It's easily one of my Big Problems - a lack of sensible population in my stories. Oddly, I have an easier time of things in shorter works. For whatever reason, it feels easier to reference or give a small speaking part to ancillary characters in shorter pieces. I don't know why that should be, though. It doesn't feel very intuitive and I'm talking about my own self. My current WIP takes place in a town of 500-ish people. Why do only five or six present themselves for the camera and the rest run and hide? I've been using an ap similar to Scapple to help me create "extras" from whom to pick in order to weave them into more prominent roles as they become necessary, and so that I actually continue to use the character rather than a bunch of rando, one-scene, disposable characters, but it's such a chore. Why? Anyone else? Am I alone in this? ETA: I'm not trying to give parts to 500 town residents. I'm trying to pay better attention to the idea of not having my ensemble function within a void.
I don't have this issue. I don't really need to prove that there's a population in my story. If I want to say it's crowded or there are people around, I just say, "It was crowded" or "There were people around". I don't think giving them a role in the story will help or rather is necessary to prove that they're there. If you want to give some small character an important role or develop them for just one interaction with the main character(s), then I think you're making a mistake. You can give them a name, but the reader won't care about anything other than that, if that.
IDK... My current WIP has probably a population in the few billions, not including the planet. I think we all kinda focus on the accessory people that directly interact at one point or another with the protagonist(s). I mean honestly it would be nearly impossible to give every inhabitant a tiny bit of attention in any work with a sizable population. So, don't sweat it, and just stick the important extras that crop up into the meat of the story.
My cast of characters deal with a whole lot of small populations in their travels. Riders on a caravan for example. They form relationships, talk, and of course the character has to have a name. And when they get to the end point of that segment of the journey, I drop them off. All kinds of people can appear in a story for one or a few scenes, and if you action takes place in the little village of 500 people, all of your main characters will know all of the others. They don't have to have a big back story, but they have something they do ... the butcher, the blacksmith, the guy selling horses.
I grew up in a sub-500 village. Everyone had at least heard of each other, but on a day-day basis it was pretty normal to see only a few regulars. Literally, a lot did run and hide because they didn't like people and/or wanted to burn spoons in peace. Extras don't necessarily have to be woven into the narrative. They can also have import through relation/occupation. It's smoother to say they passed Jon's son, Gabe, on the way to the store for example. Everyone is going to be linked to another in some fashion. I guess having a few archetypal regulars would help the void problem, too. It's nice to have the gossip, the shopkeep, the lawman, the alcoholic, the overbearing mother etc... to add perspectives to events. A surprisingly small cast can carry the weight of a village quite well. Twin Peaks, Hot Fuzz, and too many Stephen King novels immediately come to mind (Under the Dome being more recent).
One of my favorite writing exercises is to write an arbitrary character for one of my settings. I usually don't use any of the resultant writing, but it gives me a deeper insight into a cast of characters I can use at my leisure. Hard to do that with 500 people, but a lot of them will be shy, I'm sure.
That's a word count thing. In a short, the reader is in and out before they have time to digest everything they've eaten. Every character (or any other element) has a lot less work to do because the story is over before you know it, which is great for the writer, particularly one that doesn't have much to say. You can kind of fill those tiny gaps with bullshit--or ancillary characters--so long as everything gets wrapped up before the reader has had enough time to realize they've been navigating nothing but filler material. In a novel, everything is weighty and drawn out and protracted. And I think the writer, who more often than not has been conditioned to believe that everything they include has to have a greater meaning, shies away from the in-and-out-guy because they appear gimmicky inside that much greater word count. What I would suggest to broaden the scope of your population without feeling the need to feature more characters--whether by giving them quick scenes, POVs, or superfluous speaking parts--is to clump minor characters around you major characters. Give them little crews or cliques that they can interact with occasionally. Like a circle of friends, or a group of coworkers, or a patch of neighbors that periodically drift through the POV character's background... or pass in front of the camera, to use a cinematic term. That should create the appearance of a broader population without feeling the need to feature them unnecessarily. A good byproduct of that is it will build a depth chart of characters that you can use later.
