Can you have too many story arcs running at the same time?
I've written about 15k words of my story now and the plot is developing nicely. Perhaps a bit too nicely.
I have about a dozen of named characters which all have something interesting to do in the next part of the story. They will separately add something uniquely to the plot. They all seem to go a separate own path and will cause a change in POV up to where they will connect again in some way. This doesn't feel bad, right now. But it seems really hard to do right. Currently I have like 4-5 story arcs running next to each other. All contributing to the theme and main plotline in some way. It also adds motivation to some of the characters which makes me believe they are important.
Should I consider this a good thing or should I try to cut story arcs for better overview? Is there a general rule for this kind of things?
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The late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series has approximately 10,000 named characters and 500 story arcs*. You may take this either as evidence that it can work or cautionary tale. Or perhaps both.
*slight exaggeration
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There is no general rule. I am currently reading a book that has half a dozen named characters, sometimes close to each other or even in the same location, sometimes far away from each other with the occasional point-of-view of someone mostly unrelated. The author is doing a great job of making sure that you know who is where at which point and how the other characters and their actions are influencing the current main character. There are also lots of other named characters that are playing minor roles, having maybe one or two chapters of their own before they are being reduced to a side-kick role in chapters of other characters.
But sometimes it feels as if the author is forgetting about one or the other character because it's been so long that you have read something about them. It's difficult to strike a good balance of making the story arcs relevant and playing them out in parallel while also making sure that every overall important character has something to do throughout the other smaller arcs. Or at least to make it not feel like you are forgetting some of those characters.
At the same time I have also read lots of books that are from the perspective of only one or maybe two characters. It's certainly more easy to make the reader not feel like you are forgetting a character.
But this reduces the interdependencies that you can explore in smaller story arcs.
If you feel like there are too many great story arcs you could think about making a series and exploring other characters and their stories in those stories instead of packing everything into one story. This obviously depends on the amount of stuff you have or are planning to have in the end and whether you like series or not. But there is no general easy way to say how many story arcs you can have.
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