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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
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