writing tips

character quantity

Characters are complex. In a published novel, (most) authors try their hardest to have three-dimensional characters who aren't as flat as pancakes. Which is difficult, because guess what - they have a lot of said characters.

This means that writing and fleshing out dozens of main or even important characters would be difficult. So, you need to limit yourself.

For beginners especially, having that many made-up humans (I'm using the word character too much, let me live) would drive both the author and readers insane.

SO, how many should you have? Do you have too much?

First, ya gotta ask yourself if all your named characters are important to the story, no matter how small the role. What do they do for the plot? How do they impact your MC(s)? How do they affect your MC(s)' relationships? etc.

(Notice how I said named. I'm not talking about that unimportant barista they interact with once, or the boy who lent them a pencil and appeared in only one paragraph, or the teacher of their history class. I mean the characters that appear multiple times, talk to the character, and have somewhat of a personality.

This could mean from side/minor characters to supporting characters.)

If their only purpose in the story is to bring drama to spice up your book-and by that I mean they don't bring your MC actual character development or the conflicts they cause are completely irrelevant to how the plot goes and all that good stuff-then you should probably scrap them.

Now that you've done that, let's say you've narrowed it down to thirty characters who impact the story in one way or another.

You can't just introduce them all at once. You can't just shove them in ten chapters. You're gonna have to spread their introductions to the reader out so that they don't get confused.

Overall, in J.K Rowling's Harry Potter, she has 700+ characters. A lot are mentioned once or twice, for background on the more important character's, or to make the setting seem fuller.

But the characters who truly swayed the story (affected decisions, personalities, events-even small ones) were introduced so gradually most readers didn't get confused.

We got to know each one just enough so we can distinguish who is who.

If she'd told us all about Ron's six other siblings all in one go and didn't develop their personalities and relationships with Harry individually (even for a few paragraphs) I wouldve gotten totally confused.

All in all, you've got to narrow down then give all your characters a gradual entrance.