Characters

I have seen people talk about books that have as many as eight main characters. However--and this is from experience trying to write a query--it's best to have one primary character. That is, the character who is the main focus of the story, and the others be secondary main characters. It'll make it a lot easier to write a coherent query and synopsis!

George Martin is writing a series that must by now have a dozen POV characters; each chapter is told from the POV of one of them. It seems to work for him.

(By the way, all novels are fiction, so don't write, or say, "fiction(al) novel".)

Vomaxx said:

(By the way, all novels are fiction, so don't write, or say, "fiction(al) novel".)

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Some memoirs are fiction too....

Edit: As to the thread question - just make sure the characters are needed. Some books have just one main character, others have an ensemble cast.

Linda Adams said:

it's best to have one primary character. That is, the character who is the main focus of the story, and the others be secondary main characters. It'll make it a lot easier to write a coherent query and synopsis!

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AMEN!

While writing my novel, I had it in my head that there were three main characters, and the rest were just supporting cast. Needless to say, it was impossible to write a one page synopsis that gave justice to all three, plus the actual plot. After a little thought, it became amusingly clear who the Primary character was, and that there were actually three secondary main characters (plus a supporting cast of about eight). It helped clarify the query and the synopsis, and I can look at my own manuscript a little differently.

As to Jo's original question, there really isn't an answer to how many "main characters" a novel can have. One or twenty, the characters should serve the story. If they don't, they're just clutter.

Agreed on all of the above. I've read lots of how to's, like the Marshall Plan, and the Weekend Novelist, as well as many others, and all suggest that you have a lead, an antagonist, and then from there add what you need to tell the story. George Martin's been around the book store a few dozen times so he can handle multiple POV's. There can be a host of supporting characters but make sure that the major portion of your story is told by your lead.

My fantasy series (two books, the latter one unwritten as of yet) has two protagonists; the way I worked it out was thus.

Book 1: Gina’s story. Sam is introduced, has a fairly big part, but the book follows Gina’s sorrows and journey mainly. By the end, shadows of Sam’s future problems have been introduced, and the conclusion of Gina’s main story ends with book 1.

Book 2: Sam’s story. Though Gina still has problems (a rather important one, as it turns out) this is about Sam. It’s his journey, his problems.

The thing is, their lives are intertwined and are easily affected by the other; the moral of this story is (have I ever said that phrase before?) that it’s generally more efficient and more deserving for the protagonist to have just one MC per book. You can focus on them, tell their story without other people demanding screen time.

So basically, I’m echoing what other people have said. J

In the novel I am writing now, the story of the main character is narrated through the POV of four different people.

I feel it's better to have one MC, unless the story demands a different approach.

Hehe, I'm so not looking forward to write synopses for my novels. With exception of The Charioteer, they all have several perfectly equally important characters with plot threads of their own that interweave into a tapestry. It's like cutting one of the ships out of the Bayeux tapestry and say, that's the story.

Write however many you want to into the story. Usually you'll be able to identify the most important. If you have several characters, write then in if the novel desires to have those characters in it. I have a tendency to introduce a bazillion characters into stories.

My present work that I'm shopping around has several main characters, but I think only one of them would be the primary one, the real protagonist to the story. I would probably follow Linda's advice, and make one character the primary main character, and use the other main characters as secondary main characters. It definitely would make for an easier time explaining the work to a potential agent or editor.

Jo Scott said:

That was my problem....I had four main characters (at least in my opinion) and supporting characters to hold up the story for why these characters acted or felt a certain way. I was told too many characters clutter the story, but my story seems lacking if I take away any of the supporting characters. I have at least five to seven supporting characters and the rest fade into the background as if in a movie.

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We had four main characters, too, with about thirty or forty additional characters (a common problem with thrillers!). We did get comments that there were too many and people were having trouble keeping track--and had a lot of trouble writing a synopsis without mentioning seven (in five pages, that's a lot). So here's what I can pass along from my experiences.

First, it doesn't necessarily mean taking away characters, though you may find that some of the secondary ones are not necessary as you revise the story. Be willing to take anyone out who no longer fits.

The big one--this is probably where everyone is complaining about clutter. How many characters are in your first three chapter? Mine had eleven named characters. I critted someone else's where she had thirteen--and I stopped counting at that point. It's easy to want to try to get everyone important in there all up front, but for the reader it can very overwhelming. The story is just starting, they're trying to get into it, and lots of character names are being flung at them to remember. Try no more than three named characters in the first three chapters. After that, think and plan carefully about introducing each new character.

Do one have primary main character the story revolves around. It does not mean that you are reducing the role of the secondary main characters or pushing them to the side. What it does mean is that having one primary main character gives the story a better focus. Instead, we had been trying to make sure each character got the focus because they were all main characters--and it was at the expense of the story. Primary also gives the reader a character to immediately grab as being the important one to the story. But our secondary main characters also still have huge roles; it's just that the story is about the primary character, and they are part of that story.

Avoid naming every single character. For example, it's not necessary to name a waitress who maybe appears in the first two chapters and disappears for the rest of the book. She can just be the waitress with maybe some one line description of her. We unnamed a number of the characters because they actually had so little of a role that we felt like they weren't getting much to do. Which meant there was too many, so most of them lost their names--and you know, we don't even miss their presence. Naming them really didn't help the story as much as we thought it would.

One last thing to consider: If the story is requiring you to dump a whole bunch of characters on the reader up front, there are likely to be some major structural issues that need to be worked through. By trying to figure out how to start the story without introducing tons of characters, we ended up rethinking the first 100 pages.

Hopefully some of this will help.