: Re: 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:

@Phylliss352

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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.

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