I like a series as much as the next reader, and that’s pretty much the form I write in, myself. So I’m reasonably comfortable with stories that have quite a few persistent characters in them. That being said…

These days I’m disheartened when I pick up a series entry in some genres where the first few pages are concentrated dumps of family members in multiple generations, and/or all their friends and acquaintances, too. I’m not getting any younger, and I dread trying to keep them all straight, when they resurface halfway along in the action, or (worse) three books down the line, when I’m supposed to remember their relationships from way back when.

Romance and Mystery/Criminal categories are both high in this, but Romance is the larger irritant. (At least you get to keep knocking folks off in the criminal categories.) I want to see the characters in individual books get through their lives, in small groups, not entire clockwork ensembles of the ones from the previous three books, and their descendants keeping the machinery going.

Hell is taking it into the next generations, not to make some grand Victorian point about inherited sins, but just to keep the clockwork ticking away, going down the list of siblings. It’s all too completist for me, and I never liked Russian novels.

Practically speaking, in my own Fantasy work I think of my core characters as an ensemble that assembles slowly and changes slowly, with visiting inputs from new friends and foes mostly local to an individual book. Police procedurals mostly work this way, too, with the forces of order as the core ensemble, and the villains and victims mostly local to individual entries.

How do you keep order in your own corrals? How many characters does it take to be stuffed into something you’re reading before you fling things at walls?