Where do you get to the point where you feel you have enough main characters and subsiduary characters (less important than main characters I suppose)?

I'm agonising over whether I have enough or too many for my crime novel . . . I suppose it might be a little more important in a whodunnit as you want there to be enough characters to keep the reader guessing but not so many that it's impossible.

I don't expect a number for this but I'd be very interested to hear your opinios and experiences.

I don't worry about numbers. I find it's more important to focus on just a few characters at any one time - over the course of the novel that can add up to quite a number, but if kept in context - the barman in the bar, the prostitute on the street corner - it's easier for the reader to remember them.


- NaomiM

This is something I've had conflicting views/advice on from readers.

For example, my father, reading a recent manuscript, said that it annoyed him when I give a name to minor charcaters who will only be in one scene (I always have to give people names, dunno why.) He says it gives him the impression that they are going to matter, and reappear, and that he has to try to remember thier name!! On the other hand, I have had other people say that they'd rather, if someone is going to be in one scene as a foil to a main charcater (the chatty cab driver, the journalist who comes to interview her, the neighbour who reveals who came looking for her earlier, the doctor who breaks the bad news at the hospital, etc....) then they should be as fleshed out as possible, and in particular should have a name to hold on to, as well as (hopefully) a distinctive voice, etc...

That's not quite the same as your question about numbers. But that's also something I've had differing views on. One friend who read my novel that's due out later in the year said there were far too many characters and she couldn't remember who they all were. It's about a women's college and there are dozens of boring female dons in it. I know what mty friend meant, and it did worry me about the book. On the other hand, my editor thought it was fine - didn't worry about the large 'cast' at all. For me there was no way I could cut down the numbers more than I had done. A book about the politics of a college needs a fairly large cast of main players, so there was not way round it. But (and this really is not meant to be a hubristic comparison, it's just because the setting is the same) one of my all-time favourite books is Gaudy Night and I must have read it six times at least, but I can still never for the life of me remember and distiniguish Miss This and Dr That amongst the Fellowship! But I still love the book - my inability to recall them all doesn't detract from my reading enjoyment. (Whereas a reader like my dad would probably be bugged by it and would be constantly flicking back to try to remember who so-and-so was!) In my novel I tried to make it easier by only (very artificially!) featuring Fellows who have a college office (the Dean, the Chaplain, the Senior Tutor, the Bursar, the Admissions Tutor, etc.) so that they all had a job for the reader to link them to as well as a name and a voice/persona. But it made it unrealistic - actually there would be a Fellowship of 60 or 70, and I am only even mentioning at most 20 of them! I imagine it's similar with a crime novel involving a police investigation team. We are faniliar on TV with programmes where there seems to be just a DCI and a sargeant, and maybe a couple of DCs in the background, when in reality a murder team would consist of dozens of officers, I imagine? I guess it's about a trade-off between verisimilitude and giving the reader a chance to engage with a reasonably compact cast of main characters.

Sorry for the rambling answer. Does it make any sense?

Rosy

Yes, I think readers vary hugely how much they demand that everthing makes sense, and how much they'll go with the flow. That makes it very hard for the writer...

It's true but not helpful to say that you need as many characters as you need. How many do you need to make the plot work convincingly? (e.g. Rosy's college needs quite a few). I tend not to name people unless you're going to need to remember them for a further scene. I do think it's worth cutting a cast down when you can, because you can't rely on readers to be willing to give it their full attention: is there anyone who's surplus to requirements, who's just set-dressing, or who could be conflated ? Do you need both the husband and the wife who run the corner shop? Maybe you do, if marriage is a theme in the book, maybe you don't if it's just that your own corner shop does so it's really only 'local colour'. And I think most people accept that actually, say, there'd be many more officers on a murder case than there are in the average whodunnit, and it doesn't bother them at all.

Emma

Exactly Emma. It's not a numerical thing; ask yourself what is their function?

This is all very useful information - thanks!

For the crime writers out there how many of your characters do you try and make it plausible and possible that they could have done it?

All of them.



- NaomiM

<Added>



But seriously, I find 6-10 main characters is a good number for a whodunnit, with a couple of minor characters sneaking in from that crowd, who turn out to be just one character who then also becomes a suspect amongst the main batch of characters. And then there's the murder victims, and the guy you thought had died at the beginning, but has been playing the part of another minor character...

<Added>

...exactly how long is this piece of string?

<Added>

PS. I would say the minimum number is 2.

I think, for me, I only have as many characters as absolutley necessary. There are about five main ones in my book, with maybe another five minors who have names and all appear once or twice. 'Extras' as I like to call them, who are really there for setting, don't have names and I try not to flesh them out too much in case the reader thinks they are important to the plot. One of my important characters has five sisters - that's important, because of how he ends up feeling about himself (long story) but I only name two of the sisters and even though they are all in a room at one oint, just one of them speaks, one line, in the whole novel. I treated them as a crowd because that's how the single, youngest brother sees them.

Lady B

<Added>

P.S DrQuincey- you've started some really gread threads recently.

In a crowd I think you have to focus on only a handful of characters and treat the rest as an amorphous lump. If you start giving them all names and little walk on parts it can get very confusing.

Often I try to amalgamate minor characters into just a handful if too many pop up over the course of the first draft.


- NaomiM