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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27233
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27233
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You can certainly have an ensemble cast, and you can certainly send a team on a shared quest. Hundreds of novels and movies do exactly that. But while a team can have a shared plot, a plot is not the same thing as a story arc.

A story arc is the difference between a story and a piece of imagined history. It is the emotional lure that attracts the reader to the piece. A story arc is fundamentally moral. It is about how a character responds to a challenge and the price they are willing, or not willing, to pay to achieve their ends. This is a fundamentally moral question. It is not a matter of method, but of values. As such a story arch is fundamentally individual. A character can have a story arc; a team cannot.

If multiple team members go on a quest, either there is one member of the team whose moral arc is the focus of the work, and the others are supporting characters, whose motivations and actions need to be plausible, but do not necessarily need to be fully explored or to reach a moral crisis and resolution; or each (or several) member(s) of the team has a featured moral arc that is fully explored and resolved over the same series of events that mark the plot, meaning that several story arcs are brought to crisis and resolution at the climax of the novel.

The latter, of course, requires considerable coordination, and it is not at all unusual for some of what seemed like promising and interesting story arcs in the development of the story to go unresolved in the end. Often the way you know who the "main character" of a story really is is that their moral arc is the only one that actually gets fully and satisfyingly resolved.

But if you have people asking you who the main character of your novel is, it may well be because they are not finding a moral arc to follow. If they were engaged with a single moral arc, they would not ask the question. And I suspect that if they were truly engaged with multiple moral arcs they would not ask it either, or perhaps only at the end if they found that the more compelling moral arc they had been most invested in turned out never to be fully resolved.

Original score: 7