Number of People on a Team [closed]
Closed by System on Jul 18, 2018 at 22:47
This question was closed; new answers can no longer be added. Users with the reopen privilege may vote to reopen this question if it has been improved or closed incorrectly.
I want to build a team.
This team consists of people with diverse powers. Each of them has a different power, and some number of them are spies (one or more, I haven't decided), so they have a different actual power than they say they do. There are also several powers which none of the team members have.
I'm thinking about six characters on the team. There's only one POV (this person is also on the team), but five supporting characters with different powers, as well as one person without any powers. The relationships between the POV person and the rest of the people differ. The physical and behavioral characteristics of the team members differ.
Is this too many people? Will it get confusing? If it's too many people, how do I cut it down without losing some of my favorite characteristics?
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/37716. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Six or seven is not too many on a team, for a story.
The problem is making sure you can make them distinct and don't have two or more people doing basically the same job in the plot.
The problem with big teams is writing them; it is a lot of people to introduce and make unique and that puts a lot of pressure on the author to make that happen and NOT seem like an info-dump.
To me, Stephen King in The Stand has the best way of introducing a large team (in a long book), his "leader" starts alone, undertakes a quest (due to a dream), and meets his team one by one on this quest, a scene for each of them. It makes sense, they are all having the same dream quest and headed to the same place, etc.
That way, the reader is 'naturally' introduced to each character doing something (meeting the team-so-far for one) and this provides tension or conflict in coming to trust each other (you never know when you might be meeting a murderous gang or bad guy), etc.
But those are all story mechanics. The answer is, your team isn't too large, but definitely avoid early info-dumps trying to introduce that many people at once. It demands far too much telling and thus demands too much memorization from the reader; which they absolutely will not do. That means they will become confused by who-is-who on the team, that leads to boredom and putting down the book.
The antidote to that is slow introduction, lengthening the first ACT of the novel.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads