I've had this idea floating around for a story, but I'm unsure where to start - mostly because I would like for it to have a large character base. The way how I normally write centers around two characters at max, and I want to give that same kind of care to this group but I'm unsure which way will give them the most justice. How do you deal with a large character group and give everyone the right amount of love?
Define "large". I'll usually write 2-3 main characters, surrounded by a bunch of secondary characters and even more tertiary characters but I really don't like reading books where there are a ton of POV characters. It never feels like anything is going anywhere. I'm much happier with a smaller cast.
I can only think of movies but I would look see how it's done with stories like Knives Out., The Big Chill, Peter's Friends, A Mighty Wind, and there are all sorts of TV series with multiple characters. You should be able to find some examples in books. One of my favorite comes to mind, The Poisonwood Bible. And now that I think about it there is Little Women. Look at how other writers have done it.
My series goes though twelve different POVs over the course of seven books. However, no single book has more then six POVs and only three of the characters are POVs in all seven. Anyway, I don't worry about giving them 'enough love', I concentrate on who can show the reader the important parts of the story. I outline everything before hand, and then trace everyone's plotlines through the story. Once that is done, I figure out which scenes should be told by which characters and then move into a chapter by chapter outlines. When picking who gets what, I give the POV to the character who will have the most emotional impact on the reader well still conveying the necessary information. I also make everyone's view a bit different. One of the main characters was abused before the story, and they notice physical movement before anything else. Another focuses on people's words and tone, and someone else on minor details. Hope this helps and I will try to answer any questions you have.
I've got a series, really made of four trilogies, where each set has one main POV throughout, plus a secondary POV for each book. That's ultimately going to make it 16 different POVs spread over 12 books which I think is perfectly fine.
I use what I call the Guy Richie method. Groups of 3-5 characters in 3rd person omniscient with dedicated chapters I. The groups generally don't know about each other until the end of the story when things kind of go bang and the multiple storylines collide.
First I would make sure all the group have a purpose all the way through the story, and that no one begins as a star and mid way through becomes a shadow in the background - if that does happen I tend to just blend two characters together. I make sure my story really needs all of them. Then I'd work on a basic story and character arc for each of them. Then fit the arcs together to see roughly which would look good together and try to match them a little. Example: one of the large groups I wrote included one character's descent into darkness while another darker character became lighter so I used those quite close together. I tried to make the character's personalities as varied as possible. And equal chapters or focus as much as possible, but from the very beginning one or two stood out as the main players in the story.
The cast that I was looking at would be around 10 or 12 characters. My idea was kind of episodic in nature, an apartment complex that is filled with superheros who all know each other, one very bad villain who knows all the superheros but no one knows him, and the family who owns the building who are oblivious to everyone. I was unsure how to set the POV, if each section should be from a different hero, or if the whole thing should be from the owners. I'm not good at writing third person omnipotent, things get too muddled for me, so I like to stick to one character specifically at a time. Neither of these options seems to be the correct one in my mind, since I've tried to start this from both places and neither is really talking to me.
It sounds to me like you're still writing small groups of characters, just doing it multiple times in sequence. Treat it as such. Make all of your characters unique individuals so that the reader can tell the difference between them instantly and then just write it. You'll figure it out as you go and you can clean up any problems in revision.
I grew up on Ya series fiction that featured a lot of girl gangs - Babysitters Club, Sleepover Friends, Best Friends etc. Some of them handled groups really well others ... it became a lot of talking heads. Best Friends was the worst but it had up to 8 girls in a scene and trying to include them all got to be difficult. Think of it this way - their will be a center action - now eight people will have to respond/react to that action and people will have to respond to the responses and so on. I've written a book with a large cast - inspired by Twin Peaks so I used 'sets/locations' to separate and manage people. A local diner, a local boarding school, a church, crime scenes, a fish cannery etc. Certain people wouldn't intersect because of class and I didn't have to have every character respond to everything that happened only what affected them. At the time I read a handful of novels that handled big casts - Peyton Place, Kings Row, and Savages by Shirley Conran.
Making sure all of the characters have enough story to keep them included in the plot throughout the book would be key. At that point, you can worry less about giving each character enough love and just tell the story. You might end up shifting the order of scenes around in editing, but if everyone has importance for the duration of the plotline(s), sharing screen time shouldn't be a problem. That being said, ten to twelve MC's is a lot. Are you sure they're all needed? With super heroes, it's easy to want to come up with a new character for every super power we can think of. This may work for the X-Men spread across six monthly titles, but it's a tall order to fill in a novel. See if they all have enough of a story to warrant making them MC's. You wouldn't have to eliminate characters from the book, but some might be relegated to secondary and tertiary levels of importance. You can even still use them all as POV characters at one point or another. Sometimes it's interesting to see the MC's through the eyes of a less prominent character. I know it's a cliche to go straight to Stephen King for examples, but I'm doing it anyway. If anyone can coordinate a large cast, it's him. Check out books like The Stand, Needful Things and Under the Dome for structure. They each have tons of characters, and everyone gets their time in the spotlight, the good guys, the bad guys, everybody.
Does the action take place in the complex, or outside of it, or both? I'm trying to get a feel for what kind of story it is. If the action is superhero action then it seems strange they all live in the same complex and so does the villain but none of the heroes know him. Is this a comedy, serious superhero action, or what? Are the heroes all in one big team and work together all the time? Or would they work in smaller groups?
My series of books also has a large cast of characters. I think an important thing to keep in mind is (if possible) gently ease the reader into learning about only a few at a time, especially at the beginning. Piecemeal is the way. I concentrate the story on 3-4 characters in the first part over 11 chapters, so that each one gets at least 3 chapters each. But I also use them to have 2-3 of the other main characters in the background or mentioned. By the end of the first part, the reader has the main 3 well-characterized and remembers them and their individual stories enough to learn about the new ones. And because all of them are reacting to one main inciting incident, it also (hopefully) helps ground the reader into feeling less disorientated. One of the recurring complaints if you read online book reviews for A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire that is) is that some people feel Georgie boy threw too many characters at the reader all at once. I don't personally think that myself, but I certainly understand why they see it that way and am trying to mitigate that problem myself. So I've all the sympathies for you, @JWhy
