting that material into the story without the whole piece turning into a series of character introductions between minor incidents that don't feel fleshed out because of their relatively small size compared to the mass of character detail.

In summary depending how long your piece is balancing that many characters might be awkward but there's no hard-and-fast rule as to how many, or few, characters work in a piece.

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