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.

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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 sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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