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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37424
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 **Note:** I am not sure of which site this question belongs to: Writing SE or Literature SE. If this question is unfit for this site, I will happily migrate it there.

So I am writing about the protagonist's school life adventures. Naturally there are lot of characters - classmates, school teachers, friends, etc. and by and large more than 50 characters has some or other appearance in the story. By appearance, I don't mean about their existence for one or two line. Each one has some reasonable amount of role to play across protagonist; sometimes together and sometimes individually.

I am confused here of whether I should describe each and every character with detail for readers to understand that character's norms, habits, beliefs and nature? If not, then won't it be abruptness and vague when that character will pop out of no-where without much description?

Can anyone justify if possible with the **citation of already written literature their stand of what should I go with** -\> describing the characters in detail or just pop them up whenever required with as little detail as possible.

**Edit** : My draft is a **short novella**. I want to keep the length of my draft smaller and stick to story but I feel that description of each character alone will increase the size of my draft. My genre of writing is fiction (inspired from reality though) and the protagonist and stage is setup in India. The story is a fictional story about the protagonist's life in school and some great adventures he gets into during his school life.

Original score: 8