Thought: Large Ensemble Casts.

I recently finished Laurell K. Hamlton’s newest Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book, Bullet. If you don’t know, the main character of this book has… ok, at least a dozen “boyfriends” and for mystical purposes she must have sex with them all the time. (Yeah, I don’t…. even.) That’s not really the important part. The important part is that there are countless numbers of characters in this series.

There seem to be three ways of dealing with the problem of creating massive casts of characters: for the moment I will call them the Laurell K. Hamilton Method (LKH Method) and the Robert Jordan Method (RJ Method) and the George R.R. Martin Method (GRRM Method).

LKH Method: In the reading of Bullet, I noticed that two characters that I personally care about a lot—but who were almost non-existent in the previous few books—were suddenly important main characters and in the center of the action! They just… disappeared, until she had a need for them—or until a fan reminded her that she hadn’t said anything about them in a while.

While nice to see those characters, it was jarring. What the hell happened to them in the mean time? Why were they suddenly important now, when they hadn’t been for several books before?

RJ Method: (Please note that I haven’t read The Wheel of Time series, but that I have several close friends with whom I have discussed it.) Famously, one of Robert Jordan’s last books took place over the span of 23 hours, because he had so many characters that were all over the place, doing things that were relevant to the plot.

I can understand the impetus to make sure that all of one’s characters are accounted for and seen to be doing useful things, but it made for a long, and yet also short book. I make no judgments here since, as I said, I haven’t read the books. But somehow this strikes me as awkward.

GRRM Method: These books I have read. And yes, they are long and the plots are epic and inspiring, and the cast of characters is vast and covers two separate continents. But somehow, Martin manages to maneuver this territory with deceptively easy grace. For those who don’t know, Martin’s books are written in a switching POV style. You get a chapter from one character, then a chapter from another, and so on and so forth. There are lots of them, and the POVs are only sometimes consistent from book to book (by which I mean that just because someone is a narrator in the first book doesn’t mean that you should expect to see them in the second).

In his last book, instead of making it eight bazillion pages long, he split his characters into groups: North and South (I believe). The book that was released contained the stories of the characters in the North (I think, maybe it’s South, it’s been a while since I read it) and spans a certain period of time. When the next book comes out, it will be the characters that weren’t included in the book before it, but it will cover the same span of time in the story as the previous book.

It was stroke of genius (both as a writing tool and as a marketing ploy)! The plot marches merrily along, and the readers greedily gobbled up the characters’ thoughts and actions and then sat back to await the next book. Because we were still missing characters. While Martin handles his large cast of characters very well in his first three books, I thought the method faltered a bit.

To Sum Up: I have no idea how an author “should” handle a large ensemble. In fact, I suspect that the methods that these authors have chosen works for them—it’s just the readers who are left flailing in the abyss. (I will state for the record that I don’t think that authors should write for their readers—they should write what they want to and hope their readers will enjoy it.) It’s just that the methods chosen by these particular authors leave me wondering… why they created that many characters to begin with, and if they planned on using the methods they chose.

Still, my personal method? Don’t create more characters than I can reasonably keep track of.