Less Characters = Tighter Stories?

No, it makes for a different kind of story.

Ensemble casts are nice. Small cast is also nice. EVerything in the execution.


For bonus question - not really, no, but my stories follow the characters if that makes sense. I don't care what the plot is really, as long as it serves to explore and facilitate the characters.

I agree with Harlequin. It makes for a different type of story.

And by characters, do you mean POV charterers, or side characters?

Better? No.
I'd be cautious if I felt like I had to many POV characters and that my MC didn't get enough "screen time" but to me it depends on the author and what works better for him/her. If you work better with a large cast of notable characters, then fine. If you work better with a small cast, then fine.

Personally, I do not write huge casts, but that's also what my story called for. I've had to cut some characters that I didn't need. The story didn't get any better or tighter, it just got rid of extraneous stuff I randomly threw in. Not all characters need to be totally fleshed-out like the MC's do. As long as you give each character their needed (not wanted) amount of time, then I don't think the cast size matters.

I've read books with only a few characters and I come out not knowing them any better than a stranger. I've read books with huge casts/povs that I could tell you why I liked each character. It depends on how much you want to let your readers know.

Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series by Michael Scott

A YA fantasy series with just about everything you can throw at a book series in it. It's told from third person from many POV's and just as many side characters.

Goettsch said:

My question is: Does having fewer characters make for better stories?

Click to expand...

Not better. Maybe tighter, depending on what you mean by tight, but tight =/= better. Complicated, messy stories with lots of subplots and multiple pov characters with arcs and goals of their own can be gloriously fun to read (and write). Lean, tight stories can also be very satisfying reads.

It's a bit like asking whether or not longer novels or shorter ones are "better," or if past tense or present tense is better, or if multiple viewpoint or single viewpoint is better, or if first person or third person is better etc. It's a matter of reader taste, what works for the story at hand, and the writer's ability to develop it.

Bonus question: Have you ever developed a character enough so that they don’t seem to fit in the story they were made for anymore?

Click to expand...

I've dropped characters because I realize they no longer, if they ever did, add to or advance the overall plot of the story they are in. Maybe some of them could become stars of their own show someday.

I think it's perfectly normal for writers to cut or combine characters if they are part of side plots that don't go anywhere or if they don't really tie in with the whole.

Goettsch said:

My question is: Does having fewer characters make for better stories?


Bonus question: Have you ever developed a character enough so that they don’t seem to fit in the story they were made for anymore?

Click to expand...

To the main question, my answer is... I hope not. 'Cause I've got two mansions, one college, one small town in Virginia, another in Nevada, three artificial moons, several planets, two realms, one domain, and at least a couple of other dimensions to populate. Oh, and one extremely large starship. And I'm not gonna pull that off with a mere handful of characters.

And I'll answer the bonus question with a question: Is that even possible? I'm not sure it is.



O.H.

P.S. I've come to the conclusion that I probably can't live long enough to tell this whole story, so I'll likely just have to tell the more important parts, and be sure that each "volume" has a proper ending of it's own, without the need for the next one to finish up some particular story line. No "The Empire Strikes Back" endings for me.

Is the problem too many stories rather than too many characters? If too many of your characters are being like main characters and/or their stories are too distinct and not connected (physically or thematically) with the others, then it would be like trying to write several novels rolled into one. I can see how that could be a problem and how removing characters and filing them away for having their own novel later on would be a way to fix that. But I don't think simply having lots of characters makes for a less good story - Harry Potter (to give just one example) has a lot of characters and IMO removing some of them would make it less good, not better. It depends on the story (if a boy goes to a magic school, you can expect him to interact with lots of people, but a story about a character stuck on a desert island might not have any other characters) and on how you handle the characters. (Harry Potter has lots of characters with their own well-developed backstory, but the story focuses on Harry and those characters who affect Harry's life the most.)

"Bonus question: Have you ever developed a character enough so that they don’t seem to fit in the story they were made for anymore?"

No, however I've had secondary characters take over the focus from the main character such that I'm not really telling the main character's story any more, but the secondary character's - at which point I've rewritten the whole thing from the secondary character's point of view. Stories can work where the POV character is telling another character's story - like Sherlock Holmes for example - but that's different and generally a conscious choice that a writer makes to write it like that. I was setting out to tell one character's story, then a secondary character's story became more interesting to explore, the focus shifted and I realised I was writing the wrong story and switched to the story I really wanted to write.

I usually write with a fairly limited number of main and secondary characters, but I recently wrote a WIP that focuses on a family of 6 children, their mother, and their aunt. There are also several soldiers coming in and out. It was actually fun having more of an ensemble cast and having each of them react in different ways to the same event (one of them thinks it's funny, one of them is horrified, one of them is like "yeah I already knew, didn't you?", and one of them is just livid). So, no I don't think fewer (not "less", by the way) characters makes for a better story.

As for the bonus question, I was going to say no, but then I realized that that wasn't true. In a WIP I recently rewrote, a character named Harry got about ten more dimensions, and now I'm keen on writing his earlier life and even childhood. His head is royally effed up for various reasons, and I love it.

Goettsch said:

My question is: Does having fewer characters make for better stories?

Click to expand...

Does having fewer ingredients make for better recipes?

There is no objective answer because it is wholly dependent on what you're trying to make. War & Peace is a sprawling book with myriad characters because that's the kind of story it's trying to tell. Native Son would not be the same story at all, and probably much worsened, if more characters and POVs were added in.


Bonus Question: It happens a lot - you realize that a character is not suited for the story they're in. So you take them out, maybe save them for use in something later, or recycling the best ideas into other forms.

Does having fewer ingredients make for better recipes?

Click to expand...

Love that Thomas Vail!
My advice is similar to that in that people often think that the fewer character the tighter or better the story but it's more a quality over quantity type of thing. Your characters/ingredients should be of a high quality but that doesn't equal having fewer means they're better. If you're having trouble killing them off I'd say you're in the right direction for quality there.
I'd argue fewer characters are easier for the reader to follow which is why some writers make a conscious choice of limiting how many they have per story. Thing is we're filling a world each time, your backdrop most likely has a billion characters and they've all got interesting lives too. In a way I think I'm starting to answer your bonus question as well, in that you need the focus on your cast that completes your story because it is so easy to develop characters that have lives apart from the main story that are worth following. I find myself over developing characters out of the story I created them for and finding they're fit for their own story all the time.

Am I the only one who is grievously bothered by the grammatical error in the title of this thread? Fewer characters, please.

/little rant