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How to work with big casts?

KressKross

Acolyte
This is for my own personal preference, but I'm sure someone else might find this useful. If you were given/made up about, say, twenty characters to work with while making a story, how would you do it while making each one interesting and not feel like they are there just to move the story along? How would you intertwine them all into the story without it seemig forced/cliched/being bad?
 

MadMadys

Troubadour
I would probably slowly introduce characters into the story over as long a period as I could manage. Start with 2-3 characters that the reader gets to know first, maybe sprinkle some of those other characters in but don't delve too deep just yet. Once you have those first few started then move on to the others. Don't try to get all the plates spinning at once or you're going to end up confusing the reader more than anything else. Over the course of the story, swap characters in and out if you can so, as the reader, I'm always taking in a reasonable portion. If you try and overwhelm me with 15 characters at once my mind will probably 'splode.

Now I'm also assuming you don't have 20 main characters because that could be problematic. It's very hard work to make a reader care deeply about that many characters by making each totally unique.
 

Philip Overby

Staff
Article Team
I have pretty big casts in my stories/novels, but typically they kind of come and go, so they're not sticking around the whole story. I think as far as a "group" anywhere from 2-5 is manageable to keep up with at one time. Having several POVs makes it even more an issue because then you got a huge cast spread out all over the place. I'm working with one POV on my current WIP and I'm managing my large cast by writing every single character's name down in a notebook. I write a little note or something about them and then see how they really tie into the overall plot. If they're not that important, then they could get cut or combined.
 
This is just one approach, but I'm fond of the geodesic model. You start with, say, four characters who act in certain ways and fulfill certain roles, generally functioning as a group. Then you create a different group, with characters who're similar but not identical, and explore how their differences cause their group to operate differently. (The signature example of this is Homestuck, with four groups each consisting of one child, one guardian, one exile, and one sprite. Tales of the Abyss just uses two groups of six each, one for the heroes and one for their rivals, and Grand Theft Auto IV uses a very, very large number of duos composed of one logical person and one emotional person.)
 

Chilari

Staff
Moderator
I've never felt that large casts suit novels. They're far more suited to TV shows. Once you get above about 3 main characters, the story can lose focus and characterisation becomes weak, but it still works in TV because you've got more time to establish characters and need less because you've got the visual aspect - what they wear, how they hold themselves, little actions that you often can't describe effectively in prose but which characters just do on screen while the action and dialogue are ongoing. So it's far easier to effectively present a large variety of characters on TV than in novel format. That is, perhaps, the reason behind the success of programmes like soaps operas, which often have very large casts indeed, and "team" crime shows, like NCIS.

If by a big cast you mean you've still only got one to three main characters, but have a large cast of secondary characters, that's a different question entirely. The key is to give each character a motivation.

Let's say side character Bob, the main character's brother, wants a career as a librarian, but also wants a particular expensive necklace to give to his wife, his actions are going to be influenced by those things: he might ask the main character for financial assistance in exchange for help in the main character's goal, or he might refuse to help and try and talk the main character out of it because the main character's enemy is the head librarian, who is known to be fickle and won't give Bob a job at the library if his brother does something she doesn't like.

But you need more than motivations. Introducing character traits will impact upon how the character acts in achieving their goals. If Bob is dishonest or underhand in any way, he might help his brother for free, thereby gaining a favour owed, but use the knowledge and connections gained in carrying out whatever task he has done to make some money in order to get that necklace, or undermine the head librarian to the point where she loses her job and the next head librarian is more disposed towards Bob (not least because he helped with the promotion).
 
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