How many main characters do you have?

Well, I certainly hope it works, I'll be trying it out before I cut it anyway I would say the 95% of story is from the perspective of my protagonist, but small instances are from the POV of a person that my main character is meeting.

For example, my MC has casually dismissed a character in an earlier chapter and thinks nothing more of it. He comes back to meet that character later on to ask for a favour, and this chapter is then written from the POV of the disgruntled character. He doesn't like the little upstart that he sees in my MC and as a result, while he does take on the favour, he cuts enough corners to give himself some smug sense of satisfaction that he has had one over on the MC. The story then returns to the MC and it isn't for quite a few chapters on from this that the repercussions of his original ignorance come to light. In this case, rather than have something inexplicable happen, the reader can laugh at the MC's expense. Further on, there is a character that is particularly dangerous to the MC, but he is completely oblivious, even going as far as trying (and failing) to save him, blissfully unaware that he has done himself a favour.

From this, you might suggest that if it needs telling from another POV, then maybe it doesn't need telling at all, but my MC is a person who is quite naive and unaware of the world around him, only just coming to terms with the size and scope of it. The extra POV, IMO, highlights the naivety of my protagonist and lets the reader in on several occasions where he is unknowingly out of his depth.

Although I planned this around six months ago, last month I finally got round to reading Hugh Howey's Wool, and I while I was a little annoyed that I'd come up with a similar plan for character use, I felt that peppering the story with chapters from another's POV worked really well, and I would certainly strive to create a similar effect.

I think I count about 6 or 7 chapters in my planned story where this will happen, in one way or another.

 

It certainly could work, I'm just suggesting some caution to make sure that your book doesn't shift from a story to a character study without your planning that shift.

 

Haha, no need to worry on the caution side of things! I've been planning the story since Christmas Day last year, outlining chapters, making sure things flow and wrap up where necessary. All secondary POVs have been designed to move the story forward in my story plan. I've worked backwards through my story and if I've ever found a point where I can't justify "he got to this point because..." whilst going back, I've cut the part (or redesigned it entirely).

I've been really excited to write it, but I've also had the fear of writing out those first words so I have only officially taken it from notes to chapters in the last couple of weeks - It took a lot to start it because I'd spent so much time creating these characters and the world they inhabit that I didn't want to ruin it Currently I have only written the prologue and first five chapters in full, but it appears to be going at a steady pace.

I think where I'm going to need help is in conversations... which is for another thread I guess!

 

My story has 3 POV characters, and an ensemble of people around them who matter. The magic number depends on the work.

 

You should always keep the number of your MC to a minimum or everything gets jumbled up and none of the character gets the justice he/she deserves.
I have 4 POV characters with an occasional extra POV as the story goes. But out of all of them, only 2 are actually the 'MAIN' characters.

 

Wow, how did you manage that?

Depending on how 'main' the "main" is, I'd have one MC with a lot of strong support.

Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap has eight characters with a POV, each with their own section of the novel, all in the third person

 

I have no idea, it was INSANE. They were all plot-vital, you could almost count them as only two [they were two ten-man fireteams] but yeah, they were twenty people with backstory and personalities and names and they were all equally important. I couldn't separate anyone out as being more or less vital. I did a lot of head-hopping... that was in my terrible writing days as a 16 year old [only 4 years ago... eek!] and it was just... utterly nuts.

I don't write much in the genre anymore, I found my niche in fantasy. Magic is more fun, and things are much easier to keep track of when you're talking how many days' ride a place is from another place versus how many lightyears apart two planets are!

 

But that's the fun of it, creating insane plots and having a blast trying to realise them on paper/processor

 

Very true! I think the plot I'm working on in the fanfiction I just started is kind of insane and I'm very excited to see if I can pull it off. I'm a huge nerd and fanfiction is fun. I'm waiting for my co-writer on my main project to write, and to keep myself occupied, I have side-projects. Just finished one and started another. Supernatural fanfics the both of them, the first one I'm not content with the ending but I don't want to bother re-writing it, it was painful enough [major character death is a solid theme with me and I love them all so HOW CAN I KILL THEM D: it hurts] and I don't want to revisit it. The one I'm working on now is kind of... yeah.

It's slightly alternate universe but with strong canon references. It's set a little after season 9, so Dean is a demon and Cas is Falling and those are the problems they have to solve. Cas has come up with a solution to his Fall for me but it's going to be... interesting. He has to become a Nephilim, half-human half-angel, and to do that is extremely risky. If he fails he'll Fall as far as it's possible to Fall, right down to being one of Lucifer's minions. And though he succeeds, things don't go completely according to plan. Castiel becomes Castielle.

Regarding Dean's issue, I don't know if they'll be able to make him human again, but they'll try! It'll be traumatic and bloody and in between all that there'll be lots of lovely erotic scenes between Dean and fem!Cas. And I don't know if there's a happy ending. I honestly don't.

 

I only have 3 throughout the story, a potential fourth that becomes very involved but it's not introduced until the end so she doesn't really get a shot. Poor girl.

 

In my current project I have 7 main characters, on of which is not alive in the present time. I think the most important part of having lots of characters is to make them easily identifiable. If they overlap the readers could get easily confused.

 

I always have just one main character and occasionally a secondary character that is supportive to the main character such as a sibling or Grandma or Grandpa or a dear friend.

 

Interest piqued!

On topic, as I've been writing my story, my side characters have developed and I've come to like them so much that they are now being integrated into more of the story. They fit in well and I'm sure they make the whole thing more interesting.

Another POV to write!

 

After reading some posts, I don't feel quite so bad about putting our betas through a story with 3 main characters, 3 secondary main characters, and one additional POV character (who only has one chapter, but it's a sorta kinda intro 'cause she'll be a bigger character in the sequels). @KaTrian and I write in 3rd person limited and it's pretty tricky to separate all those different voices, but luckily the characters are pretty distinctive, and we've divided the more similar characters between the two of us, so that helps.

So far of all our stories, the smallest cast is 4, the largest number of POV characters (not all of them equal in importance) is 11, which was pushing it and the number may change in the rewrite, but what helped was that 2,5 were far more prominent than the rest and were always in the forefront.

 

One per book.

It's that character's journey. Others characters may change and grow and play vital roles, but it's not about them.

Although, I do plan on a dual protagonist thing in my next book, where one acts as a surrogate for the other. The story cannot be told with only one protagonist, but nevertheless, it's more about one than the other.

 

In the project I'm working on, the main characters are adult siblings of a very elite American family in 1906. After one of the siblings unexpectedly dies and the case is ruled inconclusive by authorities, her 6 siblings believe that they each unintentionally caused her death. After they tell scenarios about what they believe caused her death, they turn on each other. This causes an intense argument where old tensions are brought up. Eventually they decide to separate because what had been said was too controversial to take back.

 

It was an unreliable narrator.

An unreliable narrator is one who is a character in his own right, and thus has his own biases and prejudices, and thus cannot be relied upon to tell the truth. For instance, a story that my daughter was writing was narrated by a young man who, it turned out, suffered from paranoia, so nothing that he said could be relied upon to be other than paranoia...the reader had to judge what to believe, and what was a symptom.

 

I think an unreliable character could also be someone who doesn't understand something, so their view is not reality. For example, someone naive who thinks a group of people are her friends, but later in the book we see that they aren't friends, but just taking advantage of her. But, until then, the reader sees the group as she sees the group.

 

My story will eventually have a group of nine characters that the reader will follow but I think only two of them will count as main characters because they have the most bearing on the plot and I'm thinking of having the POV switch between the two of them. At first I though nine might be too many but then I figured that as long as I made sure they were very distinct from one another and memorable then it shouldn't be a problem.

 

I like your concept . . . but it's too bad the family is fated to break up. (You've made me care already.)

 

Three at most for each story or perspective. Some of my stories are told from several different perspectives, each one with it's own main character or "looking glass".

 

Two in my main novel, one in my minor novel. I have a novella on the go with two teenage boys as protagonists. I have another novella with a professor of archaeology and his three grad students as protagonists.

I can't handle too many main characters. Some people like writing huge epics with dozens of main characters, but I can't do that. I have to hold it down.

 

Like anything else, the number of main characters—or POV characters, as they are not automatically interchangeable!—will have a bearing on how your readers feel their way through your story.

In my opinion, the books that leave the strongest emotional imprint are the ones with the fewest possible POV characters. It's hard to identify with 10 different people in the same story. Hard, not impossible, of course. However, it's a pitfall to be aware of. After too many changes, characters can just become pieces on a game board rather than fully-fledged people.

I've read many comments on this forum by people who say they are unhappy at frequent shifts of POV, and don't enjoy being yanked from one character's head to another. It always takes a wee while to adjust to a new character's persepective, so you might want to keep that in mind.

I have written a VERY long historical novel, in which I have only four POV characters, and only two who have much 'screen time.' The other two are minor POVs, used to describe a couple of crucial scenes where my two main POV characters aren't present.

Another thing to watch out for ...beware of naming too many characters. If a character is not going to figure strongly in your story, it's an idea not to give that character a name. For example, a shopkeeper, or the guy who drives the taxi that carries the main character somewhere, or all the students in a particular POV character's high school class, etc etc.

I've seen lots of new writers who absolutely snow the reader under with character names. There is nothing wrong with the writer KNOWING these names, but it's a mistake to unload them all on the reader in a big wad. If you haven't got the story time to make these characters memorable, then don't bother naming them. It's a wee trick that works. And be careful about calling people by several different names as well. Nicknames are fun, as are aristocratic titles, but make sure the reader knows that all these names pertain to the same person. Just telling the reader this at the start of a book isn't enough. Chances are, the reader won't remember this kind of information because they're not closely involved in the story yet. You need to plot carefully, so that the different names stick to the right person.

 

My main story has 1 mc with two companions, but the second idea I've been bouncing around the last two weeks has two main characters amongst a score of people.

 

My stories tend to star couples, so usually two. I have a hard time deciding which of the two is the main main character so I choose not to worry about it.