: How to Write a Colossal Cast of Characters I'm planning a book series called The Weasel Sagas. Things have been going great up until now, where I've realized I've hit a bit of a problem:

Vote Up Vote Down

The issue with having a "colossal cast of characters" is simply that there is only a finite set of unique traits that you can give a character. Having too many might let your characters overlap in characteristics and motivations, which would ultimately diminish their worth in your story.
Additionally, by having less characters, you give more room for their personalities to juxtapose, or act as foils to their fellow characters. Having a huge quantity of characters, while appealing at first, ultimately wouldn't work as a first book, as you either wouldn't have time to flesh the characters out individually, or would have to rush through them, both of which would negate the reader's perception of your novel.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Look for models of stories with a colossal cast you can use as a model for your series. Many books use the device of a story within a story in order to go off on tangents.
One example of a book that uses this well is Astrea. It is a long text with a long plot and 273 (!) characters, but it manages to follow one or two main plotlines for the most part, while the exploits of the other characters are often relegated to stories which are narrated by the characters of the main plot.
The outline of the text might look something like this:

Chapter 1
(Main Plot)
Chapter 2
(Main Plot)
Story
(Side Plot)
Chapter 3
(Main Plot)

Clearly marking which sections are essential can help avoid making your reader confused. If there are sections which are of interest for reasons of character but not for plot (i.e., that the reader can skip without missing out on plot development), they should be marked as such so as not to leave your readers bored if they are not interested in those stories.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

Do you remember hearing a fairy tale as a 5-minute bedtime story in your childhood, then seeing Disney make it a 90-minute musical? How did they do that? Well, in many cases that story has a novel-length original source. For example, de Villeneuve gave us Beauty and the Beast in 1740, and it was quite long, only to be gradually trimmed to the version you heard before you went to sleep

What does this have to do with your question? I want you to imagine how dear Villeneuve wrote the original. Presumably, she had a rough story idea about as detailed as the shortest version you've heard, then gradually wrote it. But here's the crucial detail: when you have enough of an idea to write a novel, you don't have to write a novel. Oftentimes what you should really do is keep certain things in your head, then draw on them when working on what really deserves a novel-length treatment. Hemingway likened it to most of an iceberg being invisibly submerged; most of the 50 novels' worth of ideas you have in your head should never, ever be such novels.

I'm sure you want an example of something that does it well. I recently rewatched the first two seasons of A Certain Magical Index because the third is airing now, and I also watched the two seasons of its spinoff, A Certain Scientific Railgun . It's a franchise with a huge cast of characters, and you very quickly get inside the heads of all of them. But only three of them, Touma, Misaka and someone known only by the codename Accelerator, have been protagonists in the franchise, and that last one doesn't have his own series; he's just the guest protagonist in several Index episodes. Index is one of the characters, and she doesn't even get to lead what's named after her! So the author has had to be very selective about what stories are told and from which perspectives. I can't recommend it enough add an exercise in great writing for many reasons, including as building a world and its characters succinctly.

One of its tactics is a protagonist unexpectedly encountering new people and having to quickly learn and react. Another is to experiment with various characters interacting in new combinations in side scenes, allowing several to be developed simultaneously.

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

It is neither necessary nor desirable to fit everything you've generated for a story into the story

In my reading I have encountered, broadly speaking, two different kinds of stories. There are tightly-plotted stories which attempt to resolve and give closure to every thread the author introduces. (The Westing Game comes to mind.) This is great.

On the other hand, there are stories with incredibly sophisticated backgrounds (like Lord of the Rings), where the author has volumes of supporting material which could not fit into the actual story. This is also great.

I suspect that, even in the tightly-plotted cases, a good author may have material which did not directly show up.

In the real world, there are endless subtle influences on your behavior which need not be explicitly included in a story, even if their unseen mass affects the orbital paths of those characters featured. I don't need to tell you how the size of my family as I grew up, or the relative wealth of my family, still influences my decisions at the grocery store - although knowing what kind of situation your character grew up in will help you generate a more interesting "shopping list," or whatever is needed in your story.

Let your larger universe add hidden texture to the few characters that fit into each tale, and don't worry that there isn't time or room to fit everything in right now

(0)

Vote Up Vote Down

You don't. You reduce the importance of some characters to reinforce the importance of the ones critical to the plot.

(0)