They either have almost no personality traits, or they share the same quirks, or they all are strenuously different, but there are too many people to remember. Here at Obsidianbookshelf.com, I have to admit a bias for streamlined fiction that focuses on just a few vivid characters.
Does the hero really need three sidekicks when one will do? Two potential lovers plus the main character can make for a red-hot love triangle. But add another lover, and it just gets annoying. A foursome? It loses all suspense because the natural tendency would be to pair off into two couples.
Even if everyone swaps partners, or has group-sex, the wonderful tension that you get with a love-triangle just isn't possible with more than two love-interests for the main character. With a love-triangle, we readers are always going to wonder which of the two love-interests the main character will choose.
This will keep reeling us in, book after book, as we tune in to see if Anita Blake will choose Jean-Claude the vampire or Richard the werewolf (the Anita Blake series by Laurell K. Hamilton) or if Stephanie Plum will choose Joe Morelli or Ranger (the Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich).
Remember the much-hated movie Batman Forever (1995) that had Batman fighting TWO villains, Two-Face and Riddler? Batman also has two sidekicks: (1) Alfred Pennyworth, his excruciatingly proper butler who helps him with administrative tasks; and (2) Robin who helps him with the action stuff.
These two sidekicks are different enough in age, personality, and skills that I would grudgingly admit that they work as two distinct characters. But why two villains, especially two who are THAT colorful? Each competes for a share of the audience attention, and both lose. Never mind poor Batman who barely has any personality at all.
It gets even worse in the next installment, the universally-reviled Batman and Robin (1997). Here, we have two colorful villains where one would probably do: Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy.
In addition, Batman, who is still overshadowed by everyone in this unnecessarily large cast, gets burdened with THREE sidekicks: (1) Alfred Pennyworth, (2) Robin, and (3) Batgirl, for crying out loud! Both Robin and Batgirl cancel out each other out like matter and antimatter. Holy redundancy, Batman!
Writers Susceptible to Character Redundancy. I've come up with a profile. This type of writer loves to create vivid, quirky characters and is maybe even renowned for it. But an over-emphasized strength can turn into a weakness. This type also prefers working in long fiction-lengths, likes multiple third-person viewpoints, and can't bear cutting words that she worked so hard to write.
Links:
- How to detect and fix the situation: Too Many Unnecessary Characters! (website article)
- [I don't allow my blog posts to be copied in full. Please click here to see how to use an excerpt/blurb.]
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8 comments:
Too many notes, as they said in AMADEUS.
I once sat down and made a list of every character, main, supporting, minor and walk-on in my current endeavor. I think I ended up with 70 or so. It was the walk-ons, just folks wandering around the carnival, that killed me.
The two-villain trend started in Batman Returns with Penguin and Catwoman.
I completely agree on the hobbits. Merry and Pippin have no distinguishing traits. They're kinda like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
I can't think of anyone who likes cutting words. It can be kinda painful.
Hi, Angelia! I'm remembering now about Penguin and Catwoman. Now that you mention it, I think they even had separate storylines so they weren't even working together. Talk about splitting the viewers' attention unecessarily!
"Merry and Pippin kinda like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern." Ha, ha! Yes. Comic relief, maybe? Someone to hang out with the Ents while most of the action is happening elsewhere?
You said: "I can't think of anyone who likes cutting words. It can be kinda painful."
Believe it or not, I enjoy it so much that it's almost the best part for me of the writing process. It's like one of those strengths that can get overemphasized and turn into a weakness. I've been known to cut too far on my own projects and lose some good stuff or "flavor" that I probably should have kept.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately because I hate writing a novella and seeing all the reviews say, "This should have been a novel." (What I hope they mean is that they enjoyed the story and would love to have read longer; what I fear is that I screwed up the pacing and didn't fill in enough detail and I left the reader with something unsatisfying.)
In my current work in progress I have a protagonist and a love interest. I narrowed the protagonist's family down to two people, and they also serve as neighbors since they live in the same two-flat. The love interest mentions his dad because they run a family business together.
Work was tricky. I instituted two boss-type admin people and two other security guards (which the protag is also, making three guards). For everyone else, I'm just vague. The "weekend shift" or the "cleaning service." That way I don't have to introduce more walk ons to clutter up my story, and then worry that everyone will say it's too short because it's a novella rather than a novel.
I made sure the other two security guards were really different from the protag as well, one female and one really, really old, a guy who should have retired ten years ago.
I'm always hyperaware of not having too many characters clinking around. It makes scenes unwieldy.
In the Anita Blake series, I find the supporting characters to be the downfall. Suddenly everyone is ravishingly beautiful and everyone has floor-length purple hair or a big penis or a bizarre kink and can shift into something. They start blending together for me. The Anita - Jean Claude - Richard triangle was and is compelling, but then you throw in a stripper and a "pard" and all this other stuff and it becomes clutter, static. It weakens the tension of the love triangle.
Just my two cents. Hopefully it doesn't hijack the thread too much. But to me, all those frilly and unmemorable side characters are a really good and current example of redundancy.
Hi, Jordan, don't worry about hijacking; this is all good stuff! Your new project sounds like it has a perfect minimal amount of characters. I also like how that, since you have fewer, you make a lot of them do double-duty in more than one role. For example, protag's family is also the neighbors. Lover's dad is also his business partner. This, to me, means you're weaving these people even tighter into the plot-line and giving them a ton of stuff to do, thereby making them that much more vital and interesting to the reader.
I hadn't even thought in terms of what having too many characters would do to a shorter fiction length -- for some reason, I'd been thinking only of long novels when I put up this post. So that's an interesting point to bring up!
Whenever I say, "This should have been a novel." I mean it as a compliment.
Whenever I say, "This should have been a novel." I mean it as a compliment.
Ha ha! I wasn't thinking of you -- probably because I know how much you enjoy reading novellas in terms of not being able to devote hours and days to a mammoth novel.
I'm reading a 500-pager right now, and another library customer is waiting in line for it and it's overdue. It's like, "Sorry, sorry, I'm reading as fast as I can!"
Hi, Jordan! How funny. I remember those library waiting-list situations. Something would win a major prize and then everyone would stampede onto the library website and reserve a copy. Then I'd be looking at 79 hold on 5 copies. I think everybody got two weeks to read the book and weren't allowed to renew under those circumstances, but it would still take several weeks or months for me to get the book if I wasn't very quick about reserving it.
I'm going to chime in. Usually if I say "I wish it had been a novel" it means I want more! It can be something as simple as wanting more of the characters or something more along the lines of feeling the issues would have more complexity in more space. Usually reviewers do specify.
As for extra characters, the LKH empire fell under the weight of it's own importance and bloated storylines, which the additional characters are all used to show how fabulous, powerful, and wonderful Anita is. In the beginning the few extras were ok but more and more and more - is just more and leads to what the series is now. Utter trash sadly.
I do enjoy reading books of all lengths. Lately I'm more willing to try an author or a book if it's a novella because if you don't like it, it's still rather short. Longer books I dislike are painful.
You said: "As for extra characters, the LKH empire fell under the weight of it's own importance and bloated storylines, which the additional characters are all used to show how fabulous, powerful, and wonderful Anita is."
So true, unfortunately! All the extras were there either to orbit Anita worshipfully or have sex with her, or both!
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