: 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

@Goswami879

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It depends

If you're writing a short story, then nine is too many main characters. Nine is possibly too many characters period, depending on the length of the story.

The number of main characters in your story increases the complexity of the story exponentially, as you have to deal with all of the characters and all of their interactions with each other. The more main characters you have, the harder it is to balance them in an engaging story.

Try to identify the problems you've seen in other large cast stories

There are many excellent stories featuring large casts, but none of them are perfect. Figure out what they do that works well, and what they do that works poorly.

I also recommend the episode of the Writing Excuses Podcast on writing Ensemble stories. It's only half an hour long, but there are lots of good thoughts in it about how to make a large cast work.

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