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Recently, I've read two books* that presented me with a very large number of supporting characters, sketched them out in two or three paragraphs at most, and then expected me to do the work of keeping track of them. In both cases, I had some difficulty fulfilling that expectation.
The first book, Fortune's Fool, is the third installment in Mercedes Lackey's Hundred Kingdoms series. The first two books in the series were fun and fluffy fairy tale remixes/romances, and didn't require me, as the reader, to do any heavy lifting. I enjoyed them both a great deal. Not the deepest books in the world, but honestly, not everything needs to be. There's a place in this world for comfort reading (hence my addiction to Meg Cabot). I borrowed the third book from Kate expecting to find myself greeted with a refreshing, uplifting, and generally unchallenging read.
Instead, I got a book where the main characters were frankly rather boring, the romance was perfunctory at best, the writing really needed to be hit with the machete a few more times, and then -- about two-thirds of the way through -- the author introduced a rapid-fire assortment of loosely-sketched minor characters, some of them with very similar names (and at least one with no name at all). Added to the already sprawling supporting cast that came with each of the main characters, and the expectation that of course the reader remembered the minor characters from the first two books, well...it became a bit much.
I'll be honest. I never did start keeping some of the minor characters distinct from one another, and I forgot pretty much all of them thirty seconds after I closed the book. Not really the best sign. Of the three, this was the one I had the highest hopes for -- she was working with some fairy tales I very much enjoy, and in a mythos that doesn't get used enough -- and the one that I'm the least likely to read again.
Meanwhile, over in Brian Keene's Dead Sea -- a messy zombie epic taking place largely on a retired Navy cruise ship, with some rather graphic and unpleasant side-trips to other, even more dangerous locations -- we also got a wide assortment of minor characters, many of them also with similar names, many of them barely introduced before they got, well, eaten by zombies (as one does). The action is fast-paced throughout, and manages to keep itself from becoming confusing, largely by dint of blowing something up whenever too many cast members assemble in one location. (Seriously. I would not want to live in one of this man's books.) But I enjoyed it, and I'll read it again. So what's the difference?
Genre is a part of it. I love zombies and fairy tales just about equally, but there's an expectation in a work of zombie fiction that you'll start with a cast that's larger than you need it to be, so that you can feed large portions of it to the living dead. You can't have a zombie movie that only has three characters on the screen and actually maintain any real feeling of menace directed towards those characters (although believe me, I've tried). In fairy tales, the really minor characters are usually either off-screen or dead. They don't get pseudo-compelling little 'oh, and that guy, the one over there, he's super-cool, but you have to hang out with these people instead' introductions before getting shoved off the page.
There's also a lot to be said about the way those incidental characters get sketched in. There's a reason it's always the rookie in the war movie -- the one with the picture of his girlfriend in his wallet -- who dies. Don't believe me? Go watch Iron Man. The soldiers in the Humvee with Tony Stark aren't the most memorable characters in the movie. They don't even have names. But people remember them. Read The Boys, by Garth Ennis. The death of Wee Hughie's girlfriend happens so early in the series that it's not even a spoiler...but wow will you remember her.
I've done my share of juggling the really minor characters, and near as I can tell, the trick is to make them compelling enough that we'll grieve for them, or forgettable enough that we'll view them as the plot conveyances they are, without forcing the reader to keep a flow chart in order to remember which magical widget every one of them is carrying. It can be hard as hell. I have full mental dossiers on every character in Toby's world, and I think they're all fascinating, and I'd love to give them all walk-on roles. But since this isn't a zombie flick, and I'm not about to feed them all to a monster, that won't work. So they come in by ones and by twos, they take a moment to be interesting, and then they either go away or become more important. Character confetti just very rarely seems to work.
Opinions?
(*I read a lot. I mean, I read a lot. Every day, I write down in my planner what I read that day, because it helps me keep track of various essential trends in my consumption of the written word. It is now June 5th, and I've read five books so far this month. This doesn't include graphic novels, because attempting to include graphic novels would probably make me cry.)
The first book, Fortune's Fool, is the third installment in Mercedes Lackey's Hundred Kingdoms series. The first two books in the series were fun and fluffy fairy tale remixes/romances, and didn't require me, as the reader, to do any heavy lifting. I enjoyed them both a great deal. Not the deepest books in the world, but honestly, not everything needs to be. There's a place in this world for comfort reading (hence my addiction to Meg Cabot). I borrowed the third book from Kate expecting to find myself greeted with a refreshing, uplifting, and generally unchallenging read.
Instead, I got a book where the main characters were frankly rather boring, the romance was perfunctory at best, the writing really needed to be hit with the machete a few more times, and then -- about two-thirds of the way through -- the author introduced a rapid-fire assortment of loosely-sketched minor characters, some of them with very similar names (and at least one with no name at all). Added to the already sprawling supporting cast that came with each of the main characters, and the expectation that of course the reader remembered the minor characters from the first two books, well...it became a bit much.
I'll be honest. I never did start keeping some of the minor characters distinct from one another, and I forgot pretty much all of them thirty seconds after I closed the book. Not really the best sign. Of the three, this was the one I had the highest hopes for -- she was working with some fairy tales I very much enjoy, and in a mythos that doesn't get used enough -- and the one that I'm the least likely to read again.
Meanwhile, over in Brian Keene's Dead Sea -- a messy zombie epic taking place largely on a retired Navy cruise ship, with some rather graphic and unpleasant side-trips to other, even more dangerous locations -- we also got a wide assortment of minor characters, many of them also with similar names, many of them barely introduced before they got, well, eaten by zombies (as one does). The action is fast-paced throughout, and manages to keep itself from becoming confusing, largely by dint of blowing something up whenever too many cast members assemble in one location. (Seriously. I would not want to live in one of this man's books.) But I enjoyed it, and I'll read it again. So what's the difference?
Genre is a part of it. I love zombies and fairy tales just about equally, but there's an expectation in a work of zombie fiction that you'll start with a cast that's larger than you need it to be, so that you can feed large portions of it to the living dead. You can't have a zombie movie that only has three characters on the screen and actually maintain any real feeling of menace directed towards those characters (although believe me, I've tried). In fairy tales, the really minor characters are usually either off-screen or dead. They don't get pseudo-compelling little 'oh, and that guy, the one over there, he's super-cool, but you have to hang out with these people instead' introductions before getting shoved off the page.
There's also a lot to be said about the way those incidental characters get sketched in. There's a reason it's always the rookie in the war movie -- the one with the picture of his girlfriend in his wallet -- who dies. Don't believe me? Go watch Iron Man. The soldiers in the Humvee with Tony Stark aren't the most memorable characters in the movie. They don't even have names. But people remember them. Read The Boys, by Garth Ennis. The death of Wee Hughie's girlfriend happens so early in the series that it's not even a spoiler...but wow will you remember her.
I've done my share of juggling the really minor characters, and near as I can tell, the trick is to make them compelling enough that we'll grieve for them, or forgettable enough that we'll view them as the plot conveyances they are, without forcing the reader to keep a flow chart in order to remember which magical widget every one of them is carrying. It can be hard as hell. I have full mental dossiers on every character in Toby's world, and I think they're all fascinating, and I'd love to give them all walk-on roles. But since this isn't a zombie flick, and I'm not about to feed them all to a monster, that won't work. So they come in by ones and by twos, they take a moment to be interesting, and then they either go away or become more important. Character confetti just very rarely seems to work.
Opinions?
(*I read a lot. I mean, I read a lot. Every day, I write down in my planner what I read that day, because it helps me keep track of various essential trends in my consumption of the written word. It is now June 5th, and I've read five books so far this month. This doesn't include graphic novels, because attempting to include graphic novels would probably make me cry.)
