Making Your Characters Matter

by Stephanie Morrill


A writer emailed me to ask, "I struggle with the amount of characters I have in my plot. Most of the time, I end up with too many. It makes it difficult to bring new important characters into the scenes. Is there a limit for the amount of characters in novels? If you had to work with a large amount, how would you write it? How would you bring them into the scene? Define relationships?"

This is something I used to really struggle with. (Several characters got cut from my debut novel, Me, Just Different. First by me, and then an additional one by my agent.)

There's no real official limit, and it just kinda depends on the story. Helpful, right? Since that's probably not, hopefully this will be:

It's not real life

My temptation to put too many characters in comes from my drive to want to make it real. In real life, my Starbucks barista is just the person who makes me coffee one night a week. My daughter's preschool teacher is someone I see once a week when I drop McKenna off at school. But in a book, it's best to combine roles whenever you can. If it's a novel, then the preschool teacher works a second job at Starbucks ... and has to work that job because the main character's husband fired her husband, so, by the way, she's the villain too.

You see what I mean? It gives the story a wonderfully tangled feel. 

For Me, Just Different, my original thought was that Skylar, who was the queen of the popular kids, needed tons of friends. After all, in real life, the popular kids always had tons of friends. She started with 7, which even I realized by the end was way too many. I whittled it down to 4, and then when I signed with my agent, she was like, "One of these friends has got to go." So Skylar wound up with 3 girlfriends and it works just fine.

So how do you decide who to cut? You ask:

If I cut this character, would anything change?

And if your answer is "No" or, "Well, I'd have to tweak this line and that line, but otherwise, not really," then they are cuttable.

If they're cuttable BUT you really, really love that character then you have a couple options:

• Cut them anyway and rejoice that you're a real writer who can do the hard work
• Transfer them for another manuscript
• FIND a way to make them matter

If you're looking for a way to make them matter, spend some time brainstorming and fleshing them out like you might your main character. What are their goals? How do they need to change? What are some ways they can oppose the main character? What are some ways they can encourage them?

Do you find yourself having too many characters in your manuscript? How do you deal with it?

Other posts that might interest you:
Developing secondary characters
Researching your characters