Oh well.

So anyway, how many is too many? I don't want to confuse my readers into putting down my book (I know I've done that when there were too many characters) I'm talking about main and secondary characters, not auxilaries like a hotel chef, or something.

Confused (And Slightly Pissed) Chris

Depending on your particular abilities you might do better sticking with one or two, or you might pull off several. I guess my first question would be does the story have to have each of those characters POV to work? If not then see which ones it can live without.

The number of POV character's allowable is highly dependent on the audience. I prefer to read books with one or two POV characters, since with more you end up either using short snippets of POV at a time or going whole chapters without getting back to one of the important POV characters. As a reader I find both annoying, as a writer I find that I can almost never accomplish something with several POV characters that couldn't be accomplished just as well with one or two carefully chosen POVs.

If you are going to have more than four POV characters, I would generally recommend that you use one of the omniscient POV forms instead. Well written omniscient can induldge the audience in information that is not available to any of the characters, but which can give the reader a better sense of complexities in the plot that otherwise would require sifting through the perceptions of several characters.

Yikes, when I just read that number it seemed like a lot, but when I'm writing it does not seem like so many. First of all, over half the book is in one point of view. Two of the points of view only come in for a chapter, serve their immediate purpose, and then are not needed again. The other three are constant, important characters that the reader should be familiar with inside their heads or not.

Broadly speaking, the main characters are the people the story is about. Minor characters are present over the course of a story, but they are not the focus of the story. And "filler" characters are those necessary people your main characters are going to encounter throughout the day.

Let's look at an example: Star Wars. The main characters in that movie are Luke, Han, and Leia. Some of the minor characters are Chewie, Ben, Uncle Owen, C3-PO. And some of the filler characters are the Jawas, the bartender, the inter-galactic criminal who gets his arm cut off by Ben.

As we examine each category, we find that there are distinctions in each one. Of the three main characters listed, Luke is, by far, THE main character, the hero, the one the story is about. But Han and Leia are not THE main character; neither one is the hero. For clarity sake, they might be called minor-major characters.

Of the minor charcters, there is a vast difference between Ben and Uncle Owen. Ben might be called a major-minor character, whereas Uncle Owen is a pure minor chracter.

Once you establish what role your characters play in your story, you then need to consider Survivor's point: Who is your POV character(s)? Usually, the POV character will be your main character, but not always. In The Great Gatsby, the major character is Gatsby, but the POV character is Nick Carraway (I think it's Nick). Once you establish who the story is about, you need to consider the best way to tell that story.

In my experience, there is no right or wrong way to think about characters. There are helpful and not-so-help ways of thinking about characters, and what I told you I have found most helpful. For a more critical treatment of characters, you should read James Patrick Kelly's article, found here: www.sfwa.org/writing/character.htm .

Every story is different. Sometimes a story is about one or two characters. Probably a story should focus on one or two characters, but that does not mean that there are not overarching issues that need to be addressed by someone. Sometimes you even need to get into your bad guy's point of view.

I believe Robert Jordan has used over 60 POV characters. (I didn't count myself, I'm taking someone else's word for it.) But of all the things I've heard him cricized for, I've not heard anyone complain about being able to keep up with his characters. (I just complain that it's not ove ryet!)

Many science fiction stories and most fantasy stories have become longer and more complex as time goes on. We read most of our books in trilogies at the least, some go on longer than that. I think it might even be boring if you stay with too few POV characters in this situation.

I'll say what I've said before about Kelly's article--"Would you leave the safety of the spaceship? Of course not! However, the damn fools [like me] do every time; otherwise there'd be no story." But seriously, he has some pretty good points, though I don't know that they apply here (he says what a viewpoint character is, not how many you should have).

P.S. The Great Gatsby is one of the all time great books of all time, you philistine. Also, Nick isn't a POV character as such (or not as we're discussing the term), he is a narrator character--consciously telling the story rather than simply experiencing it.

This is a guess, but could that feeling have something to do with your 1757 posts as of October 3, 2003, 10:06 AM Central Time?

PS -- Here's a question. Why can't we say that Nick is the POV character, since the story is told from his point of view?

As for Robert Jordan...60 characters really aren't so many considering there are...what, 943 book in the series so far?

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Robert Jordan's books do not need to be written in an omniscient point of view, that would have been awful.

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I have not read any of his books. The fact that I have seen reviews mentioning the neverending series has discouraged me. Now Salvator I have read. I have to say he has done the most incredible job I have read in omnipresent POV. Salvator has had no problem getting me to be interested and care for the characters of the story. There have not been 60, but a quick mental count I come up with about 15 characters that could be classified as major to highly important minor.

The Crystal Gryphon series by Andre Norton had two POV characters which she alterenated each chapter between. That style of switching worked well for me also.

I would imagine it would depend on the audience you are looking for. Since most books I read limit to one or two POV characters I would think that would give you a wider range of people who would enjoy it. If you can do it right you can do more POV characters and do just as well.

One other thought this thread made me think of and that is Abe Lincoln's response to the question, "How long should a man's legs be?" Don't recall the exact answer, but it was something akin to "long enough to reach the floor and get him where he needed to go."

So...how many characters? As many as it takes to reach the end of the story and get the reader where they need to get, gets my vote.

I'll leave the consideration of omniscient POV alone (there are several) for now, since I'm sure that those of us that automatically dislike omniscient POV in our reading would not feel comfortable writing it. But I'll keep the assertion that once you have more than about four POV characters, you should switch to omniscient (so if you don't feel comfortable writing omniscient, don't write more than four POV characters).

As for Nick in The Great Gatsby (love typing that ), we certainly can call him a POV character, but the book is written in an entirely different kind of POV from what we are talking about. It's a first person journalistic narrative, with Nick as the person putatively writing down the story--a sort of fictional amateur investigative biographer. In a sense...well, I admire the form, but it isn't what we're talking about here. 'Nuff said.

Note that the above statements are general rules using poorly defined terms, not mathmatical truths. If I read a story in which the author comfortably transitions between five or more character POV's without leaving any of the important characters alone for an excessive length of time, I'm very likely to catagorize it as omniscient POV because in order to accomplish (to my taste) the author is going to need some of the tricks of omniscient POV (namely, seamless transitions between one character's POV and the next--where you can just switch perspective in the middle of the action). If I enjoy the story, then the author is going to have to use enough other elements of some omniscient POV so that I don't decide it is simply sloppy TPLOPOV. I actually prefer well written omniscient POV to TPLOPOV, because of the ability the author has to create effects that are awkward (such as high level dramatic irony) in TPLOPOV.

This goes for all forms of omniscient POV. I think that the easiest to master would probably be naive omniscient, where the implied narrator character merely believes he knows the entire story. We all tell stories like this anyway ("...then John insulted Mary, and Mary got angry..."), but a good naive omniscient implies a character narrator, not the author. This would have some elements in common with Nick in The Great Gatsby, though Nick is not naive, carefully seperates his first and second hand observations from assumption and attributions, and is an explicit rather than implicit narrator, which is why The Great Gatsby, works as first person.

Saying that, I have enjoyed novels written in omniscient point of view. I am rusty with the technique mostly because I have been writing third person limited for so long on my work in process, I was just thinking I really should try an omniscient short story just for practice.

Omniscient can work well for many types of stories. I would particularly consider omniscient point of view in a heavily event driven story, which is strange because most fantasy is event driven and they tend to be written in the limited point of view.

In my opinion, when writing a heavily character driven story, in which the main focus of the book is one character struggling and changing, the limited point of view should be used. Actually I could hardly imagine trying to write a strong character story (see the MICE question in OSC's books) in the narrator's voice.

I don't believe there is a magic number of point of view characters past which you need to go omniscient. Omniscient is more about whether you want to keep up with more than one character's inner thoughts in a given scene or if you feel the need to slip fluidly from one point of view to another.

The biggest problem with having too many point of view characters, like I said before, is when the reader does not know a point of view character before they appear. The same thing can go wrong with an omniscient viewpoint if you hop from one scene to another without proper transitions. I recently read an end of the world type story (I can't remember title or author right now, but I'm sure you're familiar with the type.) That began with one character is one state, then switched to another character in another state. Before he was through, we had met five characters in five states before we knew what their common bond was or why we were getting to know any of them. This story was told in third person limited, but switching to omniscient would not have fixed the problem.

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But of all the things I've heard him cricized for, I've not heard anyone complain about being able to keep up with his [Jordan's] characters

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Ye haven't heard my rants then. Somehow, when you pick up book 7 of a series, and you have no idea who they are talking about anymore, it becomes very easy to set said book down, and not pick up books 8, 9, 10, infinity... If he would just get on with it and finish some things... 1000 pages for 3 days of no plot resolution ... gah! (I end this rant to bring you back to your regularly scheduled post).

You can have quite a few main characters if you can make distinct and interesting, and can be properly developed within the lenght of the work. A fair number of secondary characters can be supported as well. I think it sort of depends on what you are trying to do with them, and how slowly they are introduced (character dump is not a good thing). I guess though, a cast of thousands novel is something that takes a certain flare to pull off, and you sacrifice space to deeply develop characters.

I had no trouble with Jordan when there were only the the 9 or so main characters from the first book or so. It was only when minor characters, mentioned breifly a book and 1500 pages ago, reappears without notice, and with now some sort of importance, that I got fed up. To be honest, I didn't care about them. I cared about Rand and his original friends from the villiage much more. It's their story. None of their stories has been fully resolved, so as new characters become main characters, even more story threads are added, the pace slows to a crawl, and even less gets resolved.

Personally, I want the series to be over and it has gone on for too long at too slow a pace. But why would I be so frustrated if the series wasn't so good in the first place that I care?