A Cast of Thousands
Maybe it’s because I’m an actor. Or maybe it’s because I love Victorian novels. Or maybe I just like lots of elbow room when I’m telling a story, because it’s really hard to keep my character lists under control. If I don’t keep an eye on things, I will end up with a Cast of Thousands in my 100K word novel, and that’s just too many.
As an actor, I’ve been involved in musicals and dramas that utilize an energetic ensemble to fill in all the miscellaneous characters that populate a town. And given actors’ propensity for making one-line characters or even faces in the crowd have distinctive personalities, I tend to want to fill out my fictional world with all sorts of persons, no matter how small the role.
And Victorian novels – those great, baggy monsters – are filled up with cousins and half-brothers and servants and clergy, all serving the author’s theme. Dickens, especially, created large casts from the highest to the lowest social standings (as in Bleak House) to illuminate the web work that connects us all. In other words, Jo the crossing sweep, through six degrees of separation, lives in the same world as Sir Leicester Deadlock, baronet.
I have to catch myself from cluttering up my story with momentary characters who, in the scheme of things, do serve a purpose, when it would be much more efficient to use a smaller cadre of characters in those same roles.
In an earlier draft of the novel I am revising now, Reston Peace, Kenny Reston has a rather embarrassing encounter with a bunch of sorority sisters. In a sexual capture-the-flag moment, the young women manage to steal a piece of his clothing (his boxers) to mount on their sorority’s wall. For Kenny, it’s a humiliating experience. A week later, he encounters another guy on campus who had the same thing happen to him, but for this guy it’s a hugely comic story: his boxers stolen by six beautiful women! Kenny is perplexed about why he goes down the shame route while this other guy (a one-off character) can shake it off.
It’s an important moment in Kenny’s development, but the incident felt watered down by this nameless character who will never show up on the pages again.
So I step back to consider a better way to illustrate the same concept.
In the novel, Kenny and Peter (one of his football teammates) agree to model for a photographer, who insists on going for increasingly graphic sexual content. And here is where Kenny and Peter part ways: for Kenny, again it’s about the sense of shame. For Peter, he gets off on the exhibitionism.
Same concept, separate episode. So what’s the solution? Jettison the one-off character who loses his boxers and spend a little more time developing Peter’s character, because Peter is more crucial to the story. It also reduces the redundancy of scenes.
At a writer’s conference I attended, an author described how he had a novel with seventeen characters. Overall, he felt the story worked well, but he was concerned that some of the characters were less developed then others. He started retooling the cast – combining characters, merging storylines – so that by the end he had eight much better developed characters telling the same story.
The guy on the left has a story. And the one on the right. And the one in the third row, fifth from the end ...
It’s a lesson I continue to learn. So maybe I should say, “Get behind me, Cecil B. DeMille!” because I don’t need a cast of biblical proportions to tell my story of one hundred thousand words.
As an actor, I’ve been involved in musicals and dramas that utilize an energetic ensemble to fill in all the miscellaneous characters that populate a town. And given actors’ propensity for making one-line characters or even faces in the crowd have distinctive personalities, I tend to want to fill out my fictional world with all sorts of persons, no matter how small the role.
And Victorian novels – those great, baggy monsters – are filled up with cousins and half-brothers and servants and clergy, all serving the author’s theme. Dickens, especially, created large casts from the highest to the lowest social standings (as in Bleak House) to illuminate the web work that connects us all. In other words, Jo the crossing sweep, through six degrees of separation, lives in the same world as Sir Leicester Deadlock, baronet.
I have to catch myself from cluttering up my story with momentary characters who, in the scheme of things, do serve a purpose, when it would be much more efficient to use a smaller cadre of characters in those same roles.
In an earlier draft of the novel I am revising now, Reston Peace, Kenny Reston has a rather embarrassing encounter with a bunch of sorority sisters. In a sexual capture-the-flag moment, the young women manage to steal a piece of his clothing (his boxers) to mount on their sorority’s wall. For Kenny, it’s a humiliating experience. A week later, he encounters another guy on campus who had the same thing happen to him, but for this guy it’s a hugely comic story: his boxers stolen by six beautiful women! Kenny is perplexed about why he goes down the shame route while this other guy (a one-off character) can shake it off.
It’s an important moment in Kenny’s development, but the incident felt watered down by this nameless character who will never show up on the pages again.
So I step back to consider a better way to illustrate the same concept.
In the novel, Kenny and Peter (one of his football teammates) agree to model for a photographer, who insists on going for increasingly graphic sexual content. And here is where Kenny and Peter part ways: for Kenny, again it’s about the sense of shame. For Peter, he gets off on the exhibitionism.
Same concept, separate episode. So what’s the solution? Jettison the one-off character who loses his boxers and spend a little more time developing Peter’s character, because Peter is more crucial to the story. It also reduces the redundancy of scenes.
At a writer’s conference I attended, an author described how he had a novel with seventeen characters. Overall, he felt the story worked well, but he was concerned that some of the characters were less developed then others. He started retooling the cast – combining characters, merging storylines – so that by the end he had eight much better developed characters telling the same story.
The guy on the left has a story. And the one on the right. And the one in the third row, fifth from the end ...It’s a lesson I continue to learn. So maybe I should say, “Get behind me, Cecil B. DeMille!” because I don’t need a cast of biblical proportions to tell my story of one hundred thousand words.
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