How to Juggle Lots of Characters

One of the biggest differences between my first novel, Killing the Immortals, and this novel draft I’m almost done with, possibly called Separation, (but who the hell knows right now?) is the number of characters. Killing the Immortals was a lean, sleek bit of writing … very much by design. Considering it was the first novel I’d ever written, and pretty much the first fiction I’d ever really written, I didn’t want to get too complicated with it. It was relatively short, with few quoted characters, and there was very little fat to trim by the end. Everything served the plot, and it flew along at a breakneck pace.

With this novel I’m writing now, I pushed myself a little harder, taking on a more ambitious, dense narrative with more characters to track and develop. With more characters comes more storylines and more people to keep distinct. It’s undoubtedly been more challenging, and I think will make for a more engrossing read. It’s a big world to wander around, and the draft itself is going to be close to 30,000 more words than KTI.

By comparison, with Killing the Immortals, I had four core characters — Cain, Hannah, Richard, and Jacob — two secondary characters, one on the third-tier, and then your basic assortment of people popping in and out of the narrative with almost no role in the story. With Separation, I again have four core characters, but the secondary characters have expanded out to seven — more, depending upon how you define “secondary” — with five more having solid third-tier roles, and some more who hover around the periphery.

So, how do you adjust to juggling 16 characters vs. just 7? It definitely takes some work to not allow them all to be the same, or to have them be mysteries to your reader. Here’s some insight into how I tried to do it effectively …

• Be the expert on each of them
  If you can’t describe each of these characters, who’s going to be able to? In the same way you have to be the expert on your story’s setting, and the various elements of the narrative, you need to know every one of your characters intimately. I wrote up a full profile on each of the main and secondary characters that includes everything from their name, age, nationality and occupation to their mannerisms, habits, flaws, and what they want out of life. For each of the main characters, I wrote a summary of the entire story — or, at least, what I thought was the story when I started out — from their perspective. For the third-tier characters, I did a less detailed profile, but it still laid out a lot of details about who they were. That not only helped me learn about the characters, but gave me a reference to go back to as I wrote, so I could keep them consistent, and understand how they’d react to given situations.
• Find a way to make them distinct
  This gets harder the more characters you have, but it’s important to figure out some distinct characteristic about each of them, and play that up. Maybe one of them uses the same word a lot. Maybe one of them is sarcastic and funny, or timid, or has a Southern accent, or cusses a lot — or, on the flip side, always replaces “damn” with “dagnabbit.” Those profiles help a lot to determine what’s distinct about each character, and it’s important to refer back to them. The easiest thing is to let all the characters just sound like you talking, but that’ll make for sucky writing. And I don’t want my writing to be sucky.
• Give them something to do
  It’s important that each main and secondary character has a key role to play, and that you give them some solid “screen time,” to borrow a film term. As each character appeared in the novel and their role grew — I had no idea who all the secondary characters would be when I started this story — I thought about where each one fit into the narrative, and why they were there. What significance could they play? Why were they useful to the story? Some aren’t, and you can let them slide. But the ones who matter need to have a character arc, which can end in triumph, death, or somewhere in between.
• Don’t forget about them
  When you’re juggling 40 quadrillion characters, it can be easy to forget about them for too long, or even completely. You get caught up telling the story of how Peter and Mary fell in love, and completely forget that poor Mark is sitting back there wondering what’s next for him. This, of course, goes for the primary and secondary characters, mostly. But any character you’ve devoted significant time to deserves some sort of closure for the reader. Some may make short cameos, but I make it a point to give the others some form of arc, even when I’m a fan of ambiguity in the end. The key is not to leave them and the reader hanging by talking about someone up to Chapter 30, and then nothing else as the story ends in Chapter 62. The odds of doing that increase, the more characters that are there. I find that having two anchor points for perspective that I shift back and forth from helps me keep track of who’s within each, and make sure I return to each character regularly.