Does Your Novel Have Too Many Characters?

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

In one of her posts, Robyn Hood Black shared an exercise about testing the relationships of your characters to each other using cut out pieces of paper. I loved this idea, and it got me thinking that this was a great way to test a very common writing question:

Does my novel have too many characters?

This is hard to answer because "too many" is subjective. An epic high fantasy is likely to have more characters than a personal contemporary story. Even making a list of your characters isn't always helpful, because many will be walk-on or throwaway characters, and knowing that, they carry less "weight" in a list. You might not even list them because they're so unimportant, yet they take up valuable room in the reader's memory.

My twist on Robyn's exercise can help you find the answer.

Step One: Take a sheet of paper and draw two boxes in the middle, evenly spaced apart. Write your protagonist's name in one box, your antagonist's name in the other. Add boxes if you have more than one of either. If you find yourself adding a lot of boxes at this stage, you probably have too many main characters.

(More on figuring out who your protagonist is here)

Step Two: Add boxes with the other character's names. Put them below the protagonist if they're directly connected to her, above the antagonist if they're connected to him. Put down:

• Major secondary characters first (friends, sidekicks)
• Then important characters (people the plot or story hinges on, but aren't hanging out with the main characters)
• Then minor characters (recurring people who play smaller roles and are seen multiple times)
• Then walk-on characters (people in one or two scenes who don't do much, but have names anyway)
• Then any character who interacts with your protagonist or antagonist who isn't already listed

For this exercise, let's say a "character" is anyone who is A) named, as names = importance to a reader and suggest they should be remembered, or B) someone who is shown on the page affecting the protagonist (or antagonist). For example, your hero is mugged by three thugs. There are four people in that scene, but are all of them necessary?

(More on developing secondary characters here)

Step Three: Draw lines connecting the boxes. Use a solid line if the character directly interacts and affects the protagonist, or a dotted line if they are connected more to someone else connected to the protagonist. For example, when your hero is mugged by three thugs, and only one speaks to him and actually interacts in a meaningful way, he gets a solid connection line. The other two thugs would get dotted lines to the first thug, because they're connected to him, but really don't affect the protagonist much.

Step Four: Draw wavy lines between any characters who are connected to each other so you can see the relationships.

Optional: Use different colors to help keep the connections clear. Depending on the number of characters and the number of colors available, you might use one color per character.

What This Should Tell You:

• How many characters are in the book(number of boxes)
• Which characters directly affect your protagonist and which ones don't (number of solid lines)
• Which characters might be good candidates to combine into one

If you had a hard time finding room for all your boxes, that's a red flag you might have too many characters. Same if you have a lot of characters who have zero connections to your protagonist, but a lot of connections to the other characters in the book. If you see a lot of people with dotted lines to one person, that could be characters you can combine into one or two people (such as all those extra thugs).

Extra Tip: This could also be useful to see if a particular scene has too many characters in it, especially those hard-to-manage scenes with a group of people where everyone is chiming in about something. Who actually matters in that scene and who is just there to toss out a line?

Extra, Extra Tip: You could also do this with scenes instead of characters to test which scenes move the plot (use core conflict instead of protagonist) and which are just duplicating what another scene is doing.

(More on combining scenes here)

What I like about this exercise is that it forces you to think about how the various characters are connected. Someone might feel like they're affecting the protagonist, but when you sit down and really look at it, they have no direct interaction with them at all. They're more connected to someone who is connected to the protagonist. That person might be a good candidate to cut, combine, or give more plot to so they do have a stronger connection (and possibly a deeper layer) to the protagonist and the story.

Of course, there are characters who affect change without ever directly interacting with the protagonist, so keep your story and what you want to do with it in mind if you do this exercise. You might use a different style or color of line to denote that if you have characters like this is your story.

Sometimes a visual representation can provide more information than words on a page. And looking at our stories from a different perspective can allow us to see things we normally would have missed.

Do you feel there' a right number of characters for a novel? Do you think it changes by story or genre? How many do you feel are "too many?"

Find out more about characters and point of view in my book, Fixing Your Character & Point-of-View Problems.

Go step-by-step through revising character and character-related issues, such as two-dimensional characters, inconsistent points of view, too-much backstory, stale dialogue, didactic internalization, and lack of voice. Learn how to analyze your draft, spot any problems or weak areas, and fix those problems.

With clear and easy-to-understand examples, Fixing Your Character & Point-of-View Problems offers five self-guided workshops that target the common issues that make readers stop reading. It will help you:

• Flesh out weak characters and build strong character arcs
• Find the right amount of backstory to enhance, not bog down, your story
• Determine the best point(s) of view and how to use them to your advantage
• Eliminate empty dialogue and rambling internalization
• Develop character voices and craft unique, individual characters 

Fixing Your Character & Point-of-View Problems starts every workshop with an analysis to pinpoint problem areas and offers multiple revision options in each area. You choose the options that best fit your writing process. It's an easy-to-follow guide to crafting compelling characters, solid points of view, and strong character voices readers will love.

Available in paperback and ebook formats.

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. The Shifter, was chosen for the 2014 list of "Ten Books All Young Georgians Should Read" from the Georgia Center for the Book.

She also writes the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.

When she's not writing novels, she's teaching other writers how to improve their craft. She's the founder of Fiction University and has written multiple books on writing.

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