Too many characters

Note: I’ll edit this later to include any relevant links, but for now I’ll just post the raw text.
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So I’ve decided to limit the stories I make to only having 78 characters. Let me explain.

This may be presumptuous of me but I'm going to assume that you've read a book, ebook or story of some kind. Non-fiction is fine, if that’s your bag, as long as it could be construed as having some kind of plot.

I'll tell you what - if the book you picked was The Bible, I'll let you off reading any one book in it, or any two by Paul, except for Philemon. If the only book in the Bible you're missing is Philemon, you are LAZY. Go & read it right now. It's fine. The rest of us will wait two minutes while you go do that.

God I'm such an ass.

Now then, today I'm hoping to write about how stories have characters, and unless I wander into some giant tangent. Oh – I know that while most books have characters, not all do, & if your book didn't have any characters, I'm dreadfully sorry but you'll just have to try to keep up with everyone else as we move along. If you think about it, it is kind of cool how prevalent characters are in stories. I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but characters are a very useful tool if one likes to write. I mean, sometimes the plot only moves because characters are doing stuff – making decisions, thinking & processing ideas or what have you. And that’s okay, because it relates to the audience’s capacity for empathy, which is really interesting.

Once upon a time back in Ancient Greece, plays were written that centered only on one character – this was your protagonist. It wasn’t until later that playwrights decided that audiences might be able to empathize with more than one character might other roles were invented – and if you’ve ever heard the word deuteragonist before then congratulations because I sure hadn’t until a little less than a week ago. Your deuteragonist is the story’s second most important character – might be the antagonist, might be your protagonist’s Blue Ranger. If your protagonist isn’t really the heroic type, the deuteragonist might be the one who actually stands for heroism.

Of course stories aren’t limited to having two characters that the audience can relate to. A story’s tritagonist is its third most important character. And I have to wonder if that might have been the point where we storytellers on the whole started into a downward spiral. I like to write, & because my favorite kind of writing fiction, I'm usually creating – imagining up & then defining – lots of characters for my audience to meet in my stories. But you know how some authors get a little too carried away in the fun of creating characters for a story? And yes, I'm looking at you, ghost of Robert Jordan. Mr. Jordan is notable for his Wheel of Time series, which (as of this posting) has over 2300 named characters. Holy crap. That’s nearly twice as many characters as there were in the (admittedly small, liberal arts) college I went to, and it is more than twice the number of students that would actually be on campus at a time. The Wheel of Time series has so many named characters that people have designed multiple websites just to keep track of them all. Now, authors so admittedly have little tricks to help people along with that, but sometimes it just gets out of hand.

I’ve noticed throughout my writing a tendency to create a fair number of named characters with fleshed out back-stories, and I’d be the first person to defend the practice. But I recently read this article on Cracked talking about what it called the Monkeysphere. Its real name is Dunbar’s number – a hypothetical limit on the amount of people that someone can empathize with & think of as real people. This actually makes a lot of sense. How many of your Facebook friends do you think about on a weekly basis? And I mean really think about – if a friend you do care about posts a status update, & then another friend comments or likes the post & you think “Oh. I’m friends with that person,” or not. Am I wrong? I think this is the reason that some people go around unfriending people – as far as they’re concerned, if they don’t actually care about him or her, why keep them on as a friend? To which my response would be, “Dunbar’s number is based on the size of the brain’s neocortex, & like all parts of the brain (as far as I know – hell I’m not a neuroscientist) it can grow, & its neural pathways can become more complex, based on how frequently it’s used. If monkeys organize themselves in tribes of specific numbers based on the size of their neocortex, why couldn’t the act of unfriending hinder that process?”

And who’s to say whether having a book with 2300 characters wouldn’t do the same thing? But if my audience is limited in the amount of people – and by extent characters in a novel – that they can relate to, maybe that’s something I ought to think about. I’ve been thinking I ought to maybe set myself a limit. And the number I’ve decided on is 78.

Yeah I know – random, right? Actually it’s not. It’s the same number of cards in a tarot deck – oh, and by the way if “number of cards in a tarot deck” was the first thing that you thought of when you read the number 78, then color me impressed. I probably could make this number higher, but I’m comforted by the precedent. After all, people who know how to use Tarot decks for astrology – regardless of whether or not it can actually tell the future – are able to determine complex relationships between the cards based on their position in the spread.

I know people who can’t do that with their social circles. It’s impressive. And if I’m going to be making stories, I’m going to expect myself to track the movements of the characters throughout the winding plots & subplots. Can I hold myself accountable for remembering where that many people are? To be honest, I have trouble with much smaller numbers of characters, & even Robert Jordan would split his his cast up by sending them all across the world. J. K. Rowling used the Harry Potter wiki to remind herself of the intricacies of her plot. Can you blame her? I applaud her for recognizing that to realistically create a boarding school, you’d need to create a lot of characters. And just as in real life, some characters were explored – even discovered – faster than others.

On the other end of that spectrum you have Twilight (which I read because I felt like a hypocrite criticizing it without at least trying to like it). Now I only read the first book, so you can send your hate mail to someone who cared enough to go any further than that, but I’m fairly sure there were more people in Edward’s family than there were named students at Bella’s school – pretty much because Bella only gave a damn about him. Is it realistic for a teenage girl in the stranglehold of young love? Maybe, sure – I like to think they’re at least slightly less myopic than that. Is it realistic for a 500 page book that isn’t adhering strictly to a minimalist style? I’m gonna go with no.

But I’m thinking 78 is a pretty good number in the middle. I don’t think I would count a character who I only intended to show up in the prologue. I don’t think I’d count a character who was specific to a role – in the same way as I wouldn’t count the attendant at a gas station I only visited once as being in my Monkeysphere, and chances are good I only remember his name because of the name tag. And some characters are really only around to deliver a line. Seriously, can you remember the terrified screaming face of the guy who screamed, “It’s Godzilla!”

But you remember when Christopher Walken shows up for five minutes in the middle of the movie & does something awesome because . . . it was probably awesome. Seriously, that guy is everywhere.

A Tarot deck is sectioned off into four suits of 14 cards each, called the minor arcana, & 22 (or 21+1 if you count the fool separately) major arcana. In a slightly stricter sense than I intend to limit myself, this would mean that I oughtn’t have more than 22 characters directing the plot in a major way at any given time, although that does sound like it might be a bit too many now that I think about it.

Admittedly the first Wheel of Time novel The Eye of the World had 410 characters, & it was actually quite good, but then again that does include several who died rather quickly & little things like the names that different societies have for the Devil. 2300 different names might not actually include 2300 characters, but I think it balances out against the ability to recognize which of the 73 or so guys named Benjamin I know when someone mentions “Ben” in a sentence. Or you can count it against the fact that, unless I’m mistaken, 2300 doesn’t actually include place names.

So I think this is a pretty reasonable limit, at least for characters I intend to recur throughout a plot. And I may decide to break it at some later point, but keeping the number in mind is a worthwhile goal. But what’s more important is remembering that my audience can only be expected to remember a certain number of characters, & that if I include too many, I run the risk of causing them unnecessary confusion or losing their interest. Your thoughts?

-Chris LC