How many main characters do you have?

An unreliable narrator is someone who the reader can't really trust. Basically it is when the narrator's perspective is compromised and they tend to blur the lines between fact and fiction. The narrator in my story is unreliable as a lot of things she says contradict with each other and due to her depression she is prone to exaggeration.

 

Make sure you give your main, important characters enough screentime and attention. I can think of a least one series where the number of main characters are an obstacle to the story, as non of them got enough main character attention. It may make your story longer, which means you will have to work harder on keeping the reader's attention. For example, A Song of Ice and Fire; one of the reasons the books are so long is because of so many POVs, alot of which are developed as if they were a single main character. So, alot of main characters are a good idea, but you'll have to work harder on your story.

 

I agree with you Domino . A lot of POVs confuse the writer as well as the readers and it often leads to diversion from the central theme of the plot and the focus in the story.

 

An unreliable narrator means the story is told in first person but that the narrator is not telling the truth or the whole truth.

 

Y

 

You mean hiding some of the information?

 

It could be deliberately withholding, or it could be more subtle than that. We all suppress unpleasant memories to a certain extent. This is why first person narrators are considered less reliable than third person.

In a project I have since put aside, the character who introduces the story treated people really badly as a young man. Now, in middle age, he is trying to make it up to one of them by helping him get back on his feet but needs the help of another person he hurt to accomplish it. In his introduction, he admits he was a louse when he was younger, but we don't know to what extent. Later, we get a better idea, but not from him.

 

Or a child narrator may misunderstand what is happening in the story.

 

I've also written (briefly) an unreliable narrator who was a propagandist historian for a future government. So in that case the narrator was actually lying.

 

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas comes to mind.

Wonderful book, and one of the few book to movie adaptations I've actually liked. I don't like it when the director, screenwriter or producer changes too much, especially when I love the story enough to have a strong emotional investment in it. Probably one of the reasons if I get published and IF I get approached to make a movie deal I would insist on being involved and moreover I would insist on slapping anyone with the book if they said "yeah but what if...?"

 

Some things in books don't translate well into movie adaptations, but I've seen some weird choices when it comes to removing key details or adding things which have nothing to do with the source material whatsoever.

Should you be fortunate enough to have a movie adaptation made from one of your works, be prepared for some changes, but don't be afraid to speak up if you're not happy about changes to key details.

 

In the novel I am working on, there are four main characters, two guys and two gals. There's absolutely NO romantic entanglement involved in the story whatsoever. Why would there be they either hate or mistrust one another and one even believes the other is an escapee from an insane asylum.
The story starts with Layla then the others are introduced, and they have to muddle through their differences to unite and to save the world. There are many other characters who come in and out of the story. But none of them take centre stage, like the quartet, they have there part to play but are only there to enlighten the main characters on important information they will need on their journey.

Mine too is written in third person. But if you have read any of the my submissions here you'll see I have trouble slipping tenses. In my defence, I get caught up in the euphoria of finishing a short story and press submit without proofreading, it's a weakness and an sign of an amateur.

I read (or may have heard) that if you have more than nine characters in you novel it confuses the reader. Agatha Christie was famed for doing this but in her case she did it on purpose, she did it to take the reader on a wild goose chase, to steer them in the wrong direction, to throw red herrings in the mix and apparently she did it well. She of course was writing murder mysteries but if you're not, nine main characters are IMH way to many characters to keep track off.

 

This is true, however look how they butchered Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Not my favourite book of the series but god the movie was TERRIBLE.

Another example? Twilight. The books are better than the movies by far. I won't pretend that the character development/reactions are realistic, hell I don't even LIKE Twilight, but 14-year-old me did, and 20-year-old me thinks it would get a hell of a lot less hate if the movies weren't so terrible.

Percy Jackson. Great YA series. Horrible HORRIBLE movie.

The Mortal Instruments. I love the books. I refuse to even try to watch the movie because of the casting choices. They only got one of them even remotely right. Others in the fandom have said I'm not missing much.

Eragon. Don't even get me started.

If you're going to make a movie out of a book, yeah, there are things that need to be left out, because you simply can't fit as much content into a two-hour movie as you can into a book that someone might willingly read over six, seven, eight or even more hours.

TBSP was a good adaptation. I haven't read any Tolkien, I can't wrap my head around his prose, but people who have read his books have said the movie adaptations were great. MOST Harry Potter is reasonable, a few things are changed but not enough to irritate those who've read the books.

I don't know. To be honest I'd rather be approached with a TV show deal than a movie deal.

 

Just to clarify, there is a distinct difference between a Main Character and a Primary Character. As some others have already noted, you might have some important characters that move the story along but are not necessarily the most important focus of the story.

You actually have four classes of characters in a story - The main character(s); the primary character(s); secondary (supporting cast); and, tertiary (throw-away) characters.

The main are, perhaps, a step above the primary characters. Think Protagonist vs. Antagonist, here. Both are critically important to the story and plot but the focus of the story and its ultimate outcome are primarily on one character and not both. The same holds true with the rest of your primary characters as opposed to your main character or characters.

You say you have six main characters. Are they all equally vested in the outcome of the story? Do they all play an equally prominent (prominent not important) part in the story?

If they were getting academy awards, who would get the best supporting actor award and who would get the best actor award?

 

OotP was too long for screen adaptation unfortunately. I watched the movie first then read the book and was very disappointed with how much they cut but they did what they could with the length they had.

Yeah, Twilight movies are terrible. I tried to get into the books. I really tried. But seeing Bella idolize Edward every two paragraphs was very annoying. That, and I felt I was reading the book way too fast for some reason. I like the soundtracks of the movies, though.

Never read Tolkien, but people say bad things about the new Hobbit movies. I don't care since I found them enjoyable.

 

Depends on how many angles I want the story to be viewed in. If I want the story to have two sides, I'll have two main characters. 3 sides, 3 main characters. If I want to show how intricate human relationships are and how we are all connected, then probably more.

 

OotP could have been done so much better. So, SO much better. I felt like it was a bridging movie setting the scene for HBP and informing people of the story between GoF and HBP. OotP was its own book and should have been its own movie.

The soundtracks of the Twilight movies are amazing. More than half of the music I have playing when I write, I discovered because of the Twilight soundtracks. Individual tracks that I like encouraged me to seek out more from each of the bands/artists they were from and my over-200-track writing playlist is very heavily influenced by that.

I've TRIED to read Tolkien. Tried. I enjoyed having The Hobbit read to me when I was a kid, but actually reading it myself proved to be too much effort. I'm a lazy reader. If I actually have to think about what's going on to keep track of it all, more often than not, I don't bother. I wanted to read the LOTR trilogy before I watched the movies, but... that just... didn't happen. I haven't seen any of the Hobbit movies yet, sort of wanted to finish LOTR first [I'm halfway through Return of the King]. Even though The Hobbit is set before LOTR. I don't know, don't ask me! My logic is weird.

 

The large number of groups of characters and the plots that intertwine round them make The Hobbit and other Middle Earth books challenging to understand, but rewarding when you finally figure out the plot.

 

HAve to be careful not to head hop in such an instance.

 

My novel has a cat called ...hmmmm DAM IT and DAM your stereotypes. im going to write Sir Flufferson and the Twine ball of Doom.

 

i raged at what they did to Eragon, i love the cycle personally.

Anywhoo onto what was asked by the OP
In my Master Swordsman Chronicles there are 2 main characters with a handfu being primary characters

Oculus In Infernum currently has 1 main character and 3 primary characters, but im thinking of making it 2 once i have this characters POV written down

 

I've got a second project on the back burner with 4 main characters, three of which are children and the fourth is from an extra-terrestrial species which have a colony based in the Arctic.

 

Eep, I hope I'm going the right way about the characters in my story then. I have one main protagonist, and one main antagonist. There are of course other characters, but my protagonist is on a journey that he is determined to see through, as so the other characters tend to be around for anything between one and three chapters. However, I have several smaller chapters that are written from the POV of these secondary characters, showing how they see the main character - one of these characters isn't even human, it is a mountain lion (though I haven't fully written this part yet, I have been watching plenty of videos about them to try and capture their mannerisms in my writing).

From my own perspective I thought it came across as a good technique for portraying a wanderer entering and leaving the lives of others. Of course, these smaller chapters aren't main characters, but I'll be giving more though to the structure of these chapters now.

 

Hmm, I have involved a cat. A large cat, but a cat nonetheless. He's also a POV character for a bit.

 

I'm not sure if that will work well or not. The issue that I see is that a story is usually from the point of view of one or more characters, looking outward at the world. In this case, your story--at least, those chapters of your story--is looking inward at your main character.