Keeping track of multiple characters when writing a book.

[Wawona Girl]

I love creating characters of all types. But when you leave some on one planet and a few on another, I find it exhilarating when you bring all the main characters together and have to re-route or discard the rest. Is it a power play thing or is it just me?

 

[Biskit]

Be good to your characters and they will be good to you... no, sorry, typing total bollocks there. Kick your characters around the universe on their own paths, winnow the herd mercilessly, and bring the survivors together, clinging to a rock over the pit of doom, because it makes for a much more exciting story.

Although, seriously, don't discard too many. I tend to leave them by the wayside, hanging by their predicaments, because you never know when a good secondary character might have mileage as the star of another story.

On a seriously serious note - for me, it depends on how you feel about your characters. I used to litter my writing with a multitude of characters, which does take some effort in terms of management, but now I find I use fewer but get more thoroughly under their skin. Either way, there is a degree of thrill when disparate threads come together, but the challenge is to convey that to the reader because really, unless they get a buzz out of it the storytelling has flopped.

And going back to the more flippant...

Is it a power play thing or is it just me?

It's your universe to rule as you will, but with great power play comes great responsibility... not to spoil the story.

PS. Welcome to Chrons!!!!

 

[Jo Zebedee]

I love creating characters of all types. But when you leave some on one planet and a few on another, I find it exhilarating when you bring all the main characters together and have to re-route or discard the rest. Is it a power play thing or is it just me?

It depends on how engaged you make the reader in them and which genre you write in. Grimdark is pretty prosaic about high character counts, as is military sci fi - but not if it's a main character and bought into, in which case a death needs to be memorable and moving (and further the plot).
In fact, that's the point - does it move the plot on. If not, it's probably going to seem weak and turn people off over time.

 

[Wawona Girl]

You guys rock!!! You know exactly what I am talking about! Inventing characters is great fun. But when the time comes to discard them, man, is it hard. However, the power play itself is exhilarating. Playing God in a universe that you have created takes fortitude. But the hardest part at times is first putting bum to chair. Authors everywhere rock! So say we all.

 

[ColGray]

I love introducing a minor character somewhere and then just leaving them. Their life continues off-screen/page -- but they're out there if I need them again later.

I love those little call backs when i'm reading something. I'm trying to think of a good example and struggling but i think the Expanse does it a couple times -- some minor character appears in book 1 or 2 and then re-appears (briefly) in a novella or a later book and the history is kind of plot-irrelavant but it's a fun sting to catch it and remember.

 

[Swank]

I take the POV that characters are pawns to the plot, so you wouldn't have any that don't further the plot. That means that a character that does should have a death that furthers the plot.

Once that is settled you can take a character-centric POV that puts the intentions of the characters into the events they must perform in.


I don't see this as choosing plot over character or vice versa. You make your people for your story and your story for the people.

 

[Wayne Mack]

I keep track of all characters that I name in a spreadsheet along with any pertinent details about them. Later, when I need a tertiary character, I will first try and reuse one of the previously introduced characters. It keeps the reader from having a blitz of one-off characters and keeps me from stopping and thinking up a new character name.

 

[sknox]

Necro thread, we feed on the dead. <grin>
It's worth considering what "keeping track" means. At one level, it's just making sure you don't turn his brown eyes blue, and others have noted tools for that. Those are things that are fairly straightforward, both to track and to check.

More slippery are things like voice. This one bedevils me, sometimes. I like to make my main cast (primary and secondary characters) each speak in a way that makes them identifiable, if not in short sentences at least over the course of a monologue. But, my characters tend to grow (oh all right, change) over the course of the novel, and sometimes that leads them to change how they speak. Usually it's small things. This one never uses contractions. That one doesn't swear. Another sounds education.

But only by chapter 12, right? There's an evolution to how they talk. Sometimes I can set a tone and keep it from first to last, but other times ... not. This extends to how they dress, maybe how they fight, likes and dislikes, even down to the words I use to describe them in narration. Combing through the novel looking for character consistency can be wretchedly tedious. I often miss stuff.

It would be nice if there were software where I could tell it to pull out all references to Character X, including all their dialog, and let me peruse that separate from the novel. Or, at least, that'd be good for an editor!

 

[msstice]

I love introducing a minor character somewhere and then just leaving them. Their life continues off-screen/page -- but they're out there if I need them again later.

I love those little call backs when i'm reading something. I'm trying to think of a good example and struggling but i think the Expanse does it a couple times -- some minor character appears in book 1 or 2 and then re-appears (briefly) in a novella or a later book and the history is kind of plot-irrelavant but it's a fun sting to catch it and remember.

Disney's entire business model for it's Star Wars property is to create series based on minor characters from the original series.

 

[ColGray]

If SW has glossed over anything, it's that Darth Vader is a villain because he clearly has like six secret families--just based on his ability to have secret apprentices. Every SW pitch feels like it went:

Wait wait: what if Vader had a secret apprentice!
-You mean the one in the books?
No, a different one!
-Oh, the one in the video games? He had different apprentices in Force Unleashed and Dark Forces, didn't he?
Neither!
-Wait, do you mean a secret apprentice like in the Dark Horse comics?
Not that one, either!
<repeat>

 

[msstice]

What is missing is the backstory for the singers in the Cantina.

 

[ColGray]

i feel like robot chicken did a thing on that where they're like down on the their luck jazz musicians and hoping to make it big. It's... suitably dark

 

[Fiberglass Cyborg]

Not sure if there's a well-known name for this, but it's pretty common to structure a story around the relative locations of the major characters. There's the classic "Split the Party," (together - apart - togther), and the "Mysteriously Converging Plotlines" (apart - together). I can't actually think of a story that does "dispersal" (together - apart) except as a volume of a larger series.

James Joyce's "Ulysses" is a "Mysteriously Converging Plotline" book. Tad Williams' "Memory, Sorry and Thorn" cycles through "Split the Party" not once but three times.

 

[ColGray]

Necro thread, we feed on the dead. <grin>
It's worth considering what "keeping track" means. At one level, it's just making sure you don't turn his brown eyes blue, and others have noted tools for that. Those are things that are fairly straightforward, both to track and to check.

More slippery are things like voice. This one bedevils me, sometimes. I like to make my main cast (primary and secondary characters) each speak in a way that makes them identifiable, if not in short sentences at least over the course of a monologue. But, my characters tend to grow (oh all right, change) over the course of the novel, and sometimes that leads them to change how they speak. Usually it's small things. This one never uses contractions. That one doesn't swear. Another sounds education.

But only by chapter 12, right? There's an evolution to how they talk. Sometimes I can set a tone and keep it from first to last, but other times ... not. This extends to how they dress, maybe how they fight, likes and dislikes, even down to the words I use to describe them in narration. Combing through the novel looking for character consistency can be wretchedly tedious. I often miss stuff.

It would be nice if there were software where I could tell it to pull out all references to Character X, including all their dialog, and let me peruse that separate from the novel. Or, at least, that'd be good for an editor!

You might check out Fictionary. They extract characters and plot mark and let you condense characters (e.g. Character Name, Nick-name, Other nickname, Name with a rank, etc) and it makes searching characters pretty easy. Not sure on the dialogue tags, though.