Too Many Characters?

 By Thomas Kies

How many characters in a book are too many?  I’m struggling with that because in the book I’m working on now, it just feels like there may be too many.

I found one opinion that 4-7 characters should be the number, except for an epic where 20 or more are acceptable. I found another opinion that set the number of characters as 8. Period.

I took a look around the internet and the consensus seems to be that there is no set number.  The number of characters is what it will take to tell the story. But there is agreement that each character should have their own identity.  They should stand out from the crowd somehow.  

Sometimes, that’s as simple as identifying their profession, like Joe is a cop or Mike is a chef or Clara is a Supreme Court judge.  Sometimes it is as simple as giving them a distinctive name, like Clara.

Maybe the distinction is in the physical description.  Ted is tall and built like a linebacker or Sally is petite, had dark hair and one eye is blue and one eye is brown.  

So, make the character vivid and memorable when they’re first introduced. 

One bit of advice I saw was avoid introducing a lot of characters all at once.  It’s like walking into a crowded room and your host tells you the name of everyone there.  I don’t know about you, but that’s information overload and more often than not, I don’t recall anyone’s name.

Speaking of names, don’t give the extras names.  If the pizza guy is delivering dinner, he’s just the pizza guy.  If the Uber driver is taking your protagonist to the airport, he’s just the Uber driver. Don’t confuse the reader with more names than they need to recall. 

Don’t give characters similar names.  In a book that was never published, I was admonished for using Jake, John, Jim, and Jack. All different characters but with names like that, who could keep them straight?

All of your characters should have some relevance to your story.  Why are they there? If they don’t add something to the storyline, kill your darlings.  

An example of that is in A Song in Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin upon which the hit series Game of Thrones was based.  Just when you identify with one of his characters, he kills him or her off.  Most likely in the most gruesome manner imaginable. But in their death, that character has become more relevant.  It often becomes a reason for revenge.

I distracted myself with the Game of Thrones.  What I really mean, if the character doesn’t add something to the story, they shouldn’t be there in the first place. 

A disadvantage to a bunch of characters, especially in the same scene, is the use of dialogue tags.  We all try to stay away from them as best we can, instead, showing some action and then the dialogue.  But when you have more than two characters in the same scene, sooner or later you’re going to have to write Roberto said- or Matilda argued- or Ludmilla shouted...

Giving your characters distinctive names helps the reader recognize the players more easily when they show up.  I hope that I do that in my mystery series.  Geneva Chase-a crime journalist, John Stillwater-ex-cop and now a private detective, Shana Neese-dominatrix and leader of an organization that fights human trafficking, and Nathaniel Ruben-owner of Lodestar Analytics, an open-source research company. 

Time to go back to my work in progress and see if I need to kill any of my darlings. 

Would Sherlock Be Sherlock?

There’s a movement afoot in my part of the world to rename things. It started with the city of El Segundo renaming its portion of Sepulveda Blvd to Pacific Coast Highway.

Let me orient you a bit. Sepulveda is a very long, generally North/South street that runs for miles and miles. The portion I’m going to talk about starts just south of LAX. From there it runs through the cities of El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach, in that order.

For as long as I’ve lived in the area, the street has been named Sepulveda until it reaches Hermosa where it becomes PCH. Everyone’s used to that. Then El Segundo decided to change its portion (about 2 miles) to PCH as well. That means as you travel south from LAX you go from Sepulveda Blvd to PCH back to Sepulveda and finally to PCH again. For us locals it’s not an issue. It’s the same street we’ve always known. But I would think that could be very confusing for visitors to the area.

As far as I can tell the reason for the change is El Segundo felt they weren’t getting enough credit for being a beach city so they thought the name change would signal to everyone far and wide that they were a city along the coast.

Now a realtor in Manhattan Beach has started a campaign to rename the portion of the city east of Sepulveda (that darn street again!) from East Manhattan to Manhattan Knolls. The portions of the city west of that darn street have cute names like the Sand Section, the Hill Section and the Tree Section. These aren’t official designations, just convenient names used by residents and real estate agents to tell someone approximately where a house is located.

Doesn’t make a darn bit of difference to me what these places are called. It doesn’t change how I view them. I’m not that sure it’ll make much difference other people either.

But all of this kerfuffle did get me to thinking about characters and their names. Would Sherlock Holmes be the same character if he had a more ordinary name like John Smith or Ben Rogers? (I pulled those names out of the air; no offense to anyone with those names.) Would Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have given Sherlock the same personality if he’d given him a different name? I have no idea which came first for him, the name or the personality traits of the character, or if they arrived at the same time. I suspect, though, that he knew his character’s personality traits fairly early on.

I know a character doesn’t truly come alive for me until I give him/her at least a first name. But, before that, I generally have some idea of the character’s personality. I do try to pick a name that goes along with them.

For my first book, Fatal Brushstroke, I named the murder victim that my main character finds in her garden, Hester Bouquet. This was a bit of an homage to Hyacinth Bucket, the main character in the British TV show, Keeping Up Appearances. Hester has some of the same personality traits as Hyacinth—she’s always worried about appearances and what people think of her and her family. If you remember, Hyacinth Bucket insisted on having her name pronounced “Bouquet”.

Probably the only character I’ve created in my books where the personality didn’t come first was my main character, Aurora Anderson. I just love the name Aurora so I wanted to use it and Aurora Amelia Anderson had a nice ring to it.

So here are a couple questions for all of you writers out there. Does it matter what you name your characters? Does the name influence the personality traits you give them or is it the other way around?

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In other news, the phantom seems to have left my car. (Knock on wood!) No more mysteriously opened windows. It was pretty hot when the “peculiarities” happened so I figure the phantom didn’t want to be left in the car with the windows rolled up. Now that it’s cooler, it’s happier. That’s what I’m going with, anyway.