Overwhelming Your Reader With Too Many Characters (Don't Do This)

Have you ever been to a holiday gathering for a significant other, or maybe gotten dragged to a big meet-up by a friend of yours? If so, then you probably remember how you were immediately thrust into an environment where there was one person you know and were familiar with, and you spent the rest of the event in a blur trying to build a map of who was who? You might have remembered that Jim, the big guy with the receding hair and the dad-stashe, was your friend's work-husband. Maybe you managed to remember the woman with the red hair was named Jessica, and she was your friend's ex from high school. But beyond that... well, it's mostly a blur. Even worse, you spent so much time trying to learn everyone's name, and to figure out what their relationships were, that you completely missed the evening's conversations, and anything that was happening throughout the night.

That feeling of exhausted discombobulation is the same feeling readers get when they're immediately shoved into a book that has a massive cast, and you're throwing names and descriptions at them faster than they can handle.

Who the hell were you again?

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Frogs and Boiling Water

You've likely heard the old saying about how you can't just drop frogs into boiling water. If you do that, they'll just jump right out again. However, if you put them in lukewarm water, and then ratchet up the heat a little at a time then they'll just stay in the water while you cook them. While we aren't looking to harm our readers, this is generally the method you should use to introduce them to both your world, and to the characters who populate it.

So, there was a thing called the Fast Food Wars, and, ugh... well, it's complicated...

There are generally two methods you can do for this. The first is to have a long story so that you can introduce your cast of important characters over time. This is probably the most common strategy used for those writing a novel series. The second strategy is to have a flash-introduction for the whole cast all at once, but not to linger on them. Then, one-by-one, we find reasons for our readers to spend time with them, and to fill in their details so they gain depth and personality.

Consider a book series with a massive cast of characters, like A Song of Ice and Fire. Even if we just include the main cast, there's more than 20 some-odd characters we spend a lot of time with, and at least a dozen of them become point-of-view characters throughout the story. However, we're introducted to this cast over several very large books... and more importantly, the audience is often told about characters before they meet them, so that when they actually show up the audience has at least heard of them before. And as new members are added to the cast, and new events happen, we get to add more and more names to the roster without confusing the audience.

Of course, it also helps that they seem to get pruned every couple of chapters as well.

Prime examples of the latter strategy, though, tend to be mystery stories and cop/private eye dramas. For example, consider a story like Murder on The Orient Express. The cast is rather large, and we get them in a rather rapid succession... but we aren't slammed with all of them all at once. We, instead, get smaller touches of conversation, as well as interviews with Monsieur Poirot. In this way we can introduce a number of characters in a controlled environment so that our audience can "meet" them all, but they're also there to be examined and learned, as we're looking for details about their lives and possible involvement in the unfolding murder. You'll see similar setups with the Benoit Blanc films Knives Out and Glass Onion, as well, which allows us to easily juggle a dozen characters or more with relatively little stress.

The key in both situations is being able to breathe in between bites. If each new character is a new dish, it's important to give your audience time to take a bite, chew it, analyze it, swallow, and maybe take a drink of water to cleanse their palate before you give them a new one to taste. Space out how often you introduce your cast, and just as with your plot or world building, don't just jam a funnel into your reader's mouths and pour until the bottle is empty.

No one will enjoy that experience, and it's likely to lead to readers putting your book down and walking away before they ever get close to the dessert course.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

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Does Your Story Have Too Many Characters?

People love stories because of the characters in them. However, just as folks will often lambaste Tolkien for going on and on about the leave on his trees, I'd suggest there's a lesson we could learn from another big name in the fantasy genre. Because for all the good things one can say of A Song of Ice and Fire, perhaps one of the biggest issues that Martin puts on display is that when you expand your cast on every other page, you really dilute the interest of your readers.

In short, every story needs character. However, too many characters will make it impossible for your reader to see the forest for all the trees in their way.

Because it's really easy to confuse your audience if you aren't careful.

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How Big Does Your Cast List Really Need To Be?

Let's return to Martin's less-than-complete opus for a moment. There were a lot of changes made when adapting the books to the screen, but one of the more notable ones was eliminating minor characters from the story entirely, and combining different characters together as a way to boil down the number of names and faces the audience was expected to keep track of. It made for a smoother flow, and it was easier to digest the narrative that way.

If you can prune your character list by dozens of names and events, though, that really should leave you asking why you had so many characters in your book to begin with.

Though if they're going to be dying every other chapter, you may need them.

Generally speaking, characters need to serve a purpose in your story. Sometimes that purpose is a linchpin role (like the main antagonist, your protagonist or protagonists, etc.), and sometimes it's a supporting role (the witness who drops a clue in the detective's lap, the spunky sidekick who helps out, the oracle who provides the prophecy, etc.), but everyone has a role to play.

If a character doesn't really have a role to play, it's best to think of them as an extra.

For those not familiar with how movies are made, extras are all the fill-in folks in the background in film and TV. Those are the people filling up a café where the spy meets with the hacker to discuss stolen information, or all the people walking down the street before our hero comes pelting around the corner being chased by a tank. They're necessary to the scenes in question, but they aren't a part of the cast in a story sense. They are, if anything, like a living part of the set design. While you might find an occasional extra with a speaking line (like the waitstaff who take one's order in a restaurant scene, or nameless reporters firing questions around a murder investigation) they are still more a part of the background than the story.

When we're discussing whether your story has too many characters, these aren't usually the characters we're talking about... except when they are.

We Don't Need The Backstory on Every Tree Branch

When we introduce important members of the cast we usually give the reader a bunch of details about them, along with more information than they get about other characters. We get a full description, a name, maybe see things from their perspective a little, stuff like that. And while academically we know that every person is the main character of their own story, if you treat too many members of the cast like they're main characters in this story you're going to overload your audience.

Wait... why is Gerald Finn, the Gate Captain with the iron hand, important again?

Look over your story with a critical eye, and ask how many characters actually serve a narrative purpose. Great or small, you should be able to tell us what part of the story pocket watch they represent, and what their job is in the narrative. Even if it's something as small as, "Humanize the main character by showing their relationships outside of tracking down serial killers," that's still an important purpose.

But if the character doesn't have an important role, ask what happens if you scale back their involvement in a scene. Does it change anything? For example, do we need to know that Suzy Delgado is working a double at the diner, she's very stressed, but she's trying to keep a brave face? Or is that information just being dumped on us while Sly Goodman and assassin Alicia Carmine have a meeting, only involving Suzy when they want to order black coffee and some scrambled eggs before getting down to the nitty gritty on their current job?

What happens if you eliminate a character from the story entirely? Does that have any effect on the narrative at all? Because if their presence makes no impact on the story, shows us nothing about the rest of the characters, and serves no function, then you may be able to kill that particular darling without worrying about getting too much blood on your typewriter.

As the author, think of yourself as the head of stage lighting, or camera direction. You are the one who tells the audience where to look, what to pay attention to, and what is important. If you try to show the audience everything, though, you're going to end up with them paying attention to the wrong things, or getting bogged down in details that may confuse your story rather than clarifying it.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

The Key To Grimdark Fiction is Showing How Things Could Have Been Better

From A Song of Ice and Fire to the far future of Warhammer 40,000, grimdark fiction takes many forms. However, while the details of the settings, worlds, and stories may vary from one book to another, the key to really making these tales work is that they're tragedies on a whole other level. But for a tragedy to really hit home, and to resonate with the audience, it's important to show the audience how things could work out... to make them really wonder if maybe this time characters will get a happy ending.

They won't, of course, but the reader needs to at least think it's possible.

They need to drop their guard for you to land the blow.

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Now then, let's get to it!

The Spoonful of Sugar Helps The Poised Pill Go Down

I've been thinking on this topic for a good while now, especially while working on some Warhammer 40K tales of my own like Field Test, which is about an experimental deployment of a previously untested weapon by an inquisitor, and Waking Dogs: A World Eaters Tale, which is about one of the fallen legionnaires deciding he's had enough of his lot in life. And something I realized while I was doing all that thinking is that a major flaw in a lot of grimdark fiction is that a lot of writers mistake bleakness for tragedy. This really undermines a story, and it can stop readers from getting invested in what's going on.

What makes grimdark fiction (and really any tragic story) work is that the audience has to actively want the tragedy to not occur, even if they're reasonably certain that it will. If things start bad, and only get worse with no suggestion that they could ever have been better, then there's no contrast for the audience to be impacted by. It's just a parade of rakes to the face as they try to walk across the yard.

A perfect example of what I'm talking about is slasher movies. While neither grimdark nor tragic (usually, anyway), a good slasher movie gets the audience invested in the survival of the protagonists. We watch them being stalked by an implacable, masked killer, and we know they're in a bad situation, but we're hoping they will make the right decisions and survive (if not triumph) because we've developed empathy for these characters. Even if everything in the story, the score, and our experience says they're going to fail, we hope they don't. In bad slasher movies (much like in bad grimdark fiction) we often have characters that bad things continually happen to with no reprieve or chance that they might not happen. And because it feels like there's no chance things could turn out better, it creates a sense of bored Nihilism; why bother getting emotionally invested when it feels like there's no point?

One of the best ways to do this is to give the audiences glimpses of how things could happen. Show them how our protagonists might triumph, or what things they could do to avoid the terrible fate. Can our lead overcome their pride and make restitution? Could our coward nobly sacrifice themself to save everyone else? Would someone selfish give up their most prized possessions, or their power, for the good of others?

The answer to all of these is usually, "no," because we're still talking about grimdark stories here. However, if the audience sees the possibilities, it can be a lot like seeing the bomb under the table. They know what could happen, and because you've put that possibility in play they can't un-know it. The only question as they watch the tragedy unfold is will it be the road the story goes down? Or just a glimpse of what-might-have been that will make the grimness hit all the harder?

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

And to stay on top of all my latest news and releases, collected once a week, make sure you subscribe to The Literary Mercenary's mailing list. 

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

Why Killing Lead Characters Is A Good Idea (Even If You're Not A Horror Author)

You know those people. The heart-breakers. The ones who take your trust, nurture it, and who snap it in half the moment you get complacent. You know their names. Stephen King. George R. R. Martin. Frank Darabont. Brian Keene. Joss Whedon. David Eddings. They are the creators and dreamers who suck you into their stories, make you love their characters, get you to choose favorites, and then kill them right in front of you.

Some people accuse these creative hatchet men of using blunt force trauma on an audience's emotions just to get a reaction. The claim is that killing off main characters or giving you an ending where the bad guy comes out ahead is nothing more than a lack of talent trying to camouflage itself with shock. I've got news for you though; we need more stories that do this.

The Anatomy of The "Fuck-You" Ending

Comedian Reginald D. Hunter refers to a certain type of movie in one of his funnier stand-up bits. A young man is riding a bus in China when two men in ski masks with guns stand up, force the driver to pull over, and rob everyone on the bus of their valuables. The masked men then force the driver, a young and attractive woman, off the bus to the side of the road. Everyone sits on the bus and does nothing, waiting for it all to be over, except for a young man who stands up and demands to know if they're going to just let this happen.

That was the plan, now that you mention it.

The young man descends from the bus full of outrage and ready to defend the driver's honor. He interrupts the attackers before they can commence with the sexual part of the rape (though just barely), and is promptly beaten bloody and mostly senseless by the two professional criminals. The criminals take their loot and leave. The boy reaches out to the driver who is in shock and disarray. She abruptly snaps out of it, straightens her clothes, and walks to the bus. She throws the boy's backpack at him, shouts for him to go away, shuts the doors in his face and the bus drives off. The boy is limping down the highway with his backpack when he hears sirens, and he thinks that at least the driver sent an ambulance for him. The ambulance shoots past, along with a dozen police vehicles. Turns out the driver went over a cliff, and everyone on the bus was killed.

Dark stuff for a 12 minute movie, huh?

Dark endings, or fuck-you endings as Reg would call them, have some elements in common. They have a main character who is striving to do something, who fails in the goal (even if it looks like the character somehow succeeded), and an ending that shows you just how vulnerable people really are by refusing to cut away as this character's hopes, dreams, and even life are ground into dust beneath reality's harsh boot heel.

So Why Do We Need More Of These?

Why would anyone want to watch movies or read books with fuck-you endings? Why would you invest that amount of time, energy, and love into something just to watch it crushed before your helpless, hoping eyes? Well for some people there's catharsis in that. The thrill of hope and the sharp downturn of failure create one hell of a cocktail, as evidenced by the vitriol it foments in many people who are infuriated by these kinds of stories.

These stories have a higher purpose than just abusing your reader's heart strings though. They create tension; not just in the story someone's reading, but in every story.

Really though, you didn't see it coming when they cast him as Lord Stark?

Visualize a world without stories like Game of Thrones for a minute. A world where in the end of The Mist the father, son, schoolteacher and friends drove out into a normal world and survived the monstrous trauma of the creatures in the fog. A world where every character in every story managed to make it through and beat the odds.

You know what audiences would be in that world? Complacent.

This same point was touched on by Eric Vespe in his article here, but it bears repeating. If every book you ever read had the main characters succeed and make it through the certain death of the big climax, what would you have? A world of action movie heroes and schmaltzy "but I thought you were dead!" reveals that lets the audience lean back in their seats and yawn at the supposed "threats" to the movie's heroes and heroines. A world where no matter how big the explosions or how fast-paced the gun fights the audience knows the heroes are going to come through unscathed.

Unless you kill them.

As soon as you show the audience you're not dicking around they are going to be on the edge of their seats. Suddenly every fight with sword-wielding thugs or car chase through crowded streets represents real danger. In a world where main characters are not sacrosanct there's a good chance no one is going to stop the executioner from dropping the sword on the hero's neck, and the plucky heroine might not get the miracle cure for the plague before the last page. Even if you're not reading a book by an author known for killing fan favorite characters there's always going to be that question in your mind; is this book the one where the author decides to take off the kid gloves?

Even if you're not writing books with fuck-you endings in them you're benefiting from authors who have. So before you condemn these endings as Nihilistic shock-and-awe, realize what they're doing for your stories.

Here's a big ole' book of fuck-you endings. Check it out!

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