Creating a new world a great challenge for both science fiction and fantasy writers. You want to create a realistic or at least believable world and complexity is one the things that gives an imaginary world credibility. However, in a quest to add complexity to their story authors are often tempted to add more and more characters on the fly.
Multiple characters allow a writer to approach the story from different angles and to explore different parts of one’s world. More characters also mean more relations between them and hence provide a means to develop more dimensional characters. However, adding too many characters has the risk of a story getting out of control.
We can see this happen in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. Over the course of the books the cast of principal characters keeps expanding and expanding. The result is that from an initially planned six-book series, the eventual series got fourteen ones (fifteen if you include the prequel). And the reception of these new characters and their plotlines by fans was rather mixed.
Too many characters means a great number of unrelated subplots and hence a myriad of loose ends. And resolving those is a serious challenge for many, many authors. So we should not be surprised that many writers of multi-volume series tend to drag on.
Keeping the numbers of principal characters seems to be essential for maintaining control of your story. A good example, in my humble opinion at least, of an author doing this is Tad Williams’ Shadow march series. In this four-book series we see the story through the eyes of only a handful characters, but still Williams is able to add a reasonable amount of complexity without getting too much sidetracked by irrelevancies and loose ends.
For my own series, the “Urando trilogy*” I have decided to restrict the number of major plotlines to four and assign characters around these lines. And in short stories I usually stick with one or two main characters. This way I seek to keep control over my stories and until now it works quite well for me as I am able to make substantial progress with the many stories I am working on. I can easily write five to ten pages a day.
One method I use to maintain control of my work is drawing sociograms. A sociogram is a graphical model of inter-human relations and is widely used by social scientists to analyze social structures. For writers the benefit of drawing a sociogram is that it enables to see how one’s characters relate to each other and it helps to see how different plotlines are interconnected.
Important to note is that a sociogram does not need to include every detail. You only need to include the most important ones, for instance whether Alice & Bob are siblings or colleagues. What is important, depends, of course, on your story.
Fascinating Future 