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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Oct 12, 2018 2:33:29 GMT
Do you have a preference for how many main characters you like to read or include in a story? Does it depend on the type of story? Do you like small, intimate casts? Huge epic casts like Game of Thrones? Do you like having one main character and just really getting inside their head and viewing life totally from their eyes? Or do you like all of these things in different types of stories? I'm trying to figure out the answer for myself, which is why I decided to ask the question.  What do you think? |
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Post by corabuhlert on Oct 12, 2018 4:16:07 GMT
As many as the story needs.
Though I find that with some "cast of thousands" sagas, I have to stop myself from skimming the parts focussing on characters I don't particularly care for to get back to the characters I do care for. So maybe limiting the number of viewpoint characters in the same book is a good idea.
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Post by writeway on Oct 12, 2018 4:18:20 GMT
As Cora says, as many as its called for. I give diddly squat how many main characters, minor characters, whoever are in the story as long as the story is interesting. Nothing else matters to me but something that keeps me flipping the pages.
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Oct 12, 2018 21:10:15 GMT
As a writer I tend to create tons and tons of characters, and what's good about that is if readers don't like all your characters, chances are they'll be intrigued by at least one. As a reader/viewer it's not unusual for me to hate the main character but be really into one of the side characters that dies. I'm always like, "Noooooo, don't kill of my favorite character." But no one ever listens to me. *shakes head sadly.*
I usually skip the POV chapters of the characters I don't like or care for, to get to the good stuff. What's nice about TV is that you don't get stuck in just one character's viewpoint and it skips around a lot more. So that's great for epic casts. But then sometimes I really want to get deep inside the character's heads, and maybe I love the main character/character's, so then I don't mind being entirely inside their head.
The Revenge of the Sith novelization was sooooo much better than the movie because it put us right inside of Anakin and Obi Wan's heads and it made me so much more invested in their characters and in the story. When I watched the movie I felt disappointed because so much depth was missing. And I feel the same way about the Hunger games books vs the movies. Loved the books, the movies were alright. But especially when you're dealing with a character who is so sad and depressed it's really hard to do that justice on-screen.
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Post by corabuhlert on Oct 13, 2018 4:47:33 GMT
As a writer I tend to create tons and tons of characters, and what's good about that is if readers don't like all your characters, chances are they'll be intrigued by at least one. As a reader/viewer it's not unusual for me to hate the main character but be really into one of the side characters that dies. I'm always like, "Noooooo, don't kill of my favorite character." But no one ever listens to me. *shakes head sadly.* I usually skip the POV chapters of the characters I don't like or care for, to get to the good stuff. What's nice about TV is that you don't get stuck in just one character's viewpoint and it skips around a lot more. So that's great for epic casts. But then sometimes I really want to get deep inside the character's heads, and maybe I love the main character/character's, so then I don't mind being entirely inside their head. The Revenge of the Sith novelization was sooooo much better than the movie because it put us right inside of Anakin and Obi Wan's heads and it made me so much more invested in their characters and in the story. When I watched the movie I felt disappointed because so much depth was missing. And I feel the same way about the Hunger games books vs the movies. Loved the books, the movies were alright. But especially when you're dealing with a character who is so sad and depressed it's really hard to do that justice on-screen. The Revenge of the Sith novelisation was written by Matthew Woodring Stover, as far as I recall, whom I actually knew online years ago. |
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Oct 13, 2018 5:34:59 GMT
corabuhlert You knew Matthew Stover? That's soo cool. He wrote the best Star Wars Novelization I have ever read. Where online were you both hanging out?
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Post by corabuhlert on Oct 14, 2018 3:01:08 GMT
A long defunct science fiction and fantasy forum that was called Frameshift, Dead Cities and a couple of other names during its lifetime. Matthew Stover was a regular and R. Scott Bakker and Scott Lynch also hung out there, the latter even before he was published. I left after an argument in 2008 and the board imploded for the last time (there'd been a couple of previous instances) soon thereafter.
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