How do I introduce a large cast in an interesting way
I am currently writing a story about eleven college friends and a child.
I don't want to just introduce them as "The Jock" or "The Delinquent," and I don't want to do a dry listing of "this is who they are, this is how they look, and this how they act."
How can I introduce this large cast to the reader without being cliched, boring or perfunctory?
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@CrisSunami is spot-on: don't introduce all your characters at once. Don't start with a scene where they are all present - start with a few characters, then bring in more. Having a great many unfamiliar characters all at once is extremely confusing to the reader: imagine walking into a room with 12 people you've never met before, and you're expected to remember their names, who they are, what kind of people they are, within 10 minutes of conversation. Oh, and you can't see any of them. It's going to be very hard for you, won't it?
You might find it helpful to watch the first episode of any series with a large cast, like Star Trek - Next Generation or Firefly. Note how the main character(s) are the ones you start with, while the others are slowly introduced as the episode progresses. The episode is almost contrived in how it's structured - there's whatever reason for the characters not to start together.
A literary example could be G.R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, a series notorious for having a great many characters. In the first chapter of A Game of Thrones we are introduced to the Stark family, but not to all the Starks. In what is almost a contrived coincidence, the first scene takes place away from Winterfell. We are told Lord Stark has five trueborn children, but in the first chapter we only meet Robb and Bran, plus Jon and Theon. In the second chapter we meet Catelyn, but still not the other Stark children. In the third chapter we jump to Daenerys, but do not yet meet Khal Drogo. We meet the characters a few at a time.
Even if your characters all share the same environment, the same living space, etc., split them up. Find a way to introduce them slowly, let the readers get to know two or three characters before you introduce the next two or three. That's the only way the readers will be able to take it all in.
It's great if you can do like @MarkBaker suggests - introduce each character when the plot demands their presence. But if the plot "demands" the introduction of too many characters at once, tweak the plot, add a scene, split up the character introductions.
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First, understand what a character is in fiction. A character is not simply a person. A character is an instrument for making a story work. You can't simply sit down, dream up a bunch of people, and then expect to insert them into a story and have them work. Characters have to be designed to drive the story. Each character has a specific job to do in driving the story forward. Any characters that don't pull their weight in driving the story are superfluous and should be jettisoned.
What are the functions of the various characters? First, of course, there is the protagonist. They are the person that the story actually happens to. They are forced out of their comfortable existence by an event that forces them to go on some sort of journey to put something right. To put that something right they will have to make some choice of values that they really don't want to make. That is the crisis of the story. Once they make they choice, they have to prove that they have made it and see it through to the end. That is the denouement of the story.
So, your first character is the protagonist. They need to have a problem, and two values that will conflict with each other and between which they will have to choose in order to address the problem.
Then there is the antagonist. You don't have to have an antagonist, but they are frequently used. Their role is to make life difficult for the character. In many cases, it is their actions that create the problem that the protagonist has to solve. But the thing that creates the problem for the protagonist does not have to be another character. It can also be nature, or the protagonist themselves.
Then there are the supporting characters. What is their role? Fundamentally, their role is to see the protagonist along the road to facing their choice of values and solving (or not solving) the problem. Since the protagonist does not want to make the choice of values that occurs at the crisis (who would?), the job of the supporting characters is twofold:
Support the protagonist in facing the choice and dealing with the consequences. This may mean giving them advice or fighting beside them.
Prevent them from avoiding the choice. This means acting in opposition to them every time they try to wriggle out of the choice. It could mean distracting them. It could mean fighting them when they try to find a solution to the problem that does not require the choice they don't want to make. It could even mean encouraging them to abandon the quest -- but if they actually abandon it, then the story dies, so these characters actually end up leading the character back to the choice.
There are also tertiary characters who just fill in the scene or perform ordinary tasks like taking the protagonists drink order. They should be given a bit of color, just so they don't feel cardboardy, but they don't really matter much. One bartender, in this case, is as good an another. Unless they give the protagonist a vital pep talk or clue, in which case they are a secondary character.
Okay, so now you know what job each of your characters has. Does everyone on your list actually have a job to do? If not, it's pink slip time.
Okay, you are down to your actually useful cast. Now, when do you introduce them into the story and how? You do one of two things with them:
You introduce them with they are needed to do their job.
You introduce them earlier to foreshadow the role they are going to play.
When do you foreshadow them? You foreshadow them when it would seem contrived if you introduced them only when they were needed to do their job. For instance, you need a character with a rope to pull your protagonist out of quicksand. Well, if that character just turns up out of the blue right after your protagonist fall in quicksand, that is going to seem pretty contrived to the reader. So you introduce him and his rope earlier in the story so that when your protagonist falls in the quicksand, the reader goes, oh yes, guy with the rope, he will get our hero out of the quicksand.
So what happens in that scene in which the guy with the rope is foreshadowed. Simple: our hero does the guy with the rope a good turn, so that when our hero falls in quicksand, the guy with the rope owes him one. Thus the moral order of the story is maintained. This should happen far enough in advance of the quicksand incident that the reader does not immediately see what the writer is going, but not so far back that the reader has forgotten that the guy with the rope exists.
Every character is part of the moving parts that make a story run. Understand what part every character plays and when they need to appear in order to play their role in the story. Introduce them when it is their time. Not before. Not after. When you introduce them, tell us what we need to know about them so we will understand the role they play when they play it. Not more. Not less.
There is no part of your story whose function is to introduce characters just so you can use them later. Every entrance and every exit performs a specific role in the story. Understand what that role is, and you will know when and how to introduce them.
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Don't introduce them all at once --that's not a story, that's a cast list. Bring them in one at a time, or in small groups, when needed by the storyline, and describe them in ways that illuminate their importance to the protagonist and the narrative:
There, standing outside the door was Rachel. Her once flame-red hair was now tinged with gray. As I saw her there, looking so much older, that torch I'd carried for her all those years flickered and finally went out.
That's only a couple of lines, but it tells you a bit about Rachel's physical description and her history with the narrator --and something about the narrator as well. If you do it this way, you can introduce the characters without bringing the story to a screeching halt, and all the descriptions will be unique, because they won't be following some cookie-cutter format. Each person will be described in a way that stems from his or her unique relationship to the protagonist.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48213. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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+1 Mark, Galastel. The one thing I would add is structural. Don't forget that the first 15% of a book, before the Inciting Incident (that introduces the major problem), is where the reader expects to be introduced to the main characters and crew (not necessarily the villains, unless you are writing for TV, then the viewer is typically introduced to the villain in the first Act, so it won't seem like a deus ex machina when the villain becomes apparent.)
In 300 page novel (75,000 words) that is 45 pages. Don't be afraid to use them! That is a lot of real estate, and the reader is expecting the start of the book to tell them what they need to know about the world and the characters in it.
Don't info-dump us on either the world, or the characters, or the back-story. Readers cannot memorize very much at all, but they can and do remember scenes and what the characters DID and how they conflicted (which could just be a friendly disagreement over something).
It is a good thing to get your characters into interactions with others as quickly as possible, in the first two pages. That is how we get to know them, through these interactions and dialogue. This is also what is meant by "in media res", starting in the middle of action: It does not mean starting in battle, it means start in a SCENE with no backstory or introduction, just a character doing something that quickly leads to interactions with other characters.
That is what agents want to see. No "thinking, pondering, remembering, wondering" openings, that will get you a rejection. It is too obviously loading people up with backstory. No openings where the protagonist is doing something alone for five pages (five is all that many agents will read for a query). Same reason.
As Galastel says, introduce them in groups; three for an easy start that progresses to the full crew. You will have to devise a reason for that, but you don't ever have to have a dozen people together talking; once introduced people can leave. 3, +2-2, +4-3, -2+2. That's eleven. They may just be recruiting for a friendly group outing; which happens to put them all together for the Inciting Incident that drives the plot forward, and them forward as a team.
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