In today’s post, I’ll share some thoughts about how many characters a story might need. I’ve seen stories with quite a limited cast, and sprawling worlds with over a hundred characters. But what is the minimum for a story to work out?

I believe the lowest I saw was the movie Zombieland, which has 5 named characters, but a 90-minute comedy movie can do with much less than a full-scale novel, let alone a series. Each plot line will increase the number of characters, even though there will be overlaps.

Of course, there will be more minor or even unnamed characters – each world, even fictional, will have a lot of people who simply live in the world without being noteworthy. Citizens roaming the streets – or countless generic bad guys’ minions, as well as droves of low-ranking monsters. These will, most often, take very little attention. And, for the writer, very little development time. It’s the named characters – whether the main cast, or supporting characters of all levels – that make the story what it is.

When I had the first ideas (late 2000s) for my current project, I started with 3 characters, and none of them had names, though that was in the earliest stages, where they were just random ideas without any concept to connect these scenes. By the early 2010s, when I started thinking a bit more seriously, the roster had grown somewhere close to 10, still nameless. I had some ideas about more that could be part of the story, but those were quite vague, and I admit this was one of the things that were scary to me. It’s one thing to have a couple of vague ideas, and something entirely different to create a world that feels like one, where there are enough characters to make it feel like an actual story.

I guess this is another proof that I’m a chronic overthinker, and that making stuff up as you go is a valid way to get over pointless fears and premature thoughts. When I wrote the “demo chapter”, it featured six characters, two of them under a nickname, one who would eventually get one and become part of the main cast, and the rest being the aforementioned generic minions. And it proved that the hard part tends to be… to start.

During the wider demo sequence, which eventually featured 8 chapters, the cast grew. A good chunk were other characters that were already present in the early ideas (the King and Princess), some were the first Eternals (I posted their backstory recently), and some popped up seemingly out of nowhere. I guess if I tried to plan things out in advance, I’d either still be stuck there or I would’ve given up.

And as I went to the beginning, more characters simply popped up. Some were due to changes in the concept (MC’s parents were now included in the story instead of dying in his youth), some were friends or relatives of the characters, some appeared as random backstory ideas, and some simply appeared out of nowhere. By the time I finished the first draft of the first book, I believe I was somewhere around 30 named characters, maybe up to 40 if I count characters that only appear as backstory mentions.

By now, it seems that the initial trilogy might contain somewhere around 60-70 characters, including backstory characters that are merely mentioned (but I plan to get to their stories eventually) – much more than I started with. And it led me to think: are things similar for other writers, or is it a result of the fact I was improvising so much?

At the same time, I wonder if there is an optimal character count. After all, too many characters can make it overwhelming for the reader to remember them all. That, however, might not be as big an issue as it seems if the characters are introduced over time – info dumps are a larger problem than sheer volume.

I would welcome opinions from other people: did you read a story with a very small cast – or a too large? And especially for any writer who might read this – how much did your cast expand between the initial ideas and the final story? Do you have characters who simply appeared out of nowhere, but it felt right, as if they were part of the story and only waited for you to discover them and their potential?