In the first 27 chapters he introduces 25 main character - yes, MAIN CHARACTERS, not including supporting characters - and accomplishes absolutely nothing of great importance until chapter ... 40'ish. During thise time all he does is "bring us in to the every days of these characters," which you have no idea why they are even in the story ... and honestly still have no idea what the story is about. Some characters he brings in for the sole purpose of being introduced and made a tiny bit likeable so he can then kill that character off.

No, it's not George R.R. Martin ... he has a lot of characters, but each of his characters actually moves the story in some way. Plus, I like his books.

Anyway, back on topic. I've noticed this type of writing is becoming popular in new SciFi/Fantasy books. Reading this book has put thing into perspective of just how crappy some of these books truly are (i.e. they only get published because of past accomplishments). This begs the question, how many characters are too many? At want point do you have so much going on that the reader throws up his arms and screams, "please, God, make the bad man stop?"

For me, I think there shouldn't be any more than one main character, who should dominate the narrative/page count, and no more than 10 major characters, who can and should have page count, but only when the story dictates. Minor characters should have no page count.

There should be exceptions of course, but generally this is what I like. Now I am curious what other thinks. Your opinions on the matter would be appreciated.

The novels I've recently read have many main characters, but each one is needed to move the plot along. Each one has his/her own introduction then they meet up with each other. That interaction with each other is may be what is missing from the last book you read.

Anyways, there will be others who have the same, or very similar, view as you do Jammrock.

Novels---rare for me now---do something similar. But with a larger spread of characters, I'll occasionally have one or two groups-of-two-or-three go off and do their own thing in a parallel plotline---though usually I've stuck with the lead character's point of view throughout most of it.

Anybody else who shows up in the scenes besides the two-or-three is usually there to just say a line (say, in a restaurant, "Thank you for your order, sir, here's your change," or somesuch) and then leave. Important to keep the scene moving, maybe with a story or two of their own...but off the focus of what I'm trying to accomplish.

To me it seems as though many authors are forgetting to write a good story in favor of writing a soap opera. A love triangle here, a couple of deaths here, a few mysteries here and there and all of a sudden you have a novel ... but where's the story. You spend so much time keeping track of what the cast is doing that the story and plot, or lack thereof, is lost. In the first 50 chapters I would guess that there were about 30 different characters that recieved their own chapters.

You see, it's not how many characters there are but rather how they are introduced. In Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series he starts with just Rand -- and then Rand and his father go into town and meet some friends and we spend some time with all of those characters before we get into their POV. And the story is moving the entire time.

I'm surprised you kept reading that book. I would have put it down. There are too many books to read to waste time on one like that. You simply aren't going to remember all those characters because they have not been tied into the story in any way. It is the story that makes the characters memorable.

But just for the record, whil I've seen this done more times in published works than I think is reasonable, I don't think it's a growing trend. You may have run across a few recently but I've read few books written in such a blatantly bad style.

RULES OF THUMB FOR MULTIPLE MAIN/POV CHARACTERS:

1. Introduce one in another character's POV before we enter his.

2. Introduce main characters one or two at a time and in a way that is relevant to the story.

3. Keep their names distinct. Especially for main characters, it doesn't hurt to have each one start with a different letter of the alphabet.

4. Give each one a quirk or distinctive trait to help keep them familiar and energized. You may even have to draw on steretypes a little to do this, but if the person is a main character they will eventually have to transcend that stereotype.

5. The closer to the front of the story a character is, the more important a reader will think s/he is. It is best, therefore, not to start with a minor or throwaway character. If you can, introduce the MAIN main character first.

The book you read had too many characters you felt didn't support the story. I've also read books writtin in a singular POV that I felt seemed unfinished. In both cases, the author failed to support the story.

As for why I kept reading? It was en eAudioBook I downloaded for free as part of my libraries new eAudioBook program. I was on vacation and I listen to audio books to keep me awake during long drives. The book has since been removed from my PDA.

quote:

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The trouble is that this is becoming a trend. Authors are putting more and more characters into their stories and making the stories so huge and so long that it's really becoming a turn off. Yet, reading stories with a big cast is fun. So where do you find the balance?

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There might be a reasonable analogy here with classical music, and the analogy might help us find a balance. (I'm thinking out loud here, so this is rather long. Sorry...)

Earlier classical music with Bach, Handel, Mozart, etc., used ensembles of (relatively speaking) modest size -- a size that might be found in a fair-sized town or city.

The Romantic period, starting with Beethoven (although not considered "Romantic", he's on the bubble), there was an increasing tendency to use larger and larger orchestras, culminating in pieces like Schoenberg's _Gurrelieder_, which required a gigantic orchestra and two (or was it three?) separate full choruses. Much of this gargantuan music is also somewhat less accessible to the average listener. In an environment where most composers got bigger and bigger and more and more "Romanitic", some composers even made a name for themselves by getting simpler. Erik Satie might be a good example.

Only orchestras from large cities can play or record pieces of this type; therefore (a) the number of people producing this type of music decreased somewhat, because they wouldn't get anything for it, and (b) the number of pieces that any orchestra would choose to perform was limited somewhat: people knew Mahler (after people like Bernstein reintroduced him) and Shoenberg, and were willing to invest in their pieces, but they _weren't_ willing to invest in performing lesser-known artists who wrote equally ambitious pieces. A rare exception is William Bolcom's _Songs of Innocence and of Experience_, which took some Grammies: but it's worth noting that it has been performed less than two dozen times since it was composed in the (I think) '70s, and that the recording that Naxos produced used primarily amateur musicians -- college students from the university where Bolcom teaches -- which helped drive down production costs.

Meanwhile, there are still plenty of orchestras and smaller ensembles willing to play less demanding works. (Note: by "less demanding" I mean only in terms of investment, not in terms of individual playing ability or sensitivity.) Many composers wrote lots of good music in the 20th century without using giant orchestras, and many small-to-midsized ensembles played classical music of all periods to appreciative audiences. Most of the most enduring and familiar pieces of music are not behemoths.

I said there was an analogy, so here it is.

Pick a writer's Beethoven -- Tolkien, maybe -- and extrapolate forward to the various Mahlers and Shoenbergs and Bolcoms -- Jordan among them, perhaps. Eventually the publishers will find the demands of these behemoth-writers' books too be too much for the mass market to bear, with the costs of paper, promotion, and so on increasing beyond the ability to support them; as well as a decreased audience, since most people won't be willing to read a 10-volume series with a cast of hundreds. Only those with a proven draw, such as Jordan, will be given the chance to write anything of that type.

Well, almost "only". There will still be room for the occasional gamble on a new writer trying something that big. The analogy breaks down because people will re-record _Gurrelieder_, but nobody will rewrite WoT.

That said, I think the point remains: the biggest market and most consistent market will probably be for the basic, accessible, manageable-number-of-characters, 350-or-so-page novel. If you love the giants and you want to be a Robert Jordan, then more power to you; but I expect that the most probable place for success and longevity remains here. We might even make names for ourselves as great writers of straightforward, outstanding, mass-market fiction.

It reminds me of a story I critiqued for a friend once. She's absolutely obssessed with putting as many main characters into a story as she can. But here's the thing: not only does she have 16 main characters in the novel I critiqued for her, they've all got real names and psuedonyms that they switch off using whenever they feel like it. She also switches off the names in the narration as if she expects the reader to automatically remember which name belongs with which psuedonym and vice versa. I got so confused, I wrote a long critique of just that explaining why it was not a good idea--but she didn't listen (even though several others besides myself have told her the same thing) and just kept things the way they were.