Handling a Cast of Thousands
Terry Odell
I recently read—okay, started—a book that I set aside after three chapters. I’d received the book at Left Coast Crime, when one of the publishers hosted an “open house” for its authors in attendance and they had stacks of their books to sign and give away. I accepted almost all of them. It would have been rude to tell them you weren’t interested, especially since the books were free. I have giveaways via my newsletter, and I figured the books would be put to good use, either before or after I read them.
What made me put this book into my giveaway pile? Characters. I’m not talking about unlikeable characters, or cardboard characters, or TSTL (too stupid to live) characters. It was the sheer number of characters that had my eyeballs spinning.
When you give a character a name, it sends a signal to readers that they should pay attention. This character isn’t an “extra” or a spear carrier, or any other term given to those who remain in the background. It says “Remember me. I have a name.”
Opening chapters—opening pages—need to entice the reader. Normally, unless it’s a prologue with characters who might not appear again, the protagonist shows up pretty darn quick. There’s the hint of a question, a problem, something of interest. Something to convince the reader this is someone they’re going to want to spend the next 300 pages with. Which is why you don’t want to start a book with a dream—major regrouping when the character wakes up and the reader realizes they haven’t been in the here and now. Or with a major battle scene. We don’t know who’s fighting, why they’re fighting, who the good guys and bad guys are. These openings are probably manufactured by authors who are told “start with action.” Action doesn’t mean combat.
The book in question started on the right foot. There was a dead body, and the cops show up at the protagonist’s door, ask her if she knows the man in a picture they show her. So far, so good. We get a view of the cops and how they’re connected to the protagonist. The protagonist says “no,” the cops leave, and we’re left with a return to the protagonist’s everyday life. Which happens to be running a hotel, and we see people checking out. Are we going to see them again? I think not. Then there’s the staff, all introduced with descriptions and perhaps a bit of back story.
Now, this is the 8th book in this author’s series, and maybe she feels obligated to bring everyone up to speed, but my brain can’t handle meeting all these people.
How many? I made a list of every named character introduced in the first 2 chapters, which comprised 21 pages. First names only (unless none was given) because I don’t want this to be about this book, or this author.
Here you go:
Amber
Kieran
Poppy
Mitchel
Viola
Mrs. Applegate
Joanne
Mrs. Newman
Aunt Ginny
Victory
Thelma
Dodson
Mother Gibson
Gia
Kim
Teresa
Iggy
Royce
Courtney
Virginia
Josephine
Augie
June
Tildy
At that point, I was past trying to keep track of who was who, and who might actually be important to the story. The fact that the book was over 400 pages long might have helped me decide to put this one away.
You have to consider that this might be the first book your reader has picked up in your series. Long time readers might know many of the cast of regulars, but you have to work them in slowly. Preferably with some connection to the story, another prominent character, something distinctive.
Sometimes, you do need to give these “extras” names. One example. Your POV character is interacting with a worker of some sort. A receptionist, admin, clerk. They’re on the page often enough so repeating “the receptionist” over and over gets annoying, so you name them. Just make sure their names are distinctive enough so readers won’t confuse them with another, more significant, character. (I keep mine on an alphabetical spreadsheet so I can see if I’ve used that or a similar name already.)
When I’m faced with this, I’ve sometimes resorted to “naming” the characters with physical characteristics, or even clothing. In the current WIP, my POV character is being held by two detectives. In her state, she doesn’t want to get personal with them, so she refers to them as “Red Tie” and “Blue Tie.” There’s another character she thinks of as “Green Blobs.” They’re only on screen for two chapters, and it wasn’t worth me thinking up yet three more character names.
Don’t start, as one author did, with a celebratory dinner with the whole darn family—three generations of them—around the table and have it become “let’s catch up with everyone” time. New readers don’t know the back story of these people. They probably won’t care. (That was the first and last book I read by that author, big name though she was.)
What about you, TKZers? How do you handle introducing characters, and making sure you’re not overloading your readers?
Any examples where you think an author handled it well? Or not well?
One last thing. I’ve officially launched my “Writings and Wanderings” Substack. I hope you’ll take a look and subscribe if you’re interested.
How can he solve crimes if he’s not allowed to investigate?
Gordon Hepler, Mapleton’s Chief of Police, has his hands full. A murder, followed by several assaults. Are they related to the expansion of the community center? Or could it be the upcoming election? Gordon and mayor wannabe Nelson Manning have never seen eye to eye. Gordon’s frustrations build as the crimes cover numerous jurisdictions, effectively tying his hands.
Available now.
Terry Odell is an award-winning author of Mystery and Romantic Suspense, although she prefers to think of them all as “Mysteries with Relationships.”
My pet peeve (one of them, anyway) is authors who give multiple characters the same initial, like Joanne, Josephine, and June. Or
Amber and Augie. Or Victory and Viola. Yes, bring on the A to Z spreadsheet. This may keep the character count to 26 or under, an added bonus.
I hear you on that one, JG. One of the best writing tips I got early on in this gig. Naming kids with the same initials might be fine in a family, but not for a reader.
Excellent post, thank you Terry.
Too many and unnecessary character names is confusing for most of us and distracts from the story, but particularly so for someone like my mother who is elderly and finds changes in time, POV, etc. confusing, but still loves reading.
I think other descriptors such as “Red Tie” or “Blue Tie” can be used well to give information about a character or reinforce a character trait.
It would be interesting to know how many characters were introduced past Chapter 2!
Thanks, Linda, but I’m not going back to count them.
Interesting post, Terry, and about a problem I’ve noticed in some recent books I’ve read.
One author came highly recommended, so I thought I was in for a treat. What I got was a confusing cast of characters who, I could tell, the author tried to make distinct, but there were just so darn many of them I had to jot down notes to keep them separated. Reading a book should not be that hard. I checked out another book by the same author. She’s a mega bestselling author and there has to be a reason for that, right? But I’m already lost in the fourth chapter. There are 17 named characters, and we have gone into all of their heads, learned about some of their background problems and a hint of secrets they’re hiding, and I don’t care. I’m not going to finish this book and I’m not going to read any more by this writer.
I have a story set in an inner-city neighborhood and there are 14 characters. Their names, ages, descriptions, and backgrounds are varied. I will have only three POV characters and will not even use last names for ten of them, but I certainly don’t want to confuse readers. I’m going to have to sprinkle them in one, or possibly two, at a time after grounding the reader in the neighborhood and interactions of the three main characters. I was hoping the books by the aforementioned author would help. Maybe they did, by showing me what NOT to do.
Reading “bad” books can be as helpful as reading good ones. I took a look at one of my earliest Mapleton Mysteries, where I had a party going on in chapter 1, but I think I brought the characters in slowly enough, with enough stage business to keep things clear in the readers’ minds.
14 characters across an entire novel doesn’t seem excessive to me.
Yikes – that is a definite turn-off. All those people! I have enough trouble remembering someone’s name two minutes after we’re introduced.
I hear you on that one, Jane. I’ve reached the point where I will tell any new people I meet that I’ll probably forget their names in the next two minutes. And yes, I’ve tried all the ‘tricks’ to remember them, but this old brain isn’t wired for accepting new data.
Good topic. This is one I wrestle with but not necessarily just opening chapters. Perhaps the number of characters in a book varies by it’s genre (I’m curious now how many total characters in my current project), but as I am working my way through writing a novel and building that story world, I often wrestle with how many characters are too many. I do try to NOT use too many characters whose names start with the same initial (amazingly easy to fall into that trap), and I try to introduce them with purpose & hopefully something memorable about them.
If you’re writing books in a series you want that familiar crew of people in a story because you know they’ll pop up again in future books even if only to be part of your story’s ‘atmosphere’. But by the same token, if you have several characters to introduce, it can feel forced trying to write them in a memorable way–I sometimes feel when I’m doing that that readers (at least those who are also writers) will criticize it and think “there she goes, trying to enforce the rules of writing about character details!”.
And there are occasional scenes which by necessity require a lot of characters for whatever reason. It can be hard to pick & choose where to place emphasis.
Unlike the glory days of childhood when I had hours to read uninterrupted, in adult life, I may start reading a book then have to put it down and not be able to pick it up again for several days or weeks. How in the world do you navigate easily memorable characters when that’s the case?
But balancing the use of multiple characters is something I wrestle with in pretty much every manuscript.
I feel your pain, BK. But nobody said this gig was easy. I write in 3rd person most of the time, and on my rereads, I try to make sure I use names enough for readers to keep things straight while they’re reading, but everything can go out the window when you take into account the ‘put the book down’ factor.
Steer clear of War and Peace.
Hahaha, Jim. You and I are on the same page.
Our High School English teacher gave us a ‘cheat sheet’ of all the names.
You hit on one of my pet peeves, Terry. I had enough “cast of thousands” books in college when I took Russian lit. Characters had many different names–formal, family, honorific, nicknames, terms of endearment, etc. Plus there were hundreds of characters sometimes scattered over several generations. After Tolstoy, Chekhov’s short stories were a breath of fresh air.
I like physical descriptions for walk on roles, like Red Tie and Blue Tie. Also job functions, baker, carpenter, physical therapist.
In my WIP, I broke my own rule. Multiple names are used to refer to the same 80-year-old character, Jerome Kobayashi. Depending on whose POV the scene is in, he’s referred to as Jerome, Kobayashi, Mr. K, and Grandfather. On rewrite, I’ll probably try to eliminate the informal “Jerome” b/c the rest of the cast views him as a revered elder.
Thanks for a helpful post, uh, er, what was your name again? 😉
You don’t have to go as far as Russian lit to run into those confounding multiple names. Reading books, especially historicals, set in England had me going crazy. Not only do I have no clue as to the hierarchy, having numerous names for the same person drives me nuts.
So get you on remembering names! I wish I were like my friend in her 80s who can remember someone’s name she only meets briefly…but some days I can’t remember my own name!
In suspense stories, there needs to be several characters who could be the bad guy which means more characters, but not in the first chapter. I do try to sprinkle in characters throughout the first half of the book so there are plenty of suspects.
And thank goodness for search and replace! I once had two characters whose names ended with i or y and I didn’t notice how similar they were until almost the end. So we not only have to watch out for starting characters names with the same letters, but how they sound phonetically. And I’ll never name a character Will again…
Don’t name a character Al, either, or readers will be thinking Artificial Intelligence. At least I did.
Great post, Terry.
My wife and I watched a movie recently with four or more couples in the process of getting married, struggling with their marriages, or going through divorce. The plots were excellent. The actors were all well known and good. But at the end of the movie I wasn’t impressed. As I got ready for bed, it hit me. There were too many characters. I didn’t know who to care about, to whom to become emotionally attached.
So, it’s not just keeping the characters straight, it’s finding a character to identify with and care about. Too many dilutes the mix.
Have a great day!
Thanks, Steve.
I agree it’s good to have a character to get behind. Way back when, at a Deb Dixon workshop (she writes romance, for some of you mystery-centric TKZers), she said one of her nieces asked her if the book she was working on was going to be a “his” book or a “hers” book. Deb hadn’t really thought of things that way–romances traditionally have dual protagonists, but it’s not really 50-50. Might be 51-49, but there’s generally either the hero or the heroine who’s arc is more important.
As authors it’s easy to overlook having too many named characters in our books, after all we need a way to keep track of them, so we assume (I certainly did) that readers need all those names, too. Actually, we authors don’t either. When I wrote my Empowered urban fantasy series, my 1st person POV Mat tended to use labels like your red tie blue tie, it was how she looked at the world.
However, when I gave my first mystery, “A Shush Before Dying,” to my beta readers, one point of feedback was too many characters to keep track of, so I removed a number of them, combined a few, and then unnamed others. Lesson learned.
Your spreadsheet to track names and insuring there isn’t too much overlap in first letters is genius.
Thanks for another great post!
Glad you like my spreadsheet system, Dale. I owe it to the late Jeremiah Healy.
Good post, Terry.
In my novels, the cast of characters is minimal. Maybe ten or under.
I like the way JSB does the “blue tie, red tie” thing. His, though, are more like “Big Nose, Muscles, Eyebrows” and the like.
I do read a couple of authors who have large casts, but the stories are so absorbing that it doesn’t bother me. It helps when they have a “Cast of Characters” section in the front of the novel.
Thanks, Deb. I’ve used physical characteristics as well. As long as they are what the character would notice, they’ll work.
Personally, I don’t care for the character lists in the front (or back) of the book. Too much flipping. I prefer an author who can keep them straight for us in the story. I gave up on a book even with the cast of characters because there were different branches of the same family, different places they lived–I think the author divided them into around 6 categories. Just reading that sent me a “this is going to be a troublesome book to read” and I gave up only a few chapters in.
Great topic, Terry. I googled “Optimal number of characters in a novel” just to see if anyone had done scientific research on the subject, but the answer (unsurprisingly) seems to be “as many as are needed.” I’m like you, though. If there are so many characters that I can’t keep them straight in the first couple of chapters, I’ll put the book down.
It’s a good lesson to keep in mind. As writers, we become so familiar with our characters, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the readers have the same knowledge. That’s especially true of a series and why it’s so difficult to satisfy both old and new readers as the series continues.
I like your idea of keeping a spreadsheet to make sure you don’t confuse the reader with character names that are similar. It has the additional benefit of knowing how many characters you’ve included in the story.
I hear you on the series thing, Kay. We have to remember some readers might be picking this book up as their introduction to you, the author, and you don’t want to chase them away by confusing them.
Definitely agree, Terry. I put aside a non-mystery novel set in ancient Rome by a bestselling author because there were too many characters with unpronounceable names. I couldn’t keep track of who was doing what to whom.
I agree, Elaine. For me a book is all about the characters, so if I can’t keep track, I’m out of there.
This is a great sin among subgenre romance writers. They start out with one romantic couple who have an adventure, they have family, friends, and colleagues, and in the next book one of the colleagues or family members meets a romantic partner and has an adventure, and the cast keeps building. The author thinks every reader expects a return of all these characters in most books, then they have to introduce a new group of people who need a romance and an adventure. Maddening. I always suggest that, if you think your readers want to catch up with Jill and Adam and their new baby, write a short story or novella about them and give it away. Extra points if it’s a Christmas story.
Good suggestion, Marilynn. Romance ‘series’ are really books connected by settings and characters. (I didn’t know that was a ‘rule’ and write an actual sequel to my first romantic suspense featuring the same hero and heroine.)
If you are writing romance, you need a new hero and heroine for each book. If you are writing suspense with a central romance, the same characters can come back.
I didn’t know that, and the publisher didn’t care, so both Finding Sarah and Hidden Fire have Randy and Sarah as the h/h. Nobody’s complained. 🙂
One of my favorite authors started a new series, a historical where all the men have courtesy titles in addition to their names. In the first chapter, she introduced a whole band of characters, with their courtesy titles. I’m sad to say that’s the last of her books ai read, simply because I had no idea who was who
Thanks, Karla. I didn’t know the term ‘courtesy titles.’ I just call them another layer of confusion.
And if you write Regency romance, readers are as bad as the gun nuts that come after authors for the tiniest mistake in weaponry. Regency readers know every last detail about the period, and heaven help the author who messes one up.
Timely advice, Terry. I just started naming characters in my WIP this week! I’ve outlined the story and I have a few names already. I wrote the opening scene this morning. When I needed a name, I just plugged in a friend or family member’s name until I have more time to process.
Congrats on starting, Gene. I tend to use [XX] as name placeholders; then I go back and fill them in when I need to know who they are.
Excellent post and replies. I especially appreciate the comments on se of similar names and/or initials. One of my earliest writing instructors stated we should never use the same initial twice in a story. I’ve forgotten other instructions she gave, but I try to adhere to that one, for my own memory situations, if not for readers.
Nice to see you here, Peggy. I will try not to use initials of the protagonists in the book. Avoiding repeating any initials gets almost impossible when you’re writing a series.