Characters

I've mentioned briefly before, but I'm not the kind of person to put a hundred characters in a story. I can barely juggle five. The reason for this is a combination of a lot of things, but suffice to say I'm simply not smart enough to keep track of them all. I have a horrible memory for names, and yes, that does include the ones that I make up. Imagine the difficulty that comes with trying to write a multitude of characters that you not only can't remember the names of, but that you have to have an intimate understanding of their backgrounds and motivations and personalities. It quickly becomes very hard to balance.

This is a problem not only with my writing, but with my reading, so when I read books with lots of characters, I tend to lose track of them all within as little as a few pages. Even watching tv shows I get names constantly confused, so having visuals doesn't entirely help me.

Because of this, I tend to write stories with a fairly small cast. One or two main characters is what I feel most comfortable with, with a villain or two, and a handful of side characters to push things along. Doing this allows me to focus. It allows me to understand who my characters are, to think more precisely about how they would react to different things. Character development is my favorite thing to see in a story, so that's what I try to write.

But there are certainly advantages to having more characters, the least of which being that you have more possibilities with what to do with the story. The more characters there are, the more development can happen, and the more those characters can interact with each other to make a more complete world.

But I also find that once I decide to add more characters, I don't stop. And that's another part of the problem. I start loading up on characters, throwing another one or two in every time something happens, and never giving myself time to develop them fully. And every time I devote space to introducing someone, I take that space away from developing those I already have. But I want to, so I stretch the story out further to try and give myself more space for development. But having more events happen means introducing new characters. You can probably see the problem by now.

This is obviously not a problem all people have. But it is very much a problem I have. But in ways, it is also a problem that I'm ok with. I don't mind reading a story with minimal characters in exchange for more development and interaction of those characters, so why should I mind writing them? Having fewer characters allows me to do the things that I want to do. And that's ok.