Words    Words    Words

• 1 Doctor Science // Apr 26, 2008 at 1:16 pm

  The reason they’re telling you not to do cast-of-thousands stories is that *most* of them suck like a hoover — see most disaster novels, the kind that have a cast list and that flip from one set of characters to the next in a set rotation.

  Any time you need a cast list, you’re probably doin’ it wrong, because that means there are too many characters for the reader to keep track of who’s who. The reader can only keep track of actual characters at some rate — characters introduced per 5000 words is probably the metric to use — which is not infinite. It also depends on the rate at which the reader (viewer) will consume what you’re writing. Tolstoy & Dickens had a lot of “readers” who were actually getting the works as read-alouds, which is much slower and gives the readers a lot more time to absorb each character before going on to the next.

  Steven (and Terry Pratchett) have built up enormous casts by the more modern method of writing series, where each book is a mix of older characters and new ones. I think adding new characters in spurts like that is particularly effective, because they come as “sets” which are easier to remember.

  It’s like, imagine you’re at a con (or conference) where you have to meet 50 people in two days, then go home and write up your impressions of each one. You can talk to each person for an hour, never sleep, and if you’re me when you get home it will be all a blur. And you’ll have Con Crud.

  Or you can meet them as panels of 5, two hours per panel, still have time for sleep and personal hygiene, and when you come home each person will have a context and a prayer that you’ll remember them.

  You’ll still probably have Con Crud, though.

• 2 skzb // Apr 26, 2008 at 1:19 pm

  You shouldn’t do it because today’s readers are impatient with keeping track of that many characters. I don’t know who “today’s readers” are, or how you consult them, or why, but that’s what They tell me.

  Now, as to how to do it: One thing that will help a little is keeping the names as distinctive as possible; avoid having two names that start with the same letter and have the same number of syllables, for example.

  Another thing to try is to get as close as you can to having “funny hat” characters without going over the edge. Quirks of speech and manner are your friends.

  Other thoughts as I have them.

• 3 Philip Brewer // Apr 26, 2008 at 1:19 pm

  I suspect that the reason that they recommend against it is because they don’t know how to tell people how do it well.

  Handling a “cast of thousands” well probably requires dozens of skills, and screwing up any of them can ruin the story–and do so in a way that can’t just be fixed by a more-skilled friend going through with a red pen.

  There are many story-writing skill failures that can be fixed by a simple edit. If someone is screwing up with POV in their story–even if they’re screwing up badly–you can say, “Here’s how you do third-person, and here are the places where you got it wrong,”

  That doesn’t get you all the way, of course. Great writers produce wonderful effects by, let’s say, varying the degree of tightness while staying within third-person. You can’t stuff that into a story with a red pen. But you can write a workable story without that skill.

  It would be cool, though, if someone would write a tidy little webpage beginning, “Here are the thirty-seven skills you need to have down if you’re going to write a cast-of-thousands story…”

• 4 Jason // Apr 26, 2008 at 1:42 pm

  I think part of the advice comes from the notion that every character should be in the story because there is a specific reason that character is included. If there are too many purposes in the story it can become diluted. But if there’s a good reason for each character and you can manage them, I don’t see why you can’t have a gazillion distinct people in the story.

  I like Steve’s advice above.

• 5 will shetterly // Apr 26, 2008 at 1:54 pm

  The problem is that it’s hard enough to create one distinctive character; now you want to do a thousand? And a big ditto on Steve’s points about distinctive names. I just did comments on a friend’s book. One of the things I suggested to her was changing one of the names of two characters, Shelley and Ella, because even though they start with different letters and are different lengths on the page, they sound enough alike that Ella seems like Shelley’s nickname.

  Helping the reader subtly is tough.

  But if you want to do a big cast, look at the subgroups, then pick one or two POV characters within each subgroup. That character will give us a reference point for the rest of the characters in the group, like: Which girlfriend is this? Oh, right. We’re in Cynthia’s POV, and Cynthia’s girlfriend is the black Buddhist with the cat. Onward!

• 6 Steve // Apr 26, 2008 at 2:19 pm

  Agreed. Totally. Steven Brust and Steven Erikson are two of my favorite writers (maybe I just prefer guys with the same name?) and I’ve never had a problem with the large casts. Sure, I’ve gotten mixed up on occasion or taken an extra hundred pages to figure something obvious out..

  But, frickin’ heck! You guys have so much good stuff in there it just makes re-reading the books more tasty!

  Even from here I can see the number of difficulties inherent with large and complicated fictional worlds, but it wouldn’t be the same story at all without all that. Just like a symphony by Beethoven (all those notes!) and a play by Shakespeare (all those words!), it’s not for everyone but it’s amazing when done right.

• 7 Grail76 // Apr 26, 2008 at 2:47 pm

  I think that you have inexperienced authors reading sites that give advice about writing for the most part.
  While there are many authors who handle large casts of characters well, most new authors do not.
  I think the advice boils down to, “When you’re learning, take smaller bites.”

• 8 Megan M. // Apr 26, 2008 at 2:48 pm

  I think everyone telling you not to is an excellent reason to get out there and do it awesomely. Anyway, you of all people can show them what’s what. ;}

• 9 db // Apr 26, 2008 at 2:53 pm

  It’s advice for beginning writers, warning them off something that is hard to do well without experience.

• 10 eve_prime // Apr 26, 2008 at 2:54 pm

  I’d just echo the point made above about having the narrative focus on subgroups wherever possible, and having one main point-of-view character per subgroup. Other characters can either have distinctive personalities or could do what Tolstoy sometimes did - for example, in Anna Karenina the female characters could be arrayed in a spectrum from Kitty to Anna (and beyond, really) on a salient characteristic. But showing distinctive personalities through quirks and affectations is more fun and gives at least the illusion of depth and individuality.

  How not to do it - the Wheel of Time books, where every point-of-view character’s inner voice has the same rhythms and texture, and where the quirks end up making the readers roll their eyes. (I even started making a tally of the skirt-smoothing incidents at one point.)

• 11 Konrad // Apr 26, 2008 at 3:11 pm

  1. Make sure the names look and sound distinctive. Note this requires them to be pronounceable in the first place. Also be consistent in how you refer to characters (especially minor characters).

  2. Readers only remember characters that are memorable. Don’t waste time and focus on characters that aren’t doing anything interesting.

  3. Don’t use a loose omniscient POV; every scene spent inside one character’s head (1st or tight 3rd) will make that character easier to remember.

  4. Structure the book geographically: part 1 deals with events here, part 2 over there, and so on. Or any other excuse that allows you to use a fraction of the cast at a time.

• 12 Casey // Apr 26, 2008 at 3:33 pm

  Exhibit 1. An extreme case: James Clavell. Compare the complexity of his first novel, King Rat, to his next, Tai-Pan, and then again with his later novels, Shogun, Noble House, and Whirlwind. If you are going to use dozens of characters in a single novel, there needs to be a distinct role for each of them to play.

• 13 B. Durbin // Apr 26, 2008 at 3:56 pm

  I like the advice of the different names, though I have to laugh when it’s applied to real life. I know so many Chrises that you have to figure out which is which through context— if Beth, over here, is speaking of Chris, she means her husband, or if this person is speaking of Chris they mean their roommate. At one point in college there were a whole passel of bizarre nicknames in order to try and keep them straight. “Chris…” Which Chris?” “Skippy Cross Boy.”

  Right now I’m involved with a play that has two Roberts and two Bobs, which is pretty imressive for a cast of maybe a dozen males. There’s a reason last names came into existence.

• 14 Chris // Apr 26, 2008 at 5:26 pm

  I agree this advice seems to be aimed at new or inexperienced writers, which is fine. Master one character first.

  But also any sufficiently talented writer can pull off anything.

• 15 bigmike // Apr 26, 2008 at 5:35 pm

  I can think of at least fine stories (actually three and four books) that I’ve enjoyed recently that have dozens, maybe over 100 characters, if not exactly thousands. The first is Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle (maybe it helps that about half his characters are historical; it doesn’t take any mental gymnastics to keep track of Isaac Newton). The second is Lian Hearn’s Otori books, with the added complication that the names are all Japanese (although a few are Japanese renditions of Portuguese–a stunt that Stephenson pulls off in one case). In both cases, there is a glossary of names and it helps. Stephenson even uses different typeface in the glossary for real and fictional characters.

• 16 Michael Merriam // Apr 26, 2008 at 5:54 pm

  I think most of the folks above had said the smart stuff, so I’ll just add this: If the book you have to write right now has a large ensemble cast, go with. Better to write the thing you want to write and fail than to not write it because some writing advice book said you shouldn’t. Dare to do the thing you want, and if you fail, well you failed big, and that’s a good way to learn and grow as a writer. Always swing for the home run!

• 17 Miramon // Apr 26, 2008 at 6:43 pm

  There’s one sort of gratuitous character introduction that often works for me when I read it. It may be a little cold-hearted, but I think it does not tax the reader’s cognitive abilities in the manner of a typical 500 page best-seller’s cast of characters carefully organized by location, faction, and hair color .

  This is the illustrative character, who often gets killed or otherwise disposed of shortly after being introduced.

  So you just hit Indiana with a contraterrene pea from orbit, and you want to show the devastation before moving back to the alien spaceship where the main characters are currently all stuck in the brig. So you introduce this poignant janitor character working overtime to save up money for his granddaughter’s college education, and after he miraculously survives the impact and firestorm in the basement supply closet, he dies of radiation poisoning a page or two later. He’s dead, so no one needs to remember his name, or character, and he seems to have no more relevance to the plot but he served to personalize the megadeaths. Good-bye, Terra Haute.

  And then three chapters later, it can turn out that some character is in fact his beloved granddaughter, and that explains why she has a reason to hate the aliens so much….

  Of course that’s a rather gross and incompetent example, and as long as the character is clearly being shuffled off the stage, or is just being used as a case study of a situation, they don’t have to be blatantly killed.

  But my point is if you were trying to hold yourself to some limited number of characters, I’d say that the janitor “wouldn’t count” because he is not going to hang around in people’s memories anyway.

  I’d say that Stephen Donaldson is the master of the one-page introduction of an instantly well-rounded and sympathetic character who will get killed off in the most horrible possible way (usually due to a protagonist’s malice or incompetence, sigh) a very few pages later.

  Anyhow, I don’t object to large casts of characters in and of themselves, but I usually hate the structured rotation of multiple sets of characters, who often view and review the same events over and over again, which is the hallmark of the deliberately padded “blockbuster” novel, whether it is fantasy or disaster or war-thriller or whatever.

• 18 Chris B. // Apr 26, 2008 at 7:11 pm

  I think it’s probably a big mistake to interpret this advice as a problem with the reader. “Most readers lack the attention span,” etc… Not a very healthy attitude to hold toward the audience you hope will pay you to write for them. Looking down on your customers tends to show through in your work, whether writing or otherwise.

  I think “no cast of thousands” is basically sound advice, if you define “cast” as “characters who impact the plot more than once.” You can have all the one-and-done characters you want; they’re moving scenery. But every character who impacts the plot two or more times is a character your reader has to track.

  This requires you (the writer) to provide hooks for the reader to separate them from other characters–the name-sound rule that has been mentioned above is very important, not as a gimmick, but because it’s one of our basic rules for separating real people we don’t know well–but you (the writer) also carry a burden of making it worth your readers’ time to follow your growing cast list. Your reader will not begrudge you more characters if they have a reason to look forward to their appearances.

  A key, I think, is to remember that this will not take care of itself. You, the writer, carry the burden of keeping a large cast distinct and enjoyable. To your reader, they are a crowd of generic strangers, and your reader is probably content to leave them that way and go read another book, if getting through the book means they have to do the writer’s work too.

• 19 Ker_thwap // Apr 26, 2008 at 7:20 pm

  The only book series I can recall with too many characters is Robert Jordan’s WOT books. Of course I tried to read the series over the course of 20 plus years, so by the time the next book came out I could barely remember the main characters from the original book, never mind the host of uninteresting new characters.

• 20 Charlie (Colorado) // Apr 27, 2008 at 12:36 am

  You know, Buddha said “don’t believe anything you hear or read, even if you heard it from me, if it doesn’t agree with your own reason and common sense.” So you’ve got these people who say “don’t have a cast of thousands” — can you maybe link some of them, just by the way, as I don’t think i’ve ever seen it said that baldly — and on the other side you’ve got, oh, most of Tom Clancy’s biggest-selling novels and the Harry Potter series that made Jo Rowlings a billionaire-with-a-”b”-billionaire.

  So who you gonna believe?

  So, you want tips? Probably as many as there are big books. East of Eden comes back around in the story, reminding you of who was who by reprising the history. Tom Clancy does it by making most everyone interchangeable and selling you with plot (which he helps along by giving you clues about where you are at every big scene and chapter break.) Jo Rowlings does it with a couple of very strong characters and a lot of others who are wearing rubber noses and funny hats so you remember them by their grotesqueries. Lots of people put dramatis personae pages on the front so you can go back and check.

  Personally, my impression is that if you know what the hell is happening, your readers generally will.

• 21 Alexx Kay // Apr 27, 2008 at 10:31 am

  I would add to the advice on distinctive names that the last letter(s) of the name are almost as important as the first. Most word-recognition is, at least when done quickly, a combination of initial characters, final characters, and length.

  I had a decades-long storytelling project in which I serialized Orlando Furioso and Orlando Inamorata. When I realized there was an episode coming up that featured both Bradamante and Brandimarte, I started referring to the latter as “Brandy-mart” in a (partially successful) attempt to make it distinctive enough.

• 22 skzb // Apr 27, 2008 at 12:30 pm

  Will @ 5: “That character will give us a reference point for the rest of the characters in the group”

  Hmmm. This set off an interesting thought. In life, most of us know better than to define a human being in terms of his relationship to another human being–especially where the defined character is female (Jim’s wife, Bob’s sister, Joe’s husband). But in fiction, in some measure we can’t avoid that, because one character’s relationship to another (especially to a protagonist or viewpoint character) is one of the biggest ways we cue into him.

  Now I have to think about this and see if I still agree with it in an hour or so.

• 23 Doctor Science // Apr 27, 2008 at 10:21 pm

  in life, most of us know better than to define a human being in terms of his relationship to another human being

  huh? This corresponds to nothing I see around me in the real world. On the contrary, it is very rare *not* to define people in terms of each other — and I’ll argue that as social animals, it would be weird (and counterproductive — and libertarian) to identify other people as pure individuals without social connections.

  More importantly, what we do in life we do in fiction only more so. We deal with people in small groups — no more than 5-6 to a group before they fall into subgroups — and that’s how we’ll remember them when they’re introduced in stories.

  IIRC the Japanese even have a whole theory about how 5 is the ideal number for a group (a cell, in Communist/Moon Is a Harsh Mistress terms). J-Pop band manufacturers have found they get their best results when they have 5 girls (or boys) in the group, because high-school and younger-age fans tend to hang out in groups of about 4-5 friends. This way each friend can have a crush on a different band member, minimizing rivalry between fan-friends and maximizing wealth for the producers.

• 24 V. Lehtinen // Apr 28, 2008 at 4:15 am

  Because the quality is better than quantity. And especially the beginning writers may try to hide the nonexistence of the plot behind the dozens of supposedly “quirky” characters.

  Not to mention that Robinson’s Mars trilogy was barely fiction (instead of slightly disguised and a bit dramatized nonfiction) because Robinson is more interested about rocks and political theories than human beings.

  And it does not appear to the case with Khaavren and the rest of your characters. As far as I am concerned, that comparison does not really work.

  (There is also the fact that reviewers and editors may by very tired of old novels where the story ran along with a multitude of characters because the old-style families had thousands of members. They might have had to read too many of them for their literature degrees because they are “classics”. )

• 25 Mario Delgado // Apr 28, 2008 at 9:18 am

  Don’t leave George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire of the list of ensemble casts.

  I think the trick is making each character engaging. I know that sounds kind of obvious, but if the character isn’t engaging, then why is it in the story? I think it all boils down to the old axiom of only doing what the story needs in order for it to be told.

  I really dislike being told not to do something because that something, by its very nature, stinks. It only stinks if it doesn’t work. If it’s working, it’s great!

• 26 Ker_thwap // Apr 28, 2008 at 1:18 pm

  I get put off by authors that kill off a bunch of nameless extras. This seems to devalue the impact of that death, which probably isn’t the author’s intention.

  At least Martin makes his characters’ deaths more meaningful than all those nameless extras on Star Trek.

• 27 L. Himelhoch // Apr 28, 2008 at 1:34 pm

  I think it works pretty well in historical fiction where some of the characters are dramatized versions of actual people. To at least a certain degree, the reader probably already has some initial ideas who those characters are.

  They act as much as setting as characters as well.
  This is why Dumas and Tolstoy still work today.
  A person picking up their books presumably has
  some interest and knowledge of history to begin with.

  It is harder when a writer is starting from scratch. However, if a character if filling a specific role that does gives a reader some initial frame of reference. If someone is introduced as an empress, or a guard or a powerful sorceress, that immediately evokes ideas in a readers imagination that allows the writer to associate additional detail with the character and expect it to be remembered even in a long work with many characters.

  SKB has the additional mechanism of having introduced us to the various families of
  his setting so now if he tells us someone is a Dragon, or a Dzur, or a Teckla we have immediate expectations of who that character is
  and how they will act. In other genres, stereotypes serve a similar function.

• 28 Miramon // Apr 28, 2008 at 2:20 pm

  Mario Delgado:

  > Don’t leave George R. R. Martin’s A Song of
  > Ice and Fire of the list of ensemble casts

  Oh, it’s on the list, but it’s a great example of how a deliberately huge and sprawling fantasy blockbuster can lose its way in a vast swamp of words populated by a swarming of unnecessary character viewpoints and extra subplots.

  GRRM has written some great stuff elsewhere, and there’s little passages in that fantasy series that are quite good, but on balance I think it’s turgid and bloated. Cutting out 2/3 of the character viewpoints and tightening up the story would really have improved it.

  I don’t know GRRM at all, nor do I follow the fan sites for his work, but I gather that at some point he seems to have lost his way in the middle. I suggest this is at least partly because there are too many words and too many characters.

  On the other hand, if you measure success in sales, and I’m not sneering at that, only bemused by this particular work’s popularity, I guess there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

• 29 Nolly // Apr 28, 2008 at 7:01 pm

  I think my favorite book with a large and tangled cast is probably Dickens’s Bleak House. Half the fun of the book is learning how all the characters are related. Not sure what use this might be to modern writers, but it seemed to belong in this thread somewhere.

• 30 skzb // Apr 28, 2008 at 7:39 pm

  Nolly @ 29: Actually, you might be on to something. One way of making a large cast work might well be to introduce an element of mystery regarding how some of them relate to others. It’d have to be done carefully so as not to appear contrived, or to make things so frustrating that the reader just gives up. But it’s an interesting idea.

• 31 Alana Abbott // Apr 29, 2008 at 5:40 pm

  I’ve actually found that having too many characters in my own writing has detracted from the story I’m telling. The cast of thousands thing can work–but it has to be done well, and enhance the narrative, in order for it to feel genuine. If I were to rewrite my most recent manuscript (which, if I thought I’d be getting paid for it, I probably would, but that’s neither here nor there), I’d drop at least one new character in her entirety, because she just didn’t end up adding much. Several of the minor characters from a previous (published) book had larger parts in the most recent (and final) manuscript, and rather than enhancing those characters, I’m concerned that it may have *detracted* from the main characters and their stories.

  So perhaps the real answer is: avoid having a cast of thousands until you are an expert director. (And even then, your producers may have to approve your budget.)

• 32 Mr Feathertop // May 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm

  Steve,

  I think to understand how to write a story with a cast of thousands, one needs to understand why such a story typically fails. As an attorney, who has to write about complex issues for decision makers, this is a challenge I face in my work.

  The reason why such a story is likely to fail is because of how the human mind works. On average, humans are able to process seven facts in their mind at one time. Indeed we are able to memorize lists, but there is a limit to the number of items in a list we can remember. Our minds can only keep track a limited number of facts at one time.

  The way that we get around this is by what scientist call “chunking.” A great example is written language itself. We could never memorize the symbols to create a 50,000 word vocabulary with each word having a unique symbol. Nevertheless, if we memorize a list of 26 letters, we can combine them in unique ways to form a 50,000 word vocabulary. Spoken language also uses this principle. We combine words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs to make communicating more complex thoughts possible. Each stage is an example of chunking. Small pieces of information are combined to make one larger piece of information. With that larger piece, we can combine it to make more complex pieces.

  Therefore, it seems to me that one would reverse the process to make this work. One would have to find a way to combine these characters in the mind of the reader so that they form some type of coherent whole. In other words, the characters would have to be related to each other by relationship or subplot that is distinct from the rest of the characters. I think this is what Will @ 5 is suggesting. I think this is what Tolstoy did. He created multiple subplots each with a limited number of characters. In other words, stories within stories. Then, he skillfully moves the characters between subplots, which relates each to the whole.

• 33 lacee // May 26, 2008 at 8:56 am

  omg this is sweet

• 34 E. Tate // Aug 6, 2008 at 3:12 pm

  Part of the problem is keeping each member of the cast interesting for every reader. I get bored while reading some of the current popular scifi/fantasy fiction because the story left a character I like to follow a character I don’t like as much or can’t identify with.

  Steve (@2) is correct in that readers can become impatient. Trying to focus on a seperate plot or point of view while constantly thinking about my favorite character(s) can be somewhat distracting and takes away from the enjoyment of the story.

  There are a few authors that manage to keep me entertained throughout yet still offer a large cast of characters. I think the best of them (in my opinion anyway) succeed by keeping the overall story moving rather than playing catch up with every character when it is their turn in the spotlight.

  Some authors tend to fully introduce their characters the first time you meet them. The third or fourth time you focus on this character, it is often just a name. Instead, I prefer receiving this information in smaller doses so that I learn something new every time I encounter the character.

  I think you should write the story you want to write and see how it turns out. The best case scenario would be it is an instant success. The worst that will happen is it doesn’t turn out how you envisioned it and you learn something in the process.

  It seems to me that when we ask for someone’s advice, we are really asking for confirmation of our own opinion though we often aren’t sure what that is until we listen to what everyone else has to say. You can weigh both sides of the coin, but I think you should just flip it and see what happens.

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