How Many Characters to Include In a Novel
Wondering how many characters to include in your novel? Well, the answer varies. Check out my take on this issue in the video below.
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How Many Characters In A Novel Transcript
All right, YouTube video, we are in my new setup. This is actually my bathroom. I have a feature wall in my bathroom, and I wanted to use it. So, now I'm like bathroom confessional talking about number of characters in a novel. This is a question I get a lot. How many people should I shoot for in my novel? And the answer depends. There are also different category expectations to answer this question. So, that means if you are operating in fantasy, sci-fi, space opera, any of these other kinds of categories where there are often a lot of characters, a lot of action-driven plots, a lot of subplots potentially, then you need to be exposing your reader to many characters.
We all are familiar with the anecdote of George R.R. Martin having a spreadsheet so he could keep all of his characters straight. And so I think for hard sci-fi, high fantasy, these are especially categories that tolerate a lot of characters in your novel. Now, if you are writing for younger readers, that answer changes of course. So, if you're writing chapter book, and that's basically the shortest kind of novel that you can get into when you're...they give out writing novels for young readers, then you want a very tight-knit cast of characters. Those books tend to be focused more on friendships and coming of age kind of personal development family. So, then your characters' world is rather small, and you want to keep the number of characters and the people who populate that world to a manageable number, I would say maybe five, six, seven. That way you can cover the character and the siblings, best friend, family, but not necessarily all of these characters are going to get deep development, because you don't have that kind of time or bandwidth in a chapter book.
The answer expands a little when you get to middle grade. Those can tolerate let's say 10 to 15 characters. Obviously, it's not going to mean that you're just packing your novels with characters that don't need to be there, because I say an arbitrary number here. All of those characters have to be in the story, they play a role in the story, they are needed and not just sort of window dressing, because you're trying to hit a certain goal. Now, it's perfectly okay to have a novel where it's just parent and child, and they're sort of hashing out their relationship. This is maybe more for an adults' multi-generational novel or something although those tend to have quite big cast lists as well. But it is possible to have a novel with fewer characters, but the circumstances will have to be pretty specific for a novel with let's say just one character, two characters, three characters to work.
So, let's say you are working your way up from middle grade now to young adult, you'll want to flesh out some secondary characters, maybe in some tertiary characters, again, not in as much detail as you're landing to your protagonist or protagonists and your antagonist. Those tend to be the most fleshed-out characters in your story, but young adult, as the novels get longer, the worlds get more complex, maybe even if it's just in our world, there are a lot of layers to even young adult novels, and your character has more relationships with more people. As they go through the story, you may want to have a broader cast list. And then, finally, if you're writing adults, whether it's literary fiction or some kind of genre fiction, you know, romance I would say tends to have a smaller cast list, because the focus is very much on the two main characters, their love story.
Of course, you want to have antagonizing forces on their relationship, supporting forces on their relationship. But at the end of the day, I would say those are the more claustrophobic novels when it comes to character count. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have your hard fantasy, science fiction and all of those types of genres where the expectation really is a fully fleshed-out cast list.
So, I don't have a hard and fast numbers for you, but I do think that there are ranges of normal within different categories. And one of the things that you need to ask yourself is what your readers' expectations are, meaning is there sort of a norm for the category in which you're writing, should you adhere to that norm, that sort of thing. So, definitely something to keep in mind from the reader expectation angle as you try to answer this question for your project. This has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Thank you so much for checking out my YouTube channel and my cool new background for my videos. I'm just playing around, and hope to see you next time. Here's to a good story.
Whether your WIP has 10 characters or 100, it can be difficult to keep track of all their relationships and emotional arcs. An outside eye can help with that—check out our consulting options from expert editors.
