How many main characters do you have?

This sounds interesting! Reminds me of the play An Inspector Calls - the idea is very similar but it's kinda the reverse where nobody thinks they were responsible. Essentially a maid is found dead and the inspector knocks on the maid's employer's household. There's a cast having dinner inside and if I remember correctly, they were one family. In the course of being questioned by the inspector and tensions flaring, each member ends up recounting their relationship with the maid and what happened etc, none of them willing to take the blame for the maid's death. By the end of the play, it was obvious that the maid had committed suicide, and the verdict - moral verdict, anyway - was that they were all responsible for her death by the way they have treated her that had caused her to kill herself in the first place.

I'd still love to watch this play. I had the opportunity to once, for £20 - still regret not taking it. But I was with my friend and she was really not interested at all and I felt guilty making her spend £20 on a play she didn't want to watch. She was willing to go ahead with it but I said no. Thinking back, I feel so stupid...

 

Over 9000! XD

Seriously though I do have a lot of main characters, but probably closer to around 10 than 9000 XD

 

If main means POV characters, the novel I've just completed in draft has two, the female and male protagonists. The arch-antagonist is a major character as well, but he gets no POV joy.

The one I'm working on now has one main/POV character only. Which suits it, I think, since the plot partly involves how she gets more and more socially isolated.

(I think I may have made a contribution to this thread before, but I couldn't find it. )

 

Hear, hear!

And if you do change it can take some real effort to make sure the reader knows whose head they're supposed to be in after a line break. Certainly it can be done, and the more practice we get, the easier it will become. As I reread my draft I'm finding several scene openings where the POV could be either his or hers, though when I wrote them I thought it was obvious whose eyes we were seeing through. Part of the editing process will be making those POVs clear.

I have a couple places in my second novel project where that happens, but I think I'm going to suck it up and make myself stick to the one POV. If I get feedback convincing me that the "cameo" POVs would be better, I can always write them in.

It can also be good to consider what your POV character calls that minor character, what their relationship to the minor character is, and whether the person they're talking to knows the minor character. "I'm spending the evening with friends" says one thing, but "I'm going over to the Feldmans' tonight, want to come?" says another.

But in general, yeah. If your POV character has no reason to know the minor character's name, or only relates to him/her in his/her role, forget the naming.

 

I have usually had only one main character, but sometimes other characters may take the story over. I write in third person too. Very rarely have I wrote in first person, and usually these stories have come out not as good as I would have wanted.

 

In the past I've had one main character with a love interest but recently I've been gravitating more toward developing secondary characters to make the story more real. In real life the people around you are as important as you are sometimes so I've been trying to make my novels more like that.

 

Main characters? Six at the beginning, three at the end.

 

My first novel has several viewpoints. It can be difficult to juggle at times, but the plot dictates it. My second novel is mostly in one viewpoint. Both can work. It really depends on the story you are trying to tell.

 

There are many people in the world, and no one is an Island. Depending on the location of my story will determine how many characters I use. If the story is about people surviving in a lifeboat, it would be about all the people. If my story takes place in a small town, I will employee 20-30 characters. Each of my characters has to have a personality, and function to help the story along, or they don’t get the job. I plot like a movie director. My characters need to be just right for the plot…thus I build a file on each. In future stories I often use some of the same characters…these are my stares. If they do real good, I give them a star on the cyber walk of fame. If not, their next part will be an un-named character in a train wreck.

 

I find two or more main characters can be more suspenseful... in some stories there's always the possibility that one (or more) might not even survive to the end... In The Color Red (short-ish story), there's kind of three (and possibly more... but that's rather a long story). Maybe one qualifies for protagonist better than the others, but I still count them all as "main", i.e., essential to the plot.