Let’s see in my first book of a fantasy trilogy I suppose after the halfway point when pretty much all main characters have been introduced it’s… 9 but 2 – 4 of them are the main ones. Then there’s 2 antagonists. Then there’s some secondary and tertiary characters like family members, “classmates” and such so… 19 but as I actually write the story there will sure to be new people created to fill in certain roles. Probably more than half of those don’t matter much with some pretty much just being nothing more than names. If you wanna count animal companions then I’ve made 5 with only 1 really being important.

Sooooo…. I suppose at this stage of planning and writing about 35. And obviously it gets higher in the second and third books with some characters being lost along the way. In the second and third books there are huge gaps in planning about the characters.

What series would have the most character ever? My bet would be on either Harry Potter or One Piece.

About eleven important ones, (tweleve if you count the cat), because I guess this is sort of a small story, really. There are other characters, various policemen, peasants, servants, prisoners, and people living in Petersburg, but only about 11 are really important, and only three are viewpoint characters.

It’s kind of strange. If you asked me straight out without me thinking about it much, I’d say no, I prefer a small cast of just one or two main characters. But when I actually think about it, I realize that I actually use a lot of ensemble casts. It might focus on one or two characters primarily, but there’s still a large cast of main characters. Interesting realization for me to come to.

What series would have the most character ever? My bet would be on either Harry Potter or One Piece.

Doctor Who. Kind of inevitable after how many seasons it has. Or do you mean just characters that are regularly used? DW might not make it, then.

Of course, I have to throw out a shout-out to one of my favorite shows ever, Red vs. Blue. In the first five seasons, there were… let me think… eleven main characters (including the robot mechanic, the tank, and two ghosts) and two antagonists (one of which lived in the head of one of the sort-of good guys. Or at least the not-evil guys). And then there was Tucker’s alien baby and the evil computer and the alien on a quest and the other alien and the guy who came back from the dead…

And then there’s the more recent seasons, in which you get all of the Freelancers, and then it just gets crazy.

I don’t know whether to shove you all into the Pit of Shame or crawl in there myself.

My one project has (I kid you not) 15 viewpoint characters. I haven’t even tried counting the secondary or tertiary non-viewpoint characters, but there’s a lot, and just the secondary cast alone numbers at least in the 20s. I don’t even want to think about the number of one-shot throwaways.

It started out as an affectionate fantasy parody. It exploded into a darkly humorous fantasy EPIC that deals (among other things) with the conflict between freedom and security (or Chaos and Order if you want to be more general/cliche). Considering its now-epic nature, I suppose I can get away with the crazy large cast.

What amazes me is that I’m somehow, thus far, managing to fit it all inside one book.

As for my other projects… None of them are as far along as the one mentioned above, but the trend of really large casts is very much present. What can I say? I like my characters, and I write mainly character-driven stories. It’s like a self-propagating cycle of character multiplication.

At least they’re all distinct and not easily confused, even the one-shot throwaways.

I can’t believe nobody has nominated ASOIAF yet. After AFFC I lost track.

As for my WIP...I don’t know, I feel like the cast should be large but I’m deliberately experimenting with a more claustrophobic atmosphere, so I’m really trying to either a) limit the people that show up or b) have unimportant people appear in huge masses.

Cool. I was going to have 1 to 3 chapters that were from other people’s point of view but eventually decided against it because I feel the story works better only being from the main guy’s POV. The first chapter/prologue is from someone else’s POV though. Well actually a few. It does that thing where it switches between an invisible narrator and a few characters. That’s allowed isn’t it? In book 2 I want to do a part where you follow maybe 3 different point of views during the same time frame. So while all this hectic stuff is going on one character might hear an explosion. Then the next chapter starts from the beginning of those events again but from someone else’s view point and you find out what exploded and why. Like that The Simpsons episode with Bart, Lisa and Homer or whoever’s stories. But I dunno…

Kyllorac, dare I ask how long the novel is? I mean, even assuming the POV characters only have, like, two pages a piece, that’s still 30 pages right off the bat. I think if it were me I’d start meandering at that point, so I’m slightly in awe that you’re managing to keep all those strings straight and lines moving.

Mine has about 42 named characters. Plus eight who are mentioned but never appear in-story.
As a contrast, my last one had only five for most of the story, except at the beginning and end.

Only 80k?! What. How in the world did it manage to be so compact? I’m flopping around at 60k with only two POVs. You may very well be my new hero.

I have to agree with Kyllorac on the character to wordcount thing. All my shortstories usually come in at just over 1k and I’ve never written a shortstory with more than two people—the most recent one I wrote only had one. You need as many characters as you need, I guess. Like, in the Catcher in the Rye, Holden meets only a handful of other characters—he thinks about quite a few, but he doesn’t meet that many, and of those he meets even fewer are named. I suppose it just depends on what type of story you’re dealing with.

And Taku, I would challenge you on that. My short stories tend to have at most five characters, even the ones with over 1K words. Unless you count random background crowds or those that are only briefly mentioned by another character.

I think you’ll find you use roughly 26 characters, if you’re writing in English. ‘S’ ‘T’ and ‘E’ are the most common.

And now back to your serious discussion.

Not counting peripherals, I tend to keep my characters to a minimum. I like to work with two or three at a time, at most. I find that if I try to work with more, I tend to forget to iunclude some in the scene, and focus in on the actions/thoughts of a single character to everybody else’s exclusion.

applauds vigorously

Jolly good show, what?

I think you’ll find you use roughly 26 characters, if you’re writing in English.

What’s this? We’ve been had!

He used only 25.

Did he leave out…z?

I GOT YOUR JOKE, TAKU

I’m too lazy to count my non-PoV ones. I do have two alternating persistent PoVs, and 3 one-shots at the beginning, middle, and end. The structure doesn’t really call for more, since it’s basically a two-person road trip.

The umlaut challenges you. You’re lookin’ at the umlaut…and the umlaut’s lookin’ at you.

@Klutor – that would be the one. It’s called Gadsby.

I really want to read that. It piques my professional interest – how did he pull it off? Does it seem awkward? Is the plot interesting? If yes, no, and yes, respectively, that’s a pretty incredible feat.

Um… yeah… that was related…

So in one novel which I’m aiming for 47 000 words (because it’s for kids, and that was the length of the longest Enid Blyton novel), I have fourteen characters, eight of whom have POVs. ...yeah, this is going to change once I finish the first draft. Am having fun now, though.

I actually have a lot of characters for once! My nano has ten people with names and personalities so far. Normally i bother to flesh out like two, and all my writing feels like a vacuum for it.

Yeah, probably.

^Noddy, right?

I grew up on Noddy.

I still haven’t read all of St. Claire. I read all of Mallory Towers, though. Brilliant.

...still totally related.

I mentioned Blyton’s word count on Five Go Adventuring Again as my goal for a novel I’m writing.