Listen, I know nobody can think about soup right now when it’s 150 degrees outside. I should have thought this through. Unfortunately (for you) my style is to think things through while I write them down so I’m discovering how uncomfortable the soup metaphor is in real time. In reality I’m under a blanket even in mid-July because “always chilly” is a main tenet of my personality. I’ll eat pho outside in August. I’m a monster. I am unstoppable.
Character soup is not a purée made from your characters; nothing so gruesome, I assure you. Or perhaps more gruesome, in its way.
Character soup is the term for when a story introduces too many characters too quickly, or has too many characters overall. The effect is that all the characters blur together and melt into an amorphous character soup in the reader’s mind: “Was Suzy the blonde or the redhead? Which one was the ninja and which one was the samurai and which one was the truck driver? Wait—were there two sisters or three?”
Writers love characters. Writers love making characters. They are our darlings. Based on my conversations with many other writers, making characters is the best part of writing; coming up with things for them to do (the plot) is the least-best part. I think if we could all have stories that were, like, a bunch of cool characters just vibing, we would all enjoy this process much better. No plot. No story. No four-act structure. Just vibes.
When it comes to characters, authors need to apply the Goldilocks Principle. Just as there’s a right distance from its star for a planet to be habitable, there’s a right number of characters for every story. Too few, and the story may feel empty. Too many—oops, character soup.
Unfortunately, there’s not a specific number of characters that’s right for every story, nor is there a formula you can apply like “for every 50 pages of manuscript or 30,000 words, you can introduce one additional character.” Fortunately, there are some exercises you can undertake to evaluate your cast of characters to make sure you haven’t overdone it.
First, we have to define the classifications of characters every story has:
Main characters,
Supporting characters, and
Background characters.
Main character can mean a few things. Typically it means the story’s protagonist; the most important character in the story, which the whole story centers around. In this case, however, I’m using main characters to mean the protagonist(s) and the main antagonist. The heroes and the villain.
Many stories can have multiple protagonists while having one true main character. Immediately, The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen comes to mind, in which Pie, the main character, protagonist, and narrator, undertakes a journey with two other people who are essentially also protagonists of the story. They drive the main action of the story together, but if I had to pick one main character it would be Pie. I guess a more universal example is the Harry Potter series, in which Harry, Hermione, and Ron together are the main characters and protagonists of the stories, but if you had to name just one “main character” it would obviously be Harry. He’s the guy the books are named for, after all. Anyway what I’m getting at is, for this exercise, your main characters are your protagonists; you don’t have to pick only one.
I hate using Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings as the examples for everything, by the way. But I can count on many or most people being familiar with them. They lend themselves. There’s nothing I can do about it.
Supporting characters are those who play a significant role in the story. They have names, you know things about them, they probably reappear throughout the story, and the story could not be told without them. In any given Harry Potter book, for instance, probably some of the Weasleys are supporting characters while others don’t make the cut and are background characters. George, Fred, and Ginny, along with Molly and Arthur, are often supporting characters. Bill, Charlie, and Percy most often appear as background characters. A supporting character probably cannot be changed out for a generic replacement, while a background character could be. When Molly Weasley shows up in a Harry Potter book, you can’t switch her out for any other witch mom or older female character. The role she fills in the story requires that it be her.
Background characters are those one-use characters that need to appear to fill a role—pouring a beer, showing someone to a hotel room, driving a bus—that is critical to the story, while the character themself is not. For example, a bus driver who says a few lines (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has this). You need the bus driver. The bus driver imparts important information to the protagonist; the protagonist has to be on a bus. If the bus journey wasn’t important, the author would have elided it (that is, skipped over the bus journey; faded to black as the character got on the bus and picked up the story later). However, it doesn’t matter who the bus driver is. Could be a woman. Could be a man. Could be old or young. Their back story isn’t important. They just need to drive the bus and impart some information.
Let’s say your character arrives at a backcountry inn and the innkeeper’s daughter pours a beer for them. While she’s doing it she says, “We haven’t seen one of your kind around these parts in a long time.” In this case what’s important is a local commenting about the unusualness of someone like the protagonist showing up in these parts. It doesn’t matter who the character is; could have been the innkeeper’s wife, or the innkeeper, or the innkeeper’s son, or any random person who works at the inn. That character has characteristics because protagonists notice things; maybe she has yellow hair or visible cleavage. But the characteristics aren’t important in any way. That role could be filled by any man or woman off the street.
Readers will use most of their brain space remembering things about the main and supporting characters and hopefully very little or none at all remembering things about the background characters. This is what you want. You don’t want readers wasting their mental energy on them. They should fade into the background.
Main characters and background characters are less likely to contribute to character soup. Main characters because there are few of them and they’re high-priority characters for the reader to retain, and background characters because they’re not important to retain. Supporting characters are usually the danger zone where writers can end up with too many.
With the space that’s left, let’s go over how to evaluate whether you have too many supporting characters, how to reduce the number if the answer is yes, and how to avoid character soup when you can’t reduce.
First, make sure you kill any inconsequential darlings. That is: If there are any characters in the story who don’t fulfill a needed role—who are just in the story because you have characters you want to include—they should be removed. Of every supporting character, ask: What happens to the story if this character were not in it? If the answer is “the story would be materially unchanged, it would just have one fewer character”—this is a character who should be flagged for closer consideration and maybe even the chopping block.
Sometimes writers will initially come up with all the characters they think they’re going to need, and develop all those characters, and then find out that the story doesn’t need all of them. This happens in reverse, too; I sometimes get deep into something and realize I need a character I didn’t plan for. Don’t include characters just because you’ve developed a cool character and you want to put them in the story. If the story doesn’t need them, and they don’t have a unique role to fill, either:
Remove them;
Demote them to a background character; or
Conflate them into one.
By “conflate” I mean a tactic that sometimes gets rid of supporting characters and sometimes creates new ones. Sometimes you can conflate multiple background characters into one role and end up with a supporting character. It’s the opposite of demoting a supporter to a backgrounder.
Character conflation happens a lot in movie adaptations. Consider this one: In The Fellowship of the Ring the novel, the elf princess Arwen is a separate character from Glorfindel, who rides with the deathly ill Frodo from Weathertop to Rivendell. For the movie, somebody said—“Why pay two actors when we could pay one?” And so Glorfindel was deleted and Arwen fills both roles.
If you suspect you have too many characters—or if someone like a beta reader has said you do—first consider whether any supporting characters are immaterial to the story and could be removed point blank. Just delete them. For instance, if you liked the idea of having a trio of assassins (like a Charlie’s Angels type of deal) but you just don’t have enough plot to demand three individual characters—give up on having three. Just have two or even one. Or name only one of the trio of deadly assassins and demote the other two to background characters. They exist so you still the trifecta, but they’re not important and don’t demand the readers’ attention.
If you don’t have any supporting characters who can be removed without affecting the plot, start looking at who can be demoted. Are any of your supporting characters really background characters in disguise? That is: Do they fill a small but important role in the plot but are not truly important for who they are outside of that role? Of your supporting characters, ask yourself: Could this character be exchanged for another character in the same role without affecting the story? If so you probably have a background character.
Let’s look more closely at the Molly Weasley thought exercise. Of any scene Molly Weasley is in, could she be substituted for another classmate’s witch mom. Seamus famously said something like “me dad’s a muggle, me mam’s a witch.” Okay so could Seamus’s mom be swapped in for Mrs Weasley in any of her scenes? Or is too much of what makes her Mrs Weasley important to the role she fills? The answer will usually be no—you can’t swap in some other mom there because this one is like this due to having seven kids; or because her family has trouble making ends meet; or because her daughter is secretly her favorite kid; or because she’s still traumatized over the death of her brothers. These are things we know about her because she’s a fleshed-out supporting character; we would not know any of this stuff about Seamus’s mom.
Ask of your supporting characters: Could I swap this character out for another character of roughly the same role without the story being changed? Do I just need someone in this role and not a full-on supporting character? Then you can demote that character to a background character. This probably means removing a lot of the backstory and character development from the text. That’s okay. Cut it out, paste it somewhere else, save it for a rainy day. Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Or, you can conflate the character with another supporting character. If you have Supporting Character A who drives the getaway car in Act 1 and Supporting Character B who rescues the imperiled kitten in Act 3, ask yourself whether those have to be two characters? Or could they be conflated into one? Does the plot demand they be separate people? Are any of their interactions critical to the plot?
Sometimes you need to have a bunch of characters. You can’t show that a character is a womanizer unless you have multiple women for him to womanize, right? You can’t conflate all the women Bond dallies with into one woman because then he’s not a womanizer anymore, he’s a husband. Downsizing the number of characters in that case would affect the main character and also the plot.
Finally, when you’re sure none of your characters are expendable, examine the pacing of their introductions. At the start of a story or book, you’ll probably have to introduce several characters rapidly. This is not unusual. After that, make sure you introduce characters at intervals so readers have time to acknowledge the character and get their mind around who they are before they have to start learning another one.
Don’t have the Crown Princess Beatrix sweep into the room with her six sisters Margaret (the scrappy one), Eleanor (the romantic one), Miranda (the one who wants to run away and become a traveling bard), Coraline (the one who makes everything a competition with Beatrix), Jeanette (the one who enjoys beekeeping), and Baby (the baby of the family who has no personality other than being the baby) if all these characters are important.
If they’re not going to be important and it only matters that Beatrix has six sisters, don’t bother to name or describe them at this point. It’s enough to just say she swept into the room with her six sisters.
If they are going to be important, introduce them one at a time through scenes that show off their personality traits instead of dumping a laundry list of names and characteristics on the reader.
There are very few books good enough for me to put up with having to take notes about who’s who.
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