When Writing a Story Are too Many Characters a Good Idea or Not?

    When first starting to write a book one of the first two things you should look at is your characters and your world building.  Now, with characters, this can be somewhat hard when you are first creating them because a lot of times you might have a particular character in mind, but usually, the supporting characters generally are the problem.  The reason I say this is sometimes you create a story for a character so that the story has everyday substance.  For example, we wouldn't want our reader to think our main character doesn't have any friends unless this is the kind of story you are writing.  The other thing you have to consider when adding characters that there has to be a reason for having them.  I have to admit sometimes when I am reading a book and find that there are a lot of characters being thrown at me all at once that I have a tendency not to want to read this book.  Now, I realize this is just my opinion, but when reading a book I like when characters are slowly presented to me.  I hate reading a book when a character is presented to me and in the end, I discover that the book didn't need the character to be successful.  In fact, I wondered why the character was even in the book.  (Here is a video below that talks about this).

     So when writing a book you need to consider if the characters that you are creating for it are really necessary, or if there is another way to tell your story without some of the characters that you want in your book.  Don't get me wrong, if you want a lot of characters I would suggest spreading them out, and also making each character with different types of characteristics.  When two characters are similar this can cause a problem as well to your reader.  Then the other thing is their names.  You've got to be careful that your names are not so similar to another character because this can cause a problem as well with giving your readers a lot of confusion.

    In my next blog article, I am going to talk about naming your characters and how important this can be to your book.

    So stay tuned!