How many main characters is too many?
the context for me being a story about a group of individuals surviving a catastrophic event and how they change/develop in the aftermath of said event. These developments would not be solo stories, but the would all be related, like they'd all be part of a group.
I'm going into this with the idea of "as many good characters as I can come up with" but I want to put a number on it, as well as see how many other stories I could work with and how many characters I could have.
Good examples would be books you've read with large casts of characters,giving a rough estimate of the number of characters. though any advice would be helpful
pynchon
Stick with the greek tragedies and keep it to a maximum of three characters.
>>7771335
Depends on your ability to manage them, that's all. Books don't have size restrictions like movies, so I see no reason why you couldn't develop as many characters as you want to. But yeah, to give a meaningful role and growth for each protagonist, the story would wind up rather lengthy.
You need 150,000 words to fully flesh out one character. Adjust accordingly.
>>7772083
>flesh out
pure i d e o l o g y
>>7771335
17,56
>2016
>Still viewing characters as a numbers game
>>7771335
Eleanor Catton's "The Luminaries" had quite a few protagonists and it was a good read. Won the Booker prize I think.
As previously mrntioned, if you are going to have an extended character list it will probably have to bee a 600/700 pager if you want to have fully developed personalities.
in my book every actor is a side character lol
>>7771335
>the context for me being a story about a group of individuals surviving a catastrophic event and how they change/develop in the aftermath of said event.
Original idea OP, I would go with 6 main characters, all kids, and name them Ralph, Jack, Piggy, Roger, Simon, Sam and Eric. With Sam and Eric being twins. As for the title I think something involving flies would be great. Go on from here and thank me later.
>>7772189
>Original idea OP
Yeah, if you disregard every zombie book/movie/TV series.
>>7772192
are you really that dense? I mean, I haven't even read Lord of the Flies, still I get the reference
I wonder if adding zombies to Lord of the Flies would do anything interesting to the subtexts.Image sort of related; I googled for an image of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to attach and this came up.
>>7772191
quick, someone escaped from his containment board
>>7772277
The tri-dubs said containment board, couldn't you read it the first time?
>>7772283
No, anything that's /r9k/ should be contained on /r9k/, you deluded fedora.
>>7772120
Yea, this
If you're really developing your characters just three to five is already a huge task
>>7772314
>doesn't like something someone has posted in response to them
>starts greentexting furiously
>>7772120
>>7772310
i'll keep this in mind.
My goal isn't to pick a number and then create characters to fill that quota. Coming from a guy who hates how that is done to make a story diverse (gotta add a black character and a gay character to make story not racist) i understand that I shouldn't add excessive or flat characters just because I can.
>>7772192
it's not about zombies.....
>>7772189
I know the description i offered was vague, but you have to give me more credit than that. I'm well aware that most basic premises have been done in one way or another before.
11 million protagonists is too many.
I'd say if there are 8,232 protagonist, that's also too many. Dial it back.
419 protagonists: Interesting, but perhaps you want to cut a few.
1 protagonist: You can have more than that.
>>7772513
This is good advice.
>>7772473
HAHAHA op. We don't have to give you any credit for such a basic idea, that is as barebones as you can get! It's not even a synopsis, it's pretty much a subgenre.
>>7771335
It all depends of how well you handle them, but for an actual number, I'd say anything above 15 is too much. Make it 10 if you don't trust yourself.
Beyond that it's going to get really hard for the average reader to keep track of them.
>>7772283
>not a sausage party
>tumblr
Please be bait.
>>7772208
for a change, i know who these semen demons are
>>7773021
Seed shit
>>7773021
I'm guessing they're the lead female characters in the filmisation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.
>>7772473
>create characters to fill a quota
>gotta add a black character and a gay character to make it not racist
you've got a really creative mind there bub
How many kids were in lord of the flies?
I suppose If each character has a role to play in 'the big one' then you can have as many characters as you like.
>>7775390
Are you dumb?
TOO MANY COOKS.
>>7777320
spoil the broth.
>>7771335
I wrote a book where the would-be protagonist dies in the prologue and the rest of it (with a couple of minor exceptions) is written from the perspectives of characters who get 1 chapter a piece. There's a prolouge with an unnamed narrator, a fictional afterword from the (fictional) editor of the book, 29 chapters from the first person perspectives of 29 different characters, 2 chapters that are internet conversations involving multiple people, and 3 sets of 3 part chapters about 3 different characters narrated by a character who's an analogue for the fictional author.
I've found it's very easy to have a host of fully developed characters in your head, but conveying that development through words to someone else really is not as easy and the more characters you have, the longer it's going to take. It's irritatingly difficult to sum someone up over the course of a handful of pages.
I once tried writing something with a large cast of main characters, and it turned into a 470k nightmare that I eventually decided I hated.
The trick is, I suppose, to have a handful of memorable supporting characters who you can have crop up in certain scenes to act as a sort of filler, without going into too much detail about their lives. I later tried this with a 60k story with one POV character, and a second character that the story followed quite closely, and a host of recurring background characters. It worked very well.
>>7779222
It really depends on how you do it. If they're going to be constantly recurring throughout a book and have multiple chapters devoted to them, it'll be annoying to manage, but if you do something like this >>7779167 you can take a short story-like approach to their development and not have it last too long.
