One of the fastest ways to double a book’s size is to change from one POV character to two. The more Point Of View characters you have, the more complex it all gets, until you have the goat gaggers of epic fantasy.
But what about non-POV characters? Those, too, add complexity. If you have a trio of troublemakers, then even if you only have one POV character, you have to flesh out each of them as individuals with likes, dislikes, backgrounds, and their own subplot or character arc. (Usually. There are always exceptions.)
By the time you have a team of five or six, you usually end up with foreground and background team members, because it’s really tough to juggle all of them… and often if you do manage it, there are still going to be foreground and background in each scene, and you’re just making sure that nobody unwittingly gets demoted to extra by never getting their turn.
At some point this will no longer scale. Small group leadership is different than large group, because there is no way to effectively, closely lead a team past a certain size. As the saying goes, Christ had a team of twelve, and one of those denied him and one betrayed him. If God incarnate in the flesh couldn’t keep more than ten people on track, us mere mortals ought to stick closer to six.
So, when you have so very many people it’s gone from The Gang to The Community, how do you track and introduce and follow all those people? Much as your long-time readers would like to see their favourites and catch up with everybody, nobody actually wants to read the fictional equivalent of a family Christmas letter with one line on how everybody’s doing; they want a story.
I’m wrestling with this one right now not necessarily from the perspective of braiding all the characters from prior books together… but from the perspective of a character walking into a community, and showing the in media res of everybody carrying on outside of the particular story they’re in. (When I get back to my main series, though, it’ll be an issue there, too.)
I’m also dealing with it in real life, because a lot of wonderful people have moved nearby, and become friends and friendly acquaintances in the last seven years. Much as I like or love each and every one of them individually, meeting up for dinner has gone from 4 of us getting together and hanging out to…. to trying to cook for 12-20 people and “let’s reserve a hall quarterly, for the 40-60 people showing up, because ain’t nobody’s house going to hold that”. The idea has become the institution, and it’s exhausting.
I don’t have answers. Well, okay, becoming a hermit in real life and ignoring the entire community in the story is a solution, but it’s not a good solution. How do you handle this?
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Groups, Teams, and Community”
Looking back over my two series, I see I’ve started out small. The first book in a series has far fewer main characters and significant supporting characters. Then the snowballing starts. I like to think it’s organic.
What’s great is that by the time you reach the end of a series you know them all really well and the characters are telling you what they’re going to do rather then making me figure them out.
By the last book of Martha’s Sons, one of the supporting characters finally got to play the role I’d been envisioning for him for about 5 books (and it wasn’t just that I finally got to write a sword v. oar fight scene), which naturally meant we landed in his POV a few times. But only as needed.
A friend once told me she’d read in a writing book that each POV character gets 50k words. No, no, no. That’s one of those arbitrary rules that can lead to larding up someone’s story line in an entirely inelegant way.
Writing that last book, I only gave the non-MCs point of view scenes when they were the prime mover of the action.
As an aside, I’m working on a new book with a new setting, new characters, new concept, new everything. It’s been a struggle. I didn’t know any of those people at all, even though they’d been wandering through my brain for the last few years impatiently waiting their turn. I was pretty surprised.
“…there is no way to effectively, closely lead a team past a certain size.”
When the problem passes a certain size, your team becomes an army. Eventually a nation. When the problem is the unceasing arrival of one EndOfTheWorld after another, the whole world gets drafted.
What I do is everybody gets their own book. MC in one is a side character in others.
All the Valkyries, Furies, Toasters, Powers, whatever are out there kicking @sses and taking names, all day every day. Lately the threat has left the mundane realm entirely and comes from the ‘celestial’ realms, where there are lots and lots of fun characters to make a book out of.
Current WIP, what happens when you drop The Nerd into the Viking hell of Niflheim, right on Queen Hela’s doorstep? And what does the nerd’s collection of over-protective robot girlfriends, friendly aliens and other-worldly creatures have to say about that? (Meaning, how do we keep them from wrecking Viking hell at two megatons per second, then nuking the rubble from orbit?)
How does Queen Hela react to being invited for coffees at the Green Lady Cafe? (Hint, it’s a -romance- fantasy.)
The World contains all the characters. I pick different people to follow around and see what they’re doing and they resolve the problem of the moment. In a long enough series, everybody gets a turn or two.
Hmm, doubling is rare. If you choose the main character with care, the plot focuses on that character and therefore a secondary or tertiary character has a lesser story.
Usually, that is.
Send them away. “You! Take him, him, and him, and go way over there! And don’t come back until the next book! I promise I’ll write up all the fun you had over there . . . sometime!”
Actually, I’ve got three POV cops now. But they don’t all have to show up on cases. I can ignore the others, or bring them in as needed.
Much easier fictionally than in real life.
Most benefit from separation, since the point is to show things the main character can’t. And introduce dramatic irony.
Or deal with something you don’t want to write. The MC can get a report about it later. Then your readers don’t point out that, oh, the Bad Guys would have just gone around the other way or something.