How many characters are too many?

As other answers have suggested a large character count is ok, if you manage them correctly.

Building on the Tolkien idea in Galastel's answer I want to add that The Silmarillion has an unbelievable character count (well more than 100 according to the Wiki) that has indeed driven away some people while at the same time being a successful book. According to the reviews on Amazon readers do have problems with that kind of number, but many found a good glossary, family trees, maps or eBook technologies to be immensely helpful (see for example [1, 3rd paragraph], [2, section c.], [3], [4], [5], [6], ...).

What one can take away from this example is that you can help the reader. You can do something like the appendix as in the Silmarillion example but I don't think that's all. Here are some brainstorming ideas (including some of the above):

• Glossaries.
• Family Trees. Or other graphical representations of relationships.
• Maps. Where are characters moving? If regions are controlled by anyone of significance, put that on the map. You could connect characters who don't have too move much with landmarks.
• Mind the scope. It's hard to remember some character including related facts when it hasn't been mentioned for 500 pages at all. It doesn't hurt to offer a sentence with a small hint what kind of character you are talking about or what that character did when it was first mentioned. Maybe it's not only the reader who might have trouble remembering or is caught off guard, but also the character itself that is meeting another character? It seems to me that this would fit quite well with your "lifelike situation" approach.
• Names. See Galastel's answer. (Exceptions apply. Naming "double characters" similarly or using the same naming scheme for characters from the same family or region or culture makes sense and actually helps with putting them in the right place.)

In summary: With enough help and thought, almost any character count works.

posted over 6 years ago

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Piwi‭

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Consider, for example, The Lord of the Rings: you've got the Fellowship (nine characters), you've got Bilbo, Elrond, Galadriel, Theoden, Eomer, Eowyn, Denethor, Faramir, Sauron, Saruman, and several more all vital for the story to work, you've got a lot more named side characters.
There are other examples. Song of Ice and Fire, for instance. So in terms of sheer numbers, you're fine.

However, your concern is not unwarranted: with so many characters, you do need to take steps so your readers don't start mixing them all up.

How do you do that? First, character's names need to be sufficiently different. Readers often complain about Sauron and Saruman being two bad guys with confusingly similar names.

Second, don't dump all the characters at once on the reader. Introduce them a few at a time, let the reader get to know each - who they are, what's their relation to the MC / the plot.

posted over 6 years ago

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Galastel‭

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This isn't unreasonable. To give you an idea of a long cast list in a novel, take a look at the Harry Potter series. There are a ton of characters of various import to the narrative. Jim Dale, who recorded the U.S. audio books of the series, holds the Guinness Book Record for most voiced characters in a single audio book (134 in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) and then proceed to break his own record when he recorded 146 voices for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Now, not all characters are equal, and Jim did record unique voices for such characters as The Ticket Taking Witch at the Quidditch World Cup... and that's literally everything we know about her. There is also probably the narrator voice, who was very close but still distinct from Harry Potter's speaking voice.

Wikipedia states that their are 8 main characters in Harry Potter (each getting a dedicated page). Supporting characters include Ginny (dedicated page) plus four additional pages classifying supporting characters by their associations (Hogwarts Staff, Order of the Phoenix Members, Dumbledore's Army members, and Death Eaters members).

posted over 6 years ago

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hszmv‭

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I'm going to point out that the named casts in Peter F Hamilton's works often top the 30 character mark. Having said that those works are huge, don't commit to more characterisation work than you can actually accomplish, if you can't actually flesh out characters enough for them to do their job, without overwhelming the story, there's not a lot of point having them filling the roster. This is an issue not only of writing material for the characters but also of fitting that material into the story without the whole piece turning into a series of character introductions between minor incidents that don't feel fleshed out because of their relatively small size compared to the mass of character detail.

In summary depending how long your piece is balancing that many characters might be awkward but there's no hard-and-fast rule as to how many, or few, characters work in a piece.

posted over 6 years ago

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Ash‭

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As a reader, I very much dislike large casts of characters, I lose patience and the ability to tell them apart quite quickly. However, a lot of it depends on how they are deployed. If your main character travels a lot, for instance, he or she might naturally encounter quite a lot of different people, who, however, would only appear a few at a time, and thus be easily distinguishable.

In general, the rule I would recommend is this: If they are easy to tell apart and memorable, keep them in. If they are easily confused with each other, combine them. If they are forgettable, drop them.

The biggest red flag in your question for me is "trying to create a lifelike situation." Fiction can simulate and imitate life, but it is never truly lifelike, and we'd lose patience with it if it were. It's a little slice of life at best, and we rely on the writer to drop the boring stuff, and highlight the parts that are of greatest interest.

posted over 6 years ago

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Chris Sunami‭

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The number of characters in a novel is probably not a number you can fix. The number of characters in a scene, and in an arc, however, can be significant.

Essentially, each character in a scene should create tension in the scene or arc, should shape the way the scene or arc unfolds. The basic test here is, how would this scene be different is this character were not present? There is obviously no fixed number for this, but there is also obviously a point where adding one more character is not going to add tension to the scene. Even if that new character is in tension, their presence is almost certainly going to take other characters out of tension. Any character that is not adding tension to the scene is adding distraction and should be removed.

The other thing to remember here is that character does not equal person. From the beginning of drama, we have had the concept of the chorus. The chorus may be many person strong, but they speak with one voice. If they add tension to the scene, they do so as a unit. For dramatic purposes, therefore, the chorus is a single character. This does not mean that they could be replaced by a single person; it means that the mob, the people, society, acting in unison act differently from the way individuals act, and thus the chorus becomes a different kind of character, one that acts in a different way and thus creates tension in a different way. The dwarves in the Hobbit are a good example of the chorus.

So the question you should be asking is not what is the right number, but rather, is each of my characters in tension in the majority of scenes that they appear in. If not, they are superfluous and are weighing the story down. Keeping a large number of characters in tension is obviously much more difficult than keeping on a few in tension, but this suggests that the upper limit is determined more by your skill as a writer than by any limit on the reader's tolerance.

posted over 6 years ago

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Mark Baker‭

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