Managing Crowds of Characters
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I always like studying reader reviews of my recent releases to see what readers are saying about my books.
Okay…correction. :) I always study my reader reviews, I don’t always like this process. But reading reviews is vital for me. I’m writing for my readers and they provide an amazing data center full of compliments and complaints. If enough readers are unhappy about some aspect of a story, I will change my approach moving forward. As I explained in my post last week–this is my day-job and my career. I aim to please.
Occasionally, I’ll read something in a review that’s baffling to me and makes me analyze my manuscript again. I discovered one of those types of reviews last week.
The reader (a regular of mine, apparently), mentioned that the book in question had ‘too many characters.’
I found this puzzling because the book had exactly the same number of characters as the rest of my books. All of my books have the same number (and there are plenty). I have 10 recurring characters (including my sleuth and sidekick) and then 5 suspects and 2 victims. This particular book didn’t deviate from that pattern–I’m not a writer that enjoys much deviation.
But looking back over how I handled the introduction to the five suspects and two victims, I saw the difference. The new characters were in a group and I introduced them at once near the beginning of the book.
My usual pattern (again, I’m fond of a pattern) is to open the story with my recurring characters and reintroduce readers to my story world. (In fact, I use a mirroring effect where I both open and close the books with the recurring characters in a similar place and situation.) I then gradually introduce the suspects.
Sometimes I do introduce them all in a group (a book club meeting, a party), but I’m careful to use various ‘reminder’ tags or dialogue clues to help readers keep them straight.
There are tricks I always use to help keep characters distinguishable from the others: quirks, speech differences, physical appearance, and names that are very different from the others (especially important are names that start with different letters).
But my tricks this time didn’t seem to work that well, at least for this particular regular reader. As well, I didn’t use as many of my reminder tags/dialogue clues.
Going forward, I’m thinking I’ll either start with a group of characters or introduce them near the beginning of the book. I won’t do both again. And I’ll make sure to increase the tags if I use either approach.
For further reading, there’s a nice Black Gate post by author M. Harold Page (note his third point on character tagging) and a helpful post from writer Zoe M. McCarthy.
How do you manage a larger cast of characters?
Photo credit: Duda Arraes via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND
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