Category: numbers

I’ve rambled on here once or thrice about characters. Protagonists vs antagonists. Main characters vs.  supporting characters vs. background characters. Who should get namedand who shouldn’t.

But it struck me that one thing that almost never comes up is, well, how many characters should I have. How many can my story really support? How many does my story need?

Yeah, that sounds a little odd but some stories need more characters than others. A murder mystery with two characters doesn’t leave a lot of room for red herrings—especially when one of them is dead on page two (thanks, Owen!). If I want to write a slasher or torture porn story, well, I’m going to need a few extra teenage campers to send off into the woods. Heck, think how much it could limit my sci-fi story not to have a red shirt or three that can head up to that ridge to look around.

The truth is, a lot of stories have certain minimums. Nothing’s written down, mind you—there’s no chart somewhere that says romance=8 characters, mystery=15, urban fantasy=23.  But, as I just hinted, I can start hitting some odd problems when my story’s understaffed. Suddenly my murderous alien monster seems a little less genetically superior because, well, it’s not managing to kill anyone. Because there’s nobody for it to kill.

One of my Saturday geekery movies a few weeks back had this problem. It was a slasher film. Nubile kids up at the lake smoking pot and having premarital sex (a recipe for sudden death). Thing is… there were only four of them. Two couples. Which… well, it didn’t give our murderous killer much to work with. He just kinda stood around for a lot of the movie. And then he had two “attacks” where he didn’t kill anybody. Or even wound them.

If I had to guess, based off my own experience with such things, the screenplay went through a lot of revisions and had a lot of cuts. A LOT of cuts. And one thing that went away was extra characters. All those people with just one or two lines, anybody who only had a single contribution toward advancing the plot, everyone who was only there to look good in a bathing suit or a wet t-shirt.   They all got trimmed and cut and combined and suddenly—again, this is my just my guess—this summer camp went from nine or ten counselors to only four. And, sure, each of these four had a lot to do, but they were just too rare for our mystery murderer to kill one of them off at the end of act one. Or even act two. The story couldn’t afford to lose a character, so the killer kept… not killing them.

Essentially, it was a slasher film where nobody got slashed.

Sometimes, weird as it sounds, we need that nubile teen in the wet t-shirt running through the woods. Okay, we don’t need her specifically, but we need somebody there because what happens to that person is setting a certain mood and letting us know some things up front. More characters raise the stakes and heighten the mystery. We need the red shirts, the lab assistants, and that guy who’s acting shifty but has a pretty solid alibi for the time of the murder because sometimes they really are advancing the plot.

And, yeah, I know this may sound a little odd to say because I’ve talked a lot here about paring away excess. I’ve made many posts about trimming the fat and figuring out if I really need this character or not. But this is one of those odd balance things we all need to figure out for ourselves. Which really sucks, I know. I wish that chart did exist so I could just tell you how many characters is the correct number for your story.

Y’see, Timmy, this is one of those things that just falls under experience and empathy. It can’t really be taught, it just needs to be figured out. And I’m going to need to figure it out every single time, because my mystery in the Hamptons is going to (hopefully) be different than my mystery in the Catskills and neither of them are like my Long Island mystery (which partly takes place at the club, so there are at least a dozen suspects. Three dozen if we’re going to consider staff). I need to figure out that perfect balance between enough characters to propel the plot forward, but not so many that I’m bogging it down.

It’s tough, but it can be done. And you can do it.

I was going to say “count on it!” but that’s just way too cheesy.

Anyway…

This weekend is the Writers Coffeehouse at Dark Delicacies and also the Dystopian Book Club at the Last Bookstore. If you’re in the southern Californiaarea, maybe I’ll see you there for at least one of them.

Next time here… okay, look. Next time I’m probably going to do something quick. I’ll explain why then. But if you’re in the Dallas area, leave the 20th open.

Until then, go write.

            Okay, a quick tip for you about numbers, because I’ve had a few folks ask me about this in the past few months.

            Some people get confused about numbers versus numerals in their writing.  Were there twelve days of Christmas or 12 days of Christmas?  Does my lord offer you a thousand swordsmen or 1000 swordsmen?

            Some of this confusion comes from journalistic standards.  A lot of non-fiction writing tends to follow the rule that everything below twelve is written out, but from 13 up you use numerals.  It varies a bit from publication to publication.  Sometimes the cutoff is ten or eleven, but it’s usually somewhere in the very early double-digits.

            That’s non-fiction, though.  Non-fiction is hard facts.  Here, we’re more concerned with making things up, yes?  With making them seem real, but not too real.

            My personal rule of thumb is that it looks very unnatural for people to talk in numbers.  We all speak in words, not numerals.  So when someone’s speaking, numbers should always be written out.  For example, in my new book, 14, someone might say “I live in room twenty-eight,” but then they’ll walk down the hall and go into room 28.  Dialogue is always written out, but numerals can show up in the prose.

            Now, there are a few exceptions to this.  Off the top of my head…

            Firstis cases where the numerals are part of a proper name.  No one should ever fire an Ay-Kay Forty-Seven or an Em-Sixteen.  The year is 2012, not twenty-twelve or two-thousand-twelve.  In Ex-Patriots, Captain Freedom is the commander of the Alpha 456th Unbreakables and speaks of them as such.  So when the numerals are part of a proper name, it’s okay for me to use them in dialogue.

            Secondis in first person stories.  If you think about it, a first person story is really all dialogue, because the character is addressing the reader.  This site is mostly first person—me talking to you—and I tend to write things out most of the time.  So I need to be extra careful using numerals if I’m writing in first person.

            Thirdis screenplays.  I should always write out numbers in screenplays because if I don’t it messes up timing, especially if I’m doing it a lot.  I might write 4,321 to save space, but the actor still has to say “Four thousand three hundred and twenty one.”  Check out this clip from my very cliché-filled road trip movie.

Now compare it to this…

            This block of dialogue just got cut in half by using numerals instead of written out numbers.  Except it really didn’t.  It’s going to take just as long for the actor to say, and all that’s really happened is the producers, assistant directors, and script supervisor have a bad estimate for how long this will take to film.  Not only that, odds are I’m going to mess it up, too, because I’m thinking my script is shorter than it really is.

            So  keep that in mind when you’re writing that subtle reference to 007’s twentieth adventure.

            Next time, I’d like to talk to you about one of my favorite animated movies, and how it’s an example of wonderful storytelling.

            Until then, go write.