Do you ever blend multiple story ideas into one novel?

[Fantasy-Faction]

I remember once when I had about three different stories I wanted to tell but decided on their own they simply didn't work or weren't quite 'epic' enough. So I took the three characters and merged their stories into one epic... it actually worked quite well and as I probably could have squeezed a novel out of each character - fitting all three stories into one novel meant it was packed with action.

I notice in a lot of today's more popular fiction (Brent Weeks, Peter V.Brett, etc) there seems to be a trend where there is no 'one' main character, but instead two or three.

Is it something you have done before? Something you could consider?

 

[Boneman]

My current Opus has two 'main' characters, and a couple more fairly major characters - it does present problems with pov sometimes, which is something I'm working on right now. Joe Abercrombie does it pretty well in the First Law Trilogy, if you haven't read them yet.

My problem will be when the two main characters meet up, (book 2) who's pov do I use?

 

[Fantasy-Faction]

Are you writing both in the first person then? That certain is a tough one... =/

I guess you would need to use it to your advantage though... Alternate between the two in a way that keeps things exciting and conceals the right information at the right time and gives it at the right time in other situations.

If you can't work it out just kill one of them late in book 1... lol

 

[Kyndylan]

Hmm, I have very little experience of writing - it's always one of those "I'll start sometime soon" things.

Firstly, I'd differentiate between stories and characters, whereas you seem to equate the two. I'd say slotting more than one character into a novel is fine if it works, but trying to shoehorn several disparate stories in is probably unwise.

My problem is that I tend to flip-flop between wanting to write my SF story and wanting to write my fantasy one. Unfortunately, I don't think I can fit one into the other! Of course, that's partly down to the milieu, but equally, the story arcs just aren't compatible.

As for characters, I don't have a problem with it in principle. But I would be loath to do it to the detriment of any single character; and for me, at least, the chances of having multiple characters with their own stories (as you're talking about) that fit together is slim.

 

[Boneman]

No, close 3rd person pov. They do belong in different worlds, so the differentiation is easy, but they will meet as star-crossed lovers later...

 

[Toby Frost]

Yes, quite often. I think quite often two ideas can crash into one another and form a more interesting third one. Not only does it increase word count and the feeling of epicness, but it creates opportunities for interesting things to happen as the ideas intersect.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

If you like to play with concepts of narrator, like, say, Gene Wolfe, the first person is essential, but you can do things with intertwined pov narratives that you can't do otherwise - like tell one character one thing but not the other, and then have the reader notice... great for suspense. Multiple narrative strands, first person included, are also great for showing the reader different aspects of a situation or environment. I much prefer the multiple strand technique, to me it seems like there's more you can do with it.

 

[Fantasy-Faction]

I done it with my work recently because I had the perfect character to fit into the story but had him in another novel I was working on too. I decided that rather than give both their own novels, I could quite easily bring the two together.

I have so far kept them completely seperate, but eventually they will meet and things will go from there. It has worked surprisingly well so far. It also means that rather than trying to think up a new character, I already have a load of back story and traits already in place. Therefore saving a lot of time

 

[GreenKidx]

Technically, I have not done this yet. However, I have toyed with the idea. Right now I have a list of about five ideas I really want to develop. Two of those ideas could work fairly well together if I were to slightly tweak the main characters identities and motives. Also, I wouldn't be putting separate characters into one novel, I would be making two sets of two characters the same one set. In effect creating a pair of new hybrid characters. While combing the two would give both storiesa sense of derection and purpose they had been lacking previously, the previously simple tales now become too epic for one stand alone and I feel some of the charm of the more is lost. What was once a tight, sharp set of pictures, is now a dazzling, riot of colors and shapes...

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I notice in a lot of today's more popular fiction (Brent Weeks, Peter V.Brett, etc) there seems to be a trend where there is no 'one' main character, but instead two or three.

Is it something you have done before? Something you could consider?

I have three main characters in my NaNo book, but they are all together for the most part. When they do separate, they aren't apart in the sense of, say, a whole chapter of their own, but just bits that follow each one till they come back together again.

I may have a secondary story of sorts threading its way through now, as right at the end of NaNo I figured out a better way to tie things together and it involves an outside plot wrapping around. It didn't start that way, though, and it was never two separate stories but rather a main story and an offshoot inspired by the main one.

 

[Dozmonic]

I've just been doing a Chapter/Scene/POV breakdown of David Gemmell's second Troy book, Shield of Thunder. For the first part of the book he has 11 chapters, 33 scenes (including prologue). He uses 8 POV characters for this, of which 3 are main POV characters, receiving a majority share of the scenes and the other 5 have just a couple of scenes each. The second part of his book, he repeats the process, introducing a whole new host of characters. Some from his first part do come into it later in the second part, while others who were minor in the first part play major roles in the third. Going from the first part alone it looks like he could be using as many as 9 main characters and 15 minor characters to tell his story from. That's a lot of characters and yet I think it's one of his better works.

His characters have their own motives, interests and threads of story but also interact with each others' threads. It makes a rich tapestry of characters whose own stories all move the plot forward. At times you could almost pluck the characters and events out, change location names and interweave them with other characters to make stories. Any book told with a lot of characters is telling lots of stories woven into one novel. Some books with few characters do the same as a single character can follow different storylines at the same time.

 

[Nik]

Sometimes my notions synergise...

Since I haven't yet produced anything commercial, I can't say if that's good or bad...

 

[InfinitySquared]

Well. Currently, the one I'm writing is technically three separate plots that slowly, and gradually twine together to form a fourth one.

 

[vector7]

Are you writing both in the first person then? That certain is a tough one... =/

Valid point. I tried that and miserably failed. But there are neat ways you could crash two different stories or characters together and watch them burn or kiss or whatever. It would really make the story better and nicer to read, if and only if you wrote it well...

 

[Jake Reynolds]

It is definitely doable. I have two main characters in each trilogy, and then I throw in secondary character pov for various other scenes when there is something happening that is best conveyed by an outside perspective. Be careful, though, because if the characters don't meet for a long time, readers will choose their favourite and then pay less attention to the other. Similarly, if they meet and then separate for any length of time, you may encounter the same problem; in part two of one of my trilogies they separate at the start and then don't meet up again until half way through the third novel.

Still, in this instance the theme is largely that they are finding out what they're supposed to do, chasing why they exist etc.

 

[My Atomic Tales]

The current pile of tripe I laughingly call my novel has multiple story ideas, but I've tried to meld them together and reign in my flights of fancy so that the minor characters don't detract too much from the main plot. It helps that I decided early on to keep the cast of characters quite small, as I don't think I have the intellect to keep track of the dynasty some authors are happy to spawn.

 

[ML Hamilton]

My first novel has a main character in the first half, who becomes a subordinate character in the second half as another character takes over. It just worked both with plot and with the dynamic nature of both characters. However, both characters are very closely tied together and their stories merge in the center so the transition is gradual.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Everything of novel length that I've ever come close to completing had at least two main characters, as well as a host of secondary characters working away on subplots of their own. But I've toyed with the idea of plots with only one (first person narrator) character. Maybe someday ...

 

[reiver33]

I always use a 1st person POV and as such can find it hard to 'stretch' a narrative idea much beyond 25k words, although this is also a function of my limited vision, not working from notes and writing in short segments.

Would 3 or 4 such stories, all featuring the same main character, constitute a novel? Or would it more properly be termed a mini-anthology?

 

[Toby Frost]

I'd have thought it would be a set of linked short stories, like The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes or Sapkowski's The Last Wish. I really like the idea, but I think I would find something like that quite hard to write. I'm also not sure how commercial it would be.