: 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

As a reader, I very much dislike large casts of characters, I lose patience and the ability to tell them apart quite quickly. However, a lot of it depends on how they are deployed. If your main character travels a lot, for instance, he or she might naturally encounter quite a lot of different people, who, however, would only appear a few at a time, and thus be easily distinguishable.

In general, the rule I would recommend is this: If they are easy to tell apart and memorable, keep them in. If they are easily confused with each other, combine them. If they are forgettable, drop them.

The biggest red flag in your question for me is "trying to create a lifelike situation." Fiction can simulate and imitate life, but it is never truly lifelike, and we'd lose patience with it if it were. It's a little slice of life at best, and we rely on the writer to drop the boring stuff, and highlight the parts that are of greatest interest.

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: 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

More posts by @Kevin153

: When is a lack of long, sophisticated words to describe an otherwise simple concept bad? Reading books of Dan Brown and that sort (pardon my inability to produce any other relevant examples

: To what extent can a first person narrative tell someone else's story? I've recently been working on some stories written in the first person from the point of view of what, in the grand scheme

: The role of inexplicable events in hard science fiction The modern world has few true mysteries, among them the fate of the Roanoke colonists and the crew of the Mary Celeste but do such happenings

: How alien can my aliens be if I want them to demonstrate how alien a human character is? Using non-humans to show human failings is a mainstay of Science Fiction but is there a limit to

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